[HN Gopher] Formlabs Form 4 Teardown
___________________________________________________________________
Formlabs Form 4 Teardown
Author : zdw
Score : 152 points
Date : 2024-06-02 23:56 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bunniestudios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bunniestudios.com)
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Wow.. all this technology costing 10x the price of a FDM printer,
| yet the models don't even look near 10x better than what a 0.1mm
| layer height FDM printer could do.. kinda disappointing. I'm
| bearish about this company.
| ZiiS wrote:
| Formlabs is very much the ultra premium end. There are less
| moving parts, so printers like
| https://store.anycubic.com/products/photon-mono-m5 are a
| reliable workhorse very much price competitive with FDM
| printers.
|
| For tiny models like table-top miniatures, then, I guess
| quality is subjective, but I certainly think it is more than
| 10x better. The numbers do not nearly represent the difference
| in surface finish and detail.
| ZiiS wrote:
| Note, I am not saying they are better in general. I much
| prefer printing on my FDM and taking a clean part strait of
| the bed. Poring very smelly toxic chemicals, making
| everything you look at sticky, having to clean, filter etc,
| along with more sanding off the supports etc. I also find it
| much harder to prep designs; is that going to warp as it is
| pulled off the bed for each layer; is that going to trap
| uncured resin etc.
| ipsod wrote:
| Fully agree on toxic chemicals.
|
| When you get a workflow down and need quantity, though,
| resin is cool. Since it exposes the whole bed at once, I
| can, for example, pull 24 small prints off of a small
| printer every 1 hour. 2 days of production, and I have
| hundreds, using just one printer. With FDM, this particular
| part, FDM couldn't even make, but if it could, it'd be more
| like 15 minutes per part - would need a small print farm to
| keep up with literally one $150 printer.
|
| I don't even have a space for the resin printer right now,
| though. It really needs a dedicated and well-thought-out
| station to keep the toxic stuff from ruining your day.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| I have never used a resin printer but from what I understand
| its not just layer height but 2D resolution. SLA printers can
| print 0.025mm layer heights, so a huge improvement over 0.1mm.
| Not sure cost has to or should be be linear compared to
| performance.
| sciolistse wrote:
| You can get a good quality SLA printer for $200-300, and you
| can buy FDM printers for tens of thousands of dollars. Just
| depends on what audience they're targeting.
| martin_a wrote:
| I'm looking into buying a resin printer for our company for
| very special applications where we need a higher resolution
| than a FDM printer.
|
| Buying a "premium" model with proper support, a service
| contract etc. is totally fine for a business investment. I
| would get lots of raised eyebrows if I were to buy a "hobby
| machine" for 1/5 of the price.
|
| So... There's a place for machines like these.
| samatman wrote:
| The difference between FDM and resin is quite substantial. Each
| style has applications which are easier, and come out better,
| compared to the other approach. Having one of each, I would
| never bother printing a replacement support bracket on resin,
| or printing a miniature model on FDM. With one of either,
| probably worth it.
|
| The differences between hobby-grade and professional-grade
| printers are less obvious at this point, more about reliability
| and throughput than they are about fidelity at this point.
| hooverd wrote:
| 10x less than an FDM printer in the same market segment, if you
| want to look at it another way. For the longest time you had to
| pay the Stratasys tax.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > First up, the Raspberry Pi 4 compute module. From a scrappy
| little "$35 computer" put out by a charity originally for the
| educational market, Raspberry Pi has taken over the world of
| single board computers, socket by socket. Thanks to the financial
| backing it had from government grants and donations as well as
| tax-free status as a charity, it was able to kickstart an
| unusually low-margin hardware business model into a profitable
| and sustainable (and soon to be publicly traded!) organization
| with economies of scale filling its sails. It also benefits from
| awesome software support due to the synergy of its charitable
| activities fostering a cozy relationship with the open source
| community. Being able to purchase modules like the Raspberry Pi
| CM with all the hard bits like high-speed DDR memory routing,
| emissions certification, and a Linux distro frees staff resources
| in other hardware companies (like Formlabs and my own) to focus
| on other aspects of products.
