It's early, so it's hard to say where this might fit in the scheme of desktop scanners. We imagine it gets closer in detail to a professional 3-D scanner, but it might produce scans that are easier to master but similar in quality to what home hackers have gotten with a webcam or a Kinect (or the 3-D scanning functionality that Microsoft announced this week will be available on the Kinect). Either way, this lines up nicely with Makerbot's pitch: make the technology as accessible as possible and let the community do the rest. There's a long way to go, too, when what's seen as an "affordable" 3-D scanner from 2009 can run to almost $30,000. But we'll still have to wait a while, of course, before we see exactly how this digitizer affects that community.