Dear Shapeways: You are missing out on increased customer sales. You only need to: Fully assess the price of producing prints in the HP nylon materials and price them -- with a conventional company-markup percentage -- proportionately to your cost of producing them: material, machine space, and handling. (I suspect the current pricing was more of a shot in the dark.) Open up the HP materials so that end-customers can purchase prints. For some models the added strength and resilience give these materials advantages over WSF and FUD and other materials. I have been holding off ordering test prints awaiting these decisions and events, and I bet that you have potential customers that are also sitting on their orders. You've been successfully producing maker-only prints in these materials for 6-10 months now. What trigger are you waiting for to make the materials generally available? If you're worried about cannibalizing sales of your other materials, remember the old maxim: if you don't do it, a competitor will do it for you.
I have to add my voice to my colleague up here. This material has a lot of potential, including its use in the new generation of full color printers from HP. However the current pricing structure is a no go. I refrained from doing more test prints that I had in the pipeline. And it was going to be my material of choice (despite the grey color) for new models but with the current price all this went away.
I think shapeways are waiting for the stabilization of the material or manufacturer to release it to the public.They can shutdown the material before it causes too much trouble.