|
| A very succinct description of the Raspberry Pi past trajectory.
| bloggie wrote:
| I find it confounding how 'cozy' RPi's relationship is with the
| open-source community given how little of their project is
| open-source. But I infer that open-source hardware and low-
| level software is much less important, interesting, and
| malleable than the OS-and-above software.
| dgroshev wrote:
| One often under-appreciated aspect is that they have a tiny
| set of SKUs, which means opensource
| contributions/docs/articles/hype are all concentrated on
| those few SKUs. It's especially true for RP2040, their
| competitors have massive lineups that help to right-size the
| MCU, but this also means that any given SKU has less
| opensource support.
| talldayo wrote:
| Cheap, open or interesting. If your product is at least two
| of those things, you should be prepared for the Open Source
| community to hack it.
| bloggie wrote:
| Well put. And I agree. I draw similarities between RPi and
| OtherOS on the PS3. Sony permitted Linux on their consoles
| and in exchange the hardware was locked. PS3 was not hacked
| until they removed the OtherOS feature and was the last
| console of that generation to be hacked. RPi is not Sony
| and would (probably, hopefully) not start limiting user OS
| choice, but the moment that happens, it will be completely
| and thoroughly hacked as there would be an incentive to do
| so.
| SR2Z wrote:
| I hope that OSS hardware gets as cheap as these tiny
| proprietary chips in the future, but I think it'll take a
| while.
| bsder wrote:
| > But I infer that open-source hardware and low-level
| software is much less important, interesting, and malleable
| than the OS-and-above software.
|
| Nope. It was all about the subsidy.
|
| Because the RPi was subsidized, competitors like the
| Beaglebone series couldn't achieve a critical mass since they
| were always being undercut. This set up a decade+ of
| mindshare.
|
| And then the RPi foundation knifed everbody in the shortage
| by shunting all the RPis to commercial companies like
| FormLabs.
|
| Even now that low-end x86 machines are cheaper than the
| RPi's, everybody _still_ sings the praises of the RPi 's.
|
| Marketing always wins.
| 15155 wrote:
| That "low-end" x86 machine still has an Intel/AMD chipset
| in addition to the processor, possibly a BIOS/UEFI chip
| from yet another vendor - they're substantially more
| difficult from a hardware standpoint to get going than
| _any_ ARM MPU. Debug tools are inferior, as well.
|
| ARM MPUs became popular because they are actually _easy to
| deploy._
| throw46365 wrote:
| > And then the RPi foundation knifed everbody in the
| shortage by shunting all the RPis to commercial companies
| like FormLabs.
|
| The Foundation did _no such thing_ because it doesn't
| manufacture the boards and it's not their decision.
|
| The Trading company manufactures the boards, and it chose
| not to destroy its commercial contracts (all of which
| experienced limited stock too, particularly of CM4s, even
| though they were prioritising CM4s), which kept the lights
| on. They were already selling dramatically more units into
| commercial channels (Citrix for example) than to hobbyists.
|
| The two entities also introduced the Raspberry Pi Pico and
| Pico W in the pandemic era, which were wildly popular and
| kept their educational goals on track, as well as giving
| suppliers like Pimoroni and Adafruit something to design
| absolutely amazing products around, with a microcontroller
| that wasn't supply-constrained. IMO they more than made the
| case that most people don't need a whole linux box to run a
| physical computing project.
|
| I don't get the whining. Do the little Intel boxes work for
| you? If so, use them and leave Raspberry Pi in the dust;
| there's more than one way to add GPIO, SPI, I2C and PIO to
| your projects.
