Abstract A measure of powder layer heterogeneity has been proposed. It has been tested on the layers realized by different deposition techniques. Good correspondence of the actual measure to the subjective layer quality estimation has been shown. The influence of the laser scanning strategy on the quality of sintered structure has been examined. It is shown that both the sintering precision as well as the inner sintering quality is strongly affected by the hatch distance whereas this fact has been often neglected in the past.