HP is often derided as the king of computer printers that somehow missed the recent revolution known as 3-D printing. But if you venture into the basement of the company's famous Palo Alto research labs, you'll find a 3-D printer that looks like no other.

It's a closely-guarded project. HP wouldn't let us photograph the thing, but for about ten minutes this week, Martin Fink, the man who runs HP Labs, pulled aside the black curtain – literally – and let us at least look it.

The printer is a monster – a five-foot tall giant of a machine cobbled together from existing jumbo-scale metal printing parts and some new custom-built equipment that HP isn't ready to talk about. It's a prototype, built for development and testing that will print out 3-D objects – keychains, Christmas ornaments, doll-house furniture, whatever – using a special polymer that HP has cooked up in its materials lab.

The polymer is stored in a container about the size of a six-pack in front of the machine, and it's as closely guarded as the other stuff. "We want to have smooth parts and we want to have resilient parts," Fink says. "Part of the technology breakthrough is the material."

After largely staying quiet on the topic, HP has recently started to talk a bit about the role it hopes to play in 3-D printing – one of the hottest and most interesting technology trends happening these days. Last month, CEO Meg Whitman said that she expects 3-D printing to grow into a big business, with the company shipping its first 3-D printers sometime next year.

To critics, that seems late. After all, HP's (2-D) printing business has been a rare success story for a company that has made too many missteps over the past decade, and so many others have leapt ahead in the 3-D printing game. But if you ask Fink, it's a mistake to think of 3-D printing as being a rerun of its paper printing play. "We don't really think there is a viable consumer market where you'll go to Best Buy and pick up your $99 inkjet printer today," Fink says. "That does not translate to 3-D printing."

Consumer 3-D printers are complex, low quality, and too slow to use, he says. Recently, he brought a $2,000 MakerBot 3-D printer to an all-day staff meeting. With Whitman in the room, he set up the thing in the back of the room and had it print out a lunch box. By the end of the day, it was about a quarter done, Fink says.

"People have this vision in their head of the Star Trek replicator, where you're Captain Picard and you say 'Tea. Earl Grey. Hot,' and magically it just shows up," Fink says. "The reality is so far different from that. They're not even close."

Fink believes that consumers will first use "print service providers" – companies similar to FedEx Office – where you send your 3-D print jobs for high-quality fulfillment. Need a replacement part for your car? You download the plans from the manufacturer's website, modify them to get the color and texture right, and then send that off to a print service provider – who has presumably shelled out the big money for the behemoth that HP is currently tinkering with in its basement.

Today, an outfit called Shapeways offers a 3-D printing service that lets you make and sell small, gift-like items via the web, but HP wants to help create an army service providers that can serve your personal, everyday needs, running high-quality 3-D printers that crank out customized products for your house or workplace or car.

"That, we think, is actually a very, very viable market," Fink says. "Now how big do we need to make this [3-D printer] for this type of market, that's still to be determined."

One thing that's clear: This isn't a lab-only pie-in-the-sky project. Fink's team is working with HP printer division product teams in Barcelona and San Diego on the project, and they aim to build something that will translate into revenue for HP.

That's part of the mandate that Fink, formerly an executive in HP's server group, brought to his new job when he was hired a year ago. HP spends more than $3 billion in research and development each year. Fink wants the venerable labs group to be more closely aligned with product teams, and to work more on research that will have a measurable effect on HP's bottom line.

When his monster printer finally ships, Fink may get a clearer picture of whether that plan is working. But the plan is certainly in place.