|
| (Side note: the Beagleboard is a Texas Instruments product,
| is it not? I am not convinced its origins are all that
| different to the Pi, in that regard. If TI couldn't compete
| on price and marketing, that is on TI, surely)
| bloggie wrote:
| Funny you mention Intel. I got burned by Intel Edison
| getting discontinued. Intel has certainly burned their
| bridges with the embedded industry and I certainly would
| never buy from them if they chose to re-enter.
| throw46365 wrote:
| Edison was really enormously promising, but it sort of
| only existed as a reactionary product in that whole ed-
| tech/maker bubble that blew up and then shrank a few
| years back.
| mkj wrote:
| Their efforts keeping up to date with current Linux kernels
| is better than most boards of that nature. That deserves some
| open source credit.
| archi42 wrote:
| Since Formlabs position themselves at the higher end, I was
| surprised they didn't skip LCDs and went straight to DLP.
|
| PDF from TI from 2019, though I think they have updated their
| line up since: https://www.ti.com/lit/sl/dlpt019e/dlpt019e.pdf
| varjag wrote:
| All resin printers have converged to the same tech years ago
| for good reasons. The differences are mostly aesthetic.
| edg5000 wrote:
| I have been doing a lot of FDM for the past 10 years, but a few
| years ago, for FOMO reasons, I got really hyped up about resin
| printing. I got an Elegoo Mars and a very large expensive Chinese
| resin printer that I never got to work.
|
| I ran into three problems that I was not able to overcome, even
| after tons of trial and error:
|
| - Warping. With ABS, a heated chamber, ABS slurry, heated glass
| bed, completely solved all warping. With resin, I was unable to
| predict or fix warping issues.
|
| - Model not sticking to the bed. Behaviour was inconsistent. With
| a good printer like the Form, that is probably not a problem.
| With FDM, having an all metal printer, with a glass bed and a
| good Z probe solved this for good.
|
| - Mechanical performance was garbage. Very brittle.
|
| - Always needing supports. With FDM, if you fully control the
| design process, you can completely eliminate supports (at least
| in my case, of course this imposes design constraints). With
| resin, you always need supports. The supports are more complex
| and harder to remove.
|
| I still think resin may be the future, because the level of
| detail with resin is just amazing.
| torginus wrote:
| The warping one is strange, warping is caused by thermal
| expansion/contraction and resin doesn't really change
| temperature during the printing process. That's one of the
| reasons you
|
| Sounds to me you either aren't printing at room temperature,
| don't have the resin dialed in or you got a bad batch of resin/
|
| The other criticisms are fair, but not necessarily dealbreakers
| and can be mitigated.
|
| PLA is brittle as well, about the same as standard resin. Just
| like with FDM, there are other formulations, but the materials
| are different, and perhaps there are no good analogs for FDM
| materials.
|
| Imo resin printing is mostly useful for tabletop minis, not
| engineering prints.
|
| As opposed to you, I don't think resin's the future, certainly
| not in the hobbyist space. The fact that it involves highly
| toxic chemicals and fumes means you need a separate space and
| be really cognizant about materials safety at all times.
|
| It does have its niches, particularly in mini printing, where
| the high detail is useful, and you can load up the whole area
| with minis at no penalty to print time and have an entire
| army's worth of minis printed in a span of hours.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> The warping one is strange, warping is caused by thermal
| expansion /contraction and resin doesn't really change
| temperature during the printing process._
|
| In my experience with resin, you can get misshapen parts for
| a bunch of reasons:
|
| 1. Resin will change size a bit during and after curing. Not
| by a large amount, and of course it depends on the type of
| resin you use etc - but enough. And of course if your design
| has some thick bits and some thin bits, one might shrink more
| than the other.
|
| 2. Every time the machine exposes the resin, it sticks to the
| previous layer _and_ to the projector screen /LCD. The
| machine then lifts the model, to unstick it from the
| projector screen. This applies force to the model, and can
| cause it to bend by a tiny amount - which can gradually build
| up over several layers.
