The Patent Timeline: Why This Is Happening Now
Desktop full-colour material jetting arrives in 2026 because two independent curves crossed. The foundational PolyJet patents finished expiring between 2019 and 2023, and industrial piezo printheads stopped being a controlled industrial part and became something you can buy one of, on eBay, from a shop whose main trade is transfer film. Neither curve alone explains it. Patents expiring without cheap heads gives you nothing. Cheap heads without the patents expiring gives you a lawsuit.
And there is a third thing, which is the honest complication: full colour was never in the expired cluster. Objet filed that patent a decade after the foundational ones and it runs to 2031.
Every patent below was pulled and read from Google Patents. Expiry dates are Google Patents' own USPTO-derived term calculations — authoritative enough for a video, not a legal opinion.
Three waves, twelve patents
Each lane is one technology; each bar is one patent, from its filing to its anticipated expiration. The pattern to look for is that the last bar in every lane is never the famous one — and that the cheap machine arrives three to five years after the last bar ends, not after the famous one does.
Bars run from filing (or earliest priority) to anticipated expiration. Filled bars ending in a solid cap are still in force. Select any bar or marker for the detail; drag the chart sideways on a narrow screen.
Rotating leveling roller trimming each layer to final thickness
US7209797B2 on Google PatentsPriority 2002-01-03 · Expired 2023-01-03 · documented
The last domino. Before 3 January 2023 you could jet but not legally level, and without leveling, layer-height error accumulates over thousands of layers into a ruined part. The 2019 date that circulates online is the first domino, not the last — the field cleared in 2023.
The rule the chart is drawing
Roughly three to five years after the last of a foundational cluster expires, a machine appears at a fiftieth to a hundredth of the original price. And the last one to expire is never the famous one. FDM: 2011 to 2015. SLA: 2014 to 2018. Material jetting: 2023 to 2026. The interval is shrinking, which is its own point — the supply chain that has to respond gets faster every cycle.
| Wave | The famous patent | The one that actually bound | Last expiry | First cheap machine | Price | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FDM | US5121329A (filed 1989, expired 2009) | US5340433A | 2011-08-23 | Sub-$300 assembled FDM | ~$250 | ~4–5 yr (2015–16) |
| SLA / DLP | US4575330A (filed 1984, expired 2004 — nothing happened) | US5597520A | 2014-01-28 | Anycubic Photon | $299 | 3–4 yr (2017–18) |
| Material jetting | US6259962B1 (filed 1999, expired 2019) | US7209797B2 (leveling) | 2023-01-03 | HeyGears G1X | $3,299 | 3 yr (2026) |
The second curve — the one about printheads — is the reason the 2026 date is a date and not a wish. Epson closed external head sales around 2008 and reopened them in 2019; the i3200 was in the public OEM catalogue by May 2021. Those three dates and the January 2023 leveling expiry belong on screen together. The printhead half of the story has the part numbers and the prices.
Every patent on the chart
The same record as a plain table, for reading, printing and checking. Two extra filings that belong in the record but sit outside the chart's date range are listed at the bottom.
| Patent | Title | Filed / priority | Expiry | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US5121329A | Apparatus and method for creating three-dimensional objects | Filed 1989-10-30 | Expired 2009-10-30 | S. Scott Crump's FDM patent: a computer-controlled movable head dispensing heated solidifiable material in thin layers under CAD control. Granted 1992-06-09. It is the patent everyone names when they explain why desktop 3D printing got cheap — and the dates below show that story does not hold. |
| US5340433A | Modeling apparatus for three-dimensional objects | Filed 1992-06-08 | Expired 2011-08-23 | A continuation-in-part of the application that became US5121329A, granted 1994-08-23. Extrusion stayed partly fenced until August 2011, not October 2009. This is the pattern that repeats in all three waves: the famous patent is never the last one. |
| US4575330A | Apparatus for production of three-dimensional objects by stereolithography | Filed 1984-08-08 | Expired 2004-08-08 | Charles Hull's stereolithography patent, originally assigned to UVP Inc and transferred to 3D Systems in January 1990. It expired in 2004 and the first cheap resin machines did not appear for another eight years. That gap is the single strongest piece of evidence that patent expiry alone never causes a price collapse. |
| US5597520A | Simultaneous multiple layer curing in stereolithography | Filed 1994-04-25 (priority 1990-10-30) | Expired 2014-01-28 | The patent 3D Systems actually asserted against Formlabs in 2012 — late-filed with an early priority date, a seven-year prosecution tail that kept the category fenced a decade past Hull. Note that a different landmark, Deckard's SLS patent US5597589A, expired the same day; January 2014 trade coverage conflated the two. |
| US6259962B1 | Apparatus and method for three dimensional model printing | Filed 1999-03-01 | Expired 2019-03-01 | Hanan Gothait's foundational Objet filing, and the one most often mis-described. Claim 1 is not a broad "jet photopolymer and cure it" claim — it is a multi-nozzle head operating method whose inventive hook is repositioning the head by at least one nozzle position on later passes to compensate for blocked nozzles. Dependent claims add UV or IR cure and nozzle calibration. Nozzle redundancy: still the failure mode reviewers complain about twenty-five years later. |
| US6658314B1 | Two photopolymers in variably selectable proportions | Priority 1999-10-06 | Expired 2019-10-06 | Digital materials — blending two photopolymers on the fly to synthesise properties between them. Granted 2003-12-02. Jetting the model was never enough; you also had to be allowed to mix. |
