Imagine a machine the size of a photocopier which fills up with a fine white powder. Once it’s finished, you fish around in the powder and pull out a solid plastic model of whatever was on your computer screen, in full colour. Three-dimensional printing is gradually, and rather expensively, approaching the mainstream.

The real thing: If you’ve got $40,000, you can buy a Z Corp Z450 colour 3D printer, which is the real deal, straight out of Star Trek. It lays down layers of starch-based powder, zaps it into shapes and paints them different colours. It takes a few hours to make impossible-looking plastic models. There's a video of the Z450 in action here at YouTube, and here's the company home page.

The sugar printer: Physicist and blogger Windell Oskay got bored of waiting for an affordable 3D printer, so built his own. The Candyfab 4000 uses three sacks of granulated sugar, an aquarium pump, a car jack and some recycled printer parts. It works, and produces much larger and cheaper models than the professionals can. As they’re made of melted sugar, they’re also edible. Here's a Flickr set of the sugar printer in action.

Print yourself: Fabjectory rents time on a Z450. They use it to make and sell 6in high models of avatars – the characters players create to represent themselves in games like Second Life and World of Warcraft. For $100 and up, a Fabjectory rep will meet you in Second Life, virtually photograph you, and a beautiful little model will be on its way in a few days.

Impossible sculptures: Californian artist Bathsheba Grossman uses a truly extraordinary $425,000 machine that can print 3D objects in a mixture of stainless steel and bronze. She prints out intricate mathematical sculptures which are 3.5in across and cost $360. They’re the perfect gift for that special geek in your life.

Do it yourself: Because not everyone has the $7,000 for even the most basic commercial 3D printer, plenty of people are trying to build cheap 3D printers themselves. The RepRap project (slogan: 'Wealth without money') is based at Bath University. They're trying to develop a self-replicating machine: A cheap 3D printer which can print its own parts, and could ultimately cost as little as £300. For $3,000, you can already buy a Fabber kit from Fab@Home, to build a cool-looking perspex kit which makes rather blobby rubber objects.

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