|
| 3. Resin has to be somewhat UV transparent, for each layer to
| cure all the way through in a short exposure time. Because of
| that, UV curing later layers can pass through the part and
| cure resin that shouldn't be cured, on earlier layers. This
| is particularly the case if the shape has areas resin can
| pool up and won't run off.
|
| _> PLA is brittle as well, about the same as standard resin.
| Just like with FDM, there are other formulations, but the
| materials are different, and perhaps there are no good
| analogs for FDM materials._
|
| For many printers, resin _has_ to be brittle because of the
| way the printing process works.
|
| You cure a layer, it sticks to the previous layer and the
| projector screen/LCD, then you raise it to unstick it from
| the screen.
|
| If the resin is flexible, the unsticking process would cause
| the layer to bend, giving poor dimensional accuracy. So resin
| is formulated to be stiff and unyielding.
|
| FDM can print flexible materials like TPU - common 'print
| upside-down' designs of resin printers simply can't. Although
| you undoubtedly could engineer a printer that could, such as
| a resin equivalent of an SLS printer, which doesn't face the
| unsticking issue.
| varjag wrote:
| You absolutely can print flexible materials on resin
| printers.
| mdorazio wrote:
| This is factually incorrect. A quick search will show you
| plenty of flexible resins. Here's one:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eely3rxr2to
|
| Resin is also much less prone to size changes than standard
| FDM filaments. If you've printed FDM you should know how
| much tolerance you have to have in your parts (ex. hole
| diameters) to account for shrinkage post-print, not to
| mention the difficulty of printing things like ABS.
|
| Resin has MANY drawbacks and in my opinion kind of sucks as
| a general user experience, but warping, material quality,
| and material options are not worse than FDM.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> A quick search will show you plenty of flexible
| resins. Here 's one:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eely3rxr2to_
|
| OK, you make a fair point. People will sell you such
| resin.
|
| But look at the video at the 4m40s mark - the dimensional
| accuracy is trash.
|
| The makers of these printers will all claim they have
| 0.01mm layers and 0.03 mm x/y resolutions and stuff like
| that but the dimensional accuracy of the parts coming off
| them is far, far, far below that no matter what the
| marketers claim. That cube barely has 1mm dimensional
| accuracy.
| mdorazio wrote:
| I agree on quality varying widely for resins softer than
| something like ABS or PETG. And tolerances are definitely
| never to advertised spec. It's worth noting that Formlabs
| themselves sell a "silicone" resin for a hilarious $350:
| https://formlabs.com/store/materials/silicone-40a-resin/
|
| At that price point you might as well outsource it or at
| least print a negative and use a real silicone pour.
| numpad0 wrote:
| It really is just open loop resolutions. You can print
| really sharp tweezers in SLA, that's what they mean by
| that.
| torginus wrote:
| All I can say that while you are theoretically probably
| right, all of this ends up not being a problem in practice.
|
| 1. Resin shrinking tends to be uniform, which is something
| to be taken into account if you plan on making parts that
| fit into holes, like screw mounts.
|
| 2. Peel force is absolutely a problem, that's why you need
| to minimize contact surface with the print film. With 28mm
| minis, this tends to be not a problem, but for large
| models, its recommended you hollow them out. This saves
| resin and prevents partially cured resin from being trapped
| inside. Bending tends not to be an issue.
|
| 3. Again not a huge problem in practice. If you look at a
| sliced model, you will see, that below each layer the layer
| below is almost the same, with most pixels shared between
| the 2, and with overhangs that stick out by 1-2 pixels.
| This means that leaking light will likely hit parts of the
| model that are supposed to be solid anyway. But both
| underexposure and overexposure can happen, with the former
| meaning that resin doesn't properly cure, leading to thing
| features disappearing, and the latter meaning that light
| leaking will cure unintended resin, which leads to thin
| cavities disappearing. This can be fixed by dialing in the
| exposure.
