A Canadian based company called Matterform  is on the verge of manufacturing a cost-effective desktop 3D scanner. At a cost of $546 it’s |precisely the kind of  price will enable home 3D scanning to explode

For all those new 3D printing, a 3D scanner lets you take a physical object and convert it into a 3D digital model on your computer. Once a physical object is digitized it can then be printed out at home or sent to an on-line printing service for final production.

At fist glance the Matterform scanner seems to tick all the boxes, it scans quickly, approximately 5 minutes per scan, can also scan objects up to 18cm x 25cm and offers 2000 points per second giving you amazing surface detail. Matterform raised nearly half a million Canadian dollars to set the project in motion using the cloud funding site indiegogo.com. They are currently taking pre orders of their unit at their web site http://www.matterform.net