Those friends could have been managers or sales or HR. Not necessarily engineers. And to save face they are just parroting fab methods they heard in passing.

Obviously not DED or binder jetting, and anyone who knows metal printing would see that instantly. DED has the resolution of a hot glue gun, laying down thick beads of molten metal that could never produce such a fine, intricate lattice - it's built for large-scale, rapid deposition, not delicate internal structures. Binder jetting is even more of a non-starter; you're essentially gluing powder together and then sticking it in an oven to sinter. That process leaves behind a distinctly porous, slightly grainy microstructure because the particles are fused, not fully melted, which looks nothing like the smooth, continuous, and fully dense solidified strands you see in this micrograph. This image screams high-precision, localized melting, which is the exclusive domain of powder bed fusion techniques like SLM or DMLS.

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