|
| 4. PLA in my experience is just as prone to shattering as
| resin is. While truly TPU-like rubber resins might not
| exist (at least I've never used them), there are ton of
| resins with a slightly rubbery texture, which are solid,
| but are flexible enough that thin features don't break when
| you manhandle the models. Most official wargaming and board
| game minis tend to be made of a similar resin (which is
| probably not UV resin but has a similar feel)
| michaelt wrote:
| _> All I can say that while you are theoretically
| probably right, all of this ends up not being a problem
| in practice._
|
| I experienced every issue I mentioned first-hand, in
| practice.
|
| I suppose it's possible I was uniquely naive in
| attempting to get engineering quality prints out of a
| consumer resin printer? It seems there's a good reason
| every resin 3D printer promotes itself with pictures of
| figurines rather than anything more demanding.
|
| My experience was that getting good results when printing
| something like a plastic bottle cap wasn't just a matter
| of dialing in the exposure - I had to dial in the
| exposure, the room temperature, the conditioning of the
| resin, the support placement, the orientation, and design
| the item geometry with printing in mind. Even then the
| results were adequate rather than impressive.
| torginus wrote:
| People who use resin printers usually go for the high
| detail instead of engineering properties - main users
| tend to be either cosplayers or mini modelers.
|
| Engineering prints are certainly possible I think, but
| you'd need some specialist resins.
|
| Personally I'd stick with FDM for making functional
| prints.
| ipsod wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your experience.
|
| Did you try engineering resins, like Siraya Tech's
| "Build", "Sculpt", etc.?
|
| I make some small parts that I FDM print, then CNC mill
| for accuracy. Was hoping to switch to resin printing,
| instead.
| varjag wrote:
| The main cause of warping is inadequate supports and/or
| unfortunate angles you place the part with. Remember you have
| both gravity and separation force pulling on the part each
| cycle, unlike with FDM.
|
| Align the bed, clean it thoroughly with alcohol before printing
| and increase base exposure. Make sure there is no debris in the
| vat. It'll stick.
|
| All printer resins are variation of acrylic and you have to
| design your parts with material limitations considered. However
| there's a range of premium resins for performance prints, look
| into Henkel Loctite or BASF offerings. We use BASF RG 35 and RG
| 9400 for small volume production parts. Also, make sure you do
| not overexpose: print an exposure target for any new resin to
| zero out the settings.
|
| Supports are certainly unavoidable but are largely a skill
| issue. After hundreds of prints it takes me minutes to depanel
| very elaborate designs.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Model not sticking to the bed. Behaviour was inconsistent._
|
| Crank the exposure time for the first 10 layers up. Way up,
| like 10x the exposure time for normal layers. They'll come out
| noticeably oversized, maybe 0.3mm bigger than you wanted.
| Adjust the model to compensate.
|
| (Assuming you've already levelled the print platform etc in
| line with the manufacturer's instructions and your resin is OK)
| numpad0 wrote:
| I learned hard way that you have to:
|
| - have GOOD ventilation and don't bother with water washables,
|
| - nail down Resin XP2 Matrix test prints,
|
| - use BOTH stirrer wash and ultrasound, and dry prints for
| hours before curing to mitigate swelling(marginal effects),
|
| - and use 10-15x longer exposure for first layer curing time,
|
| for SLA prints. Otherwise resin crumbles apart, leaves ugly
| marks on surface for first half inch, and so on. If magnetic
| beds are used, Z limit switch trigger arm must be adjusted too.
| Support-free is possible, people doing skyscraper towns are to
| some extent cargo culting.
| bearjaws wrote:
| From my experience you will have these problems with Form Labs
| printers. Especially as a novice in resin printing.
| torginus wrote:
| Honestly, this just looks like a fancypants version of the cheap
| Chinese LCD resin printers you can buy for the fraction of the
| price. Which by the way, if you are willing to drop at least $500
| on them, come with many of the convenience features that this
| printer does.
