Matthew Ryan Williams / The New York TimesGlowforge plans to sell a desktop laser cutter, capable of making items such as a custom wooden board for the popular Settlers of Catan game, for about $2,000. Whereas 3-D printers are slow and squirt out objects using plastic, desktop laser cutters and milling machines can carve three-dimensional shapes out of wood, aluminum, leather and other materials.

SEATTLE — The desk space next to PCs first welcomed paper printers and later made room for 3-D printers that could conjure any shape from spools of plastic.

Now new devices, including laser cutters and computer-controlled milling machines, are coming out of industrial workshops and getting planted on desktops. The wave of new machines is bringing a new level of precision to people who make physical objects — from leather wallets to lamps to circuit boards — as a career or hobby.

It is part of a familiar theme in tech. Computers help transform expensive, complicated machines used by the few and make them more accessible to the many. The creative types — designers, craftsmen, tinkerers — take it from there.

“Your creativity is no longer limited by tools,” said Dan Shapiro, co-founder and chief executive of Glowforge, a startup in Seattle’s industrial SoDo neighborhood that is developing a laser cutter.

Glowforge operates out of a cavernous warehouse, next to a marijuana processing center, where it has created a prototype of a desktop laser cutter that it plans to sell for around $2,000, much cheaper than comparable machines. Glowforge says the device, which Shapiro calls a 3-D laser printer, will come with software that makes it much easier to operate than laser cutters usually are.

Laser cutters have been around for decades, used in industrial manufacturing applications to engrave or slice through almost any material you can think of, including steel, plastic and wood. The computer-controlled lasers in them make precision cuts that would be almost unimaginable by hand, except by highly skilled artisans.

Over the years, the machines have become a bit smaller and more available to ordinary people, largely through so-called maker spaces, open facilities aimed at designers, do-it-yourself enthusiasts and others, which are sometimes housed in schools and sometimes privately owned. The machines have developed a strong following among jewelry-makers, printmakers and other artisans, many of whom have hung shingles out on craft sites such as Etsy.

In fact, maker spaces report that they are often overwhelmed with demand for their laser cutters and see far less use of 3-D printers, which are slow, more limited in the materials they can work with and sometimes fiendishly hard to operate.

Nadeem Mazen, chief executive of DangerAwesome, a maker space in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says his facility’s three laser cutters do 20 to 30 times more business than his two 3-D printers.

“That laser cutter is going all the time,” said Chris DiBona, an engineering director at Google, describing the maker space at his daughter’s school. Laser cutters are so fast, he said, it was easy to produce an object, tweak its design and create something new.

DiBona is an investor in Glowforge, though Google is not. The startup has raised more than $1 million.

Shapiro, who used to work at Google and Microsoft, says he is determined to make laser cutters much more accessible. Good ones typically cost around $10,000, though it’s possible to find cheaper laser cutters online from China. Shapiro says they lack adequate cutting power and safety features.

To cut costs, Glowforge has found ways to substitute sophisticated software for expensive hardware components. A camera inside the laser-cutting chamber and image processing in the cloud will take the place of a part called a motion planner that normally determines how the laser cuts material.

Another startup, the Other Machine Co. in San Francisco, has created a device, the Othermill, that acts like a reverse 3-D printer.

Rather than building up a 3-D object by creating layers of material, as a 3-D printer does, the Othermill uses spinning bits to cut away at blocks of, for example, wood, metal or plastic. The machine, which costs $2,199, weighs about 16 pounds, so it can be carted around in a car.

It’s difficult to imagine desktop manufacturing tools becoming true mass-market products, especially when they are still relatively expensive. How many people will really want to buy them to make their own tote bags and iPhone cases when it’s so convenient to shop for them?

Shapiro says he believes there are plenty of people hungry to make more of the things in their lives but who simply lack the tools.

“It’s like we’re all eating fast food,” he said, “and we’ve forgotten how to cook.”