Electronics retailer Dion Wired has just gone up several thousand percent in our geek appreciation stakes: not only is it planning to start selling Segways to consumers sometime this year, it’s about to add 3D printers to its stock list too.

That’s right. Some time this month the firm will begin selling the Cube 3D printer, which is a compact off-the-shelf modeller that’s fully compatible with most 3D printing software, including the tools that are built into Windows 8.1. Like the well known RepRap design, it uses a thin plastic sprue fed through a heated extruder to build up a model out of thin 2D layers.

Using this printer, you can create models up to 140x140x140mm in size. Which by home printer standards is actually pretty big.

The Cube 3D has been on sale in the country for a while, but Dion Wired joins an elite group of major retailers that are now selling 3D printers in store globally. There’s no price confirmed yet, but at Fabric8 a basic Cube 3D costs R19 500 – and we’d expect Dion Wired to come in at around the same mark. It’s not cheap – you can buy a RepRap Ecksbot from OpenHardware for R7 530, which is about the same size but doesn’t have the well polished look and design. Indeed, you’ll have to build a lot of it yourself.

As someone with experience building a 3D printer, the extra money to buy one off the shelf might well be worth it in terms of time and hassle saved putting one together, breaking it, taking it apart, starting again and finally burying it in the garden and pretending it never happened out of frustration. But that’s just me.

More importantly, even if Dion Wired’s printers are priced as high as that, raising awareness of the fact 3D printing is no longer arcane, overly expensive or only overseas is a fantastic thing, and deserves applause all the same.

The Cube 3D comes with a subscription to Cubify.com’s online resource for models and design software.

We’ll update with prices and exact details on sale dates soon.