|
| Quality-wise, model detail is impeccable even on my years-old
| Elegoo Saturn.
| mdorazio wrote:
| Notable that I can't find any reviews that directly compare the
| performance of this $4500 printer to one of the higher-end
| consumer resin printers available today for $500. What are you
| getting to justify the massively higher price? With the laser +
| galvo setup it was clear, but now that it's also LCD is the print
| quality better? Speed better? Reliability? Build quality? All of
| these have improved massively from the Chinese brands in the last
| couple years so I really hope Formlabs isn't planning to coast on
| their brand name.
| martin_a wrote:
| > What are you getting to justify the massively higher price?
|
| As I've written below this is a machine for businesses not
| hobbyists. You pay for service contracts, the overall
| "professional behaviour", a reseller network that helps you and
| whatnot.
| mdorazio wrote:
| This isn't supported by people I've talked to who have owned
| prior Formlabs printers, though. In fact, I've walked into
| several R&D labs and seen Formlabs printers collecting dust
| because they _couldn 't_ get support or replacement parts.
| And when I can replace an entire printer 8 times with next-
| day shipping and it's still cheaper for significantly higher
| resolution and faster prints... again, what am I getting
| here? And I'm not asking as a hobbyist, I ran a 50 printer
| farm for a couple years.
| brookst wrote:
| Formlabs may not deliver on the promise, but that
| absolutely is the promise. To consumers, a $4500 printer
| needs to "justify" its price compares to a $500 printer. To
| a larger company, a $500 printer from an offshore company
| that doesn't even pretend to have field support is just a
| non-starter.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| When we were demoing bench scale SLA, we went all-in on
| Formlabs and were pretty disappointed by the workflow,
| quality, prices, and resin choices. Not much came of our
| relationship, and their reps were more interested in
| upselling than listening or helping us meet our needs. We
| tried for a few years but decided that they weren't worth
| paying a premium for.
|
| I feel like they suffer from the same problem as Ultimaker:
| recalcitrance. They know they have a reliably engineered core
| product, but they're too intent on capturing sales without
| acknowledging the value prop of an incredibly competitive
| advancing market and are slow to innovate.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Fully agree. The Ultimaker 2 launched with a happy fanbase
| and great upgrades in the pipeline. Back then, it was also
| all open source. Then it became increasingly clear that all
| those upgrades were going to become Ultimaker 3 features
| and everything became more commercial and closed and that
| really soured the community. By now, I don't think they
| have any USP left.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| "What are you getting to justify the massively higher price?"
|
| In my opinion, Formlabs is all about convenience. The fact that
| you can directly drop the build platform into the form wash is
| just so much nicer than having to directly fiddle with skin-
| irritating chemicals.
|
| That said, my Form 2 is pretty low on speed, rather mediocre on
| reliability, and I keep having issues with it locking me out of
| the DRM-ed cartridges because the build quality of the valve
| motor is apparently rather bad. The printer thinks its
| dispensing resin while in reality it's not - because the motor
| is too weak - and then it thinks I drained 3L out of a 1L
| cartridge and it'll turn on DRM nag mode.
|
| That said, the quality of the resulting prints is still insane.
| With a tiny bit of sanding you have parts that look like
| injection molding. I have never seen anyone get even close with
| FDM-ed prints. The transparency of prints is also so good,
| people sometimes think it's glass.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| That's more of an argument for resin prints in general over
| FDM, nothing specific to Formlabs offerings.
|
| I have used both Form 2 in the past and now use Anycubic
| Photon line (one of the cheap Chinese brands). Main
| differences I noticed is
|
| - Form software like the slicer is nicer and more polished
| and more features
|
| - Support is obviously better with the Formlabs printer
|
| - The Siraya resin I use in the anycubic ranges from anywhere
| of 1/4 to 1/8 the price of the equivalent proprietary DRM'ed
| Formlabs resin
|
| - The end results of the two printers are mostly equivalent
| for my use case
|
| - If you ruin something in the printer it's a lot cheaper to
| replace it in the Anycubic.
