How much is your printer and how much for your resin and how much it will cost you to learn? I know what the answer will be but those companies who want to sell you a 3D printer or a milling machine worth $$$$, they do not care whether you get your money this year or in 10years. Plus remember all these equipment need parts and tech support. When your machine goes down good luck printing or milling that denture that is due tomorrow or even today. I still think digital denture is not ready yet. It needs a lot of tweaking and the quality is not there. I can teach someone how to do a quality denture in one week with minimum adjustment if someone have the UNDERSTANDING of how to. Not everyone can be a removable tech. Much easier for Ceramics.
The equipment is paid for already and used for other tasks, it has also made a lot of money and saved a lot of my time.which is worth more than money. However outsourcing is a possibility for those not wishing to invest in or participate in robot slave labor. It's just been my experience if you want to control your quality you will have to own the equipment and rely on yourself The cost to learn isn't any more expensive than anything else I want to teach myself. All my equipment has been and will be maintained by me or someone else here whether it is digital or analog. Being as self sufficient as possible, it's a rare occurrence to reach out to tech support although necessary at times.
If you don't schedule time for maintenance your equipment will schedule it for you, analog or digital.
Scheduling the workload and case planning in my lab eliminates rush cases due the next or same day. If a piece of equipment were to go down for some unforeseen reason the case would get rescheduled. If not, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Right now dentures are not a priority so they are something on the side to experiment with. I already do a fair amount of full arch/mouth cases and every single one of them has a DX done digitally, but analog in another time. They are all reverse engineered based on function.
I know its hard to believe that someone with a background in crown and bridge may have an UNDERSTANDING of occlusion and function, but arranging preformed teeth in proper patient specific occlusal scheme is not rocket science reserved for only the brightest.
Doing it digitally is faster and easier, no grinding and once the prototype is dialed in can be replicated over and over like printing a piece of paper. At which point it could become a denture or a hybrid implant case without starting from square one with all the labor involved. Duplication of the design without most of the analog processing errors caused by material science.
You may not think digital dentures are there yet and they may not be in some regard, but they are right around the corner and your side of the business is going to be over run by digital. Whether you want to accept that or not it's the reality of a labor intense business who's tech's are retiring or dying faster than you are teaching the replacements. It doesn't matter to me one way or the other if denture tech's believe in digital anything. If my client's have a need that's not being met and I am able, i will take that opportunity. The younger generation are already accepting digital as the way rather than the future and the next graduates even more so. Soon we will both be gone and any memory of the old analog ways will be too. The world will keep turning and things will exponentially change like they have from the beginning.
