The office has a 3D Systems Cube 2. I'm guessing it depends on what you want to do, but I wouldn't buy one if it were my own money, someone gave it to my boss for free.
If I was just making an expensive toy collection for myself, on demand, or at an extremely early stage prototype of an item, sure, a thousand dollar desktop machine would work. It's slow and I don't know if you can tell, the resolution is not very good.
I was at a seminar last month and the production printers do make the one in the office look like a toy, of course they are 100x the price as well.