3-D Printing?

[Randy King <randyk@ims.com>]

The discussions about having to see fossils reminded me of
an article I read on printing technology.  Someone, I can't
recall who, has developed a process of essentially printing
in 3-D.  You can build a model layer by layer with detail
on the order of a few millimeters.  The resolution is expected
to improve rapidly.  The process uses a liquid that can be 
hardened by adding energy from a laser, thus a layer is added,
and the object is lowered beneath the surface in preparation
for the next layer.  The raw data is stored in a form similar
to 2-d images currently as read by the printer.  

The reason this seemed significant, was that one value for it
was to duplicate fossils.  Thus alleviating the need to travel
to examine the fossil also providing the ability to destructively
analyze it by shape and form.  What you lose is color and content
and mass.  The other drawback was price, each 'printing' was 
estimated at around $2000 at the time.  

Anyway, I was curious if anyone had actually made use of the system
and/or if there was concern that such a reproduction would not
be sufficiently useful.