| US6850334B1 | Leveling roller with an embedded sensing device | Priority 2000-01-18 | Expired 2020-01-18 | A leveling roller that senses when it contacts the layer. Granted 2005-02-01. The first half of the flatness problem — knowing where the top of the part actually is. |
| US7300619B2 | Jettable compositions with temperature-dependent flow (with US7479510B2) | Priority 2000-03-13 | Expired 2021-03-12 | Resin engineered to be thick at room temperature and jettable when hot, plus the matching support and release chemistry. In other words, Stratasys patented the honey rule in 2000 and it lapsed in 2021 — which is why a 2026 machine can heat-jet structural resin at all. |
| US7364686B2 | Building material plus removable support material | Priority 2001-03-21 | Expired 2022-12-20 | Co-printing a removable support alongside the model, with release layers between them. Granted 2008-04-29. Every jetted voxel needs a floor, so a jetting machine without a legal support strategy is not a machine. |
| US7209797B2 | Rotating leveling roller trimming each layer to final thickness | Priority 2002-01-03 | Expired 2023-01-03 | The last domino. Before 3 January 2023 you could jet but not legally level, and without leveling, layer-height error accumulates over thousands of layers into a ruined part. The 2019 date that circulates online is the first domino, not the last — the field cleared in 2023. |
| US9020627B2 | Method and system for building painted three-dimensional objects | Priority 2009-02-03 | Expires 2031-07-20 — ACTIVE | Full colour was never in the expired cluster. Kritchman's filing covers dispensing colour on the outer circumference of each layer, 3D colour cells that have depth as well as area, printing build material at one resolution and colour at a higher one, and a white barrier outline so colour behaves like ink on white paper. That is the exact problem HeyGears says it built a 3D RIP in-house to solve — patented in 2009, live until 2031. |
| US9138981B1 | Water soluble ink-jet composition for 3D printing | Priority 2009-07-22 | Expires 2032-08-02 — ACTIVE | Soluble support chemistry, granted 2015-09-22, maintenance fees paid. Scope this honestly: these are composition claims, not the concept of soluble supports. The chemistry space is still fenced — one reason the support story on a 2026 machine (huge consumption, a 6–7 hour soak, matte contact surfaces) is awkward rather than solved. |
| US5569349A | Thermal stereolithography | Filed 1995-06-05 (priority 1990-10-04) | Expired 2013-10-29 | The other half of the late-filed 3D Systems fence, expiring three months before US5597520A. |
| US10005236B2 | Cationic polymerizable compositions | Priority 2012-03-01 | Expires 2035-06-23 — ACTIVE | Splits reactive components across two compositions jetted from different nozzles, solving nozzle-plate solidification from UV reflection. Beyond the right edge of the chart; Stratasys' own 20-F puts its PolyJet patent expirations at 2020 to 2038. |
What this timeline does not claim
Every one of these is widely repeated and does not survive checking. They are listed because a timeline is exactly the kind of graphic that gets screenshotted and used to support the opposite of what it shows.
- “The FDM patent expired in 2009 and that is why 3D printers got cheap.”
- RepRap started in 2005, MakerBot shipped in April 2009, and the continuation patent ran to 2011. The sub-$5,000 segment was already growing ~346% a year from 2008. Expiry removed legal risk for commercial sellers at scale; it was an accelerant, not the trigger.
- “Chuck Hull's patent expiring gave us cheap resin printers.”
- It expired in 2004 and nothing happened for eight years. Cheap DLP projectors, cheap LCD panels and Kickstarter as a capital source all had to arrive too.
- “A key 3D printing patent expired on 28 January 2014.”
- Two did — US5597520A (the SLA patent asserted against Formlabs) and US5597589A (Deckard's selective laser sintering patent). Adjacent numbers, same date, different technology. Name which one you mean.
- “The Objet patent expired in 2019, so anyone can build one now.”
- The last of the cluster expired 2023-01-03. Support chemistry runs to 2032 and full colour runs to 2031 — the single most commercially valuable feature of these machines sits inside a patent term with five years left on it.
- “A core Objet patent expired in 2018.”
- Nothing in this cluster lapsed in 2018. If you see that date, ask where it came from.
- “The da Vinci Color was cheap full-colour 3D printing in 2017.”
- It is FFF extrusion of clear PLA with a separate CMYK inkjet head spraying each layer — the build material is not jetted, which is exactly why a $3k machine could ship while real jetting stayed at $200k. Same caution for binder-jetting ProJet CJP.
- “Mimaki must have licensed the Objet patents.”
- Not found. No public licensing statement, no litigation record. A licence and a design-around are both plausible and there is evidence for neither. This chart shows Mimaki's entry as a dated fact and says nothing about how.
- “The G1X is the valve-and-DLP machine in the 2024 patent.”
- It is not. HeyGears' lead engineer described ordinary piezo droplet jetting on a heated i3200. The patent is a future product, and confusing the two is the easiest factual error to make here.
Three further gaps, stated as gaps rather than filled with speculation: peak-era gray-market printhead pricing has no dated source; no 2020–2021 i3200 pricing exists in what we searched, so the head-price trajectory is unevidenced and the collapse is argued cross-sectionally instead; and there is no DTF market data covering 2020–2022, so that point stays qualitative.
More from this research
- UV printer research hub — everything we have published on the 2026 desktop UV wave.
- F1080 vs i3200 — the second curve, with part numbers and street prices.
- How UV printing actually works — the physics the patents are describing.
- Six machines compared — including our own bench data.
