First there was the humble Sinclair printer.

Those of us who remember this miracle of technology can only look back with nostalgia at a printer that used thermal technology to print on what was effectively a silver-coated toilet roll and gave off what can only be described as an "interesting" smell.

Then came dot-matrix printers, which were an improvement although they did sound like you had a demented bee strapped to the print head. Laser printers and finally inkjet printers quickly followed, providing cheap, effective and most of all quiet printing.

So what now?

Well, it seems that the next big idea will be 3D printers. These devices take a 3D model created on a computer and turn them into solid reality. Although this may sound like science fiction, the technology is already established and was pioneered in the mid Eighties by a researcher called Charles Hudd who then went on to form a company called 3D systems (www.3dsystems. com).

Hudd was experimenting with special plastics called photo-polymers that harden when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light. His ground-breaking idea was to suspend a computer-controlled UV light above a plinth immersed just below the surface of a vat of photopolymer.

The computer directed UV light traces out the required "slice" of the object that then hardens. The plinth is then fractionally lowered within the vat and in this way the object is built up slice by slice.

There are now several competing technologies for 3D printing although they all use the same basic idea of building up 3D objects from many thin layers.

Solidscape (www.solid-scape.com) use a different technique to that proposed by Hudd. They sell a machine called the ModelMaker which builds up solid objects by spraying tiny blobs of molten plastic from nozzles that move back and forth over the printing surface, very much like a conventional inkjet printer.

One drawback of 3D printing technology is the lack of support for different colours, but it is expected that this will be addressed as the technology evolves. Another major stumbling block is the price, typically such machines currently cost around £40,000 but like many new technologies it is expected that the price will become more affordable as the technology becomes mass-produced.

For this to happen a novel application of the technology needs to emerge that can be marketed and mass-produced. Some think that this may happen in the shape of the "Santa Clause" machine.

The idea is that a cheap mass-produced version of a 3D printer could be used, in conjunction with a home PC to produce toys for children.

The home user would be able to design their own toys or download a wealth of 3D models from the Internet and then 3D print them into real toys. One company is already offering to fabricate toys to your specification, you send them a sketch and they 3D print it for you.

This technology is still a long way from that employed in science fiction movies like Star Trek but perhaps it won't be too long before I can indulge my nostalgia and fabricate my own Sinclair printer, I can almost smell it already. . .