|
| In the end for my use case the Anycubic is way better value,
| but I could see for a business without in house expertise the
| support of Formlabs is probably a better pick.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| The same thing that you're getting with the $15k Markforged
| Mark 2 FDM printers: Convenience and reliability.
|
| When you're paying each engineer on your team $100k+, you don't
| want them spending that time fiddling with printer settings.
| You want to buy a $500 roll of carbon-fiber nylon and a $15k
| printer, put the two together, and have them call someone to
| have them fix it when it doesn't "just work."
|
| The expectation that it just works (whether it does or not)
| totally justifies the price tag to an industrial customer's
| purchasing department which will be accustomed to 6, 7, and 8
| figure price tags for CNC equipment.
| Tossrock wrote:
| I'd be interested to know which CNC machines have 8 figure
| price tags. You can get a fully loaded Integrex for under a
| million.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I've worked on big, custom gantry machines like a CMS
| Poseidon that were in the low 8 figures. It was purpose-
| built for milling and inspecting composite nose cones and
| rotor blades for military aircraft.
|
| Anything with "inspecting" or "composite" or "military" or
| "aircraft" doubles the price, so you can imagine what
| happens when you combine all four!
| Tossrock wrote:
| Phew, crazy stuff, I guess it pays to be a defense
| contractor.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| A couple years ago we did a project for a division of
| Kurt (the vise guys) and they gave me a tour of their
| contract manufacturing floor. The toolchangers on some of
| their machines were themselves larger than some
| horizontal machining centers. Didn't ask, but those
| machines had to be staggeringly expensive.
| bsder wrote:
| > With the laser + galvo setup it was clear, but now that it's
| also LCD is the print quality better? Speed better?
| Reliability? Build quality?
|
| 1) Resin stability and reliability
|
| Sure, you don't care if you're printing miniatures. If you're
| printing a dental appliance, suddenly you care a _lot_.
|
| 2) Convenience features
|
| Heating the tank, refilling the tank automatically, etc. Sure,
| you _can_ do these manually, but they 're a pain in the ass to
| do manually
|
| 3) Repeatability
|
| The mountings on my Chinese resin printers need to be reset all
| the time. I have to flatten replacement plates all the time. I
| can't count on the fact that the plate removes and remounts
| accurately.
|
| 4) General engineering quality
|
| FormLabs probably did real engineering, measurement and design
| on everything with the explicit purpose of characterization and
| repeatability (light uniformity, release tension, etc.) At $500
| a unit, that just isn't happening on the Chinese ones. After
| the hobbyists poke at them a year or two fixing the issues, the
| fixes sometimes make their way back into the Chinese units
| (generally creating other problems along the way).
|
| Nominally, this should all mean way less grief printing things.
|
| And _maybe_ the main LCD is no better, but I would suspect it
| probably is. As far as I can tell, there is exactly _one_
| supplier for the LCD panels in all the Chinese resin printers.
| It would be really nice if FormLabs actually spent the NRE to
| create a better LCD with a second source as it would give a
| competitive kick to the space.
|
| For a hacker hobbyist, the Chinese printers are _WAY_ better
| value. For someone whose time equates to money, the FormLabs
| may be worth coughing up as $5K really isn 't worth thinking
| about.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I'm guessing it's like drones. Slapping on four electronic
| motors and a computer with a rudimentary accelerometer all onto
| a rigid frame clears >75% of mandatory checkbox items for a
| viable helicopter with literally just four moving parts.
| bearjaws wrote:
| I worked at a company that had a Form 3 (I think) 5 years ago,
| and granted time has passed but consumer printers are light
| years ahead of that thing now.
|
| I have a Anycubic mono x from 2020 and it is far more reliable,
| faster and cheaper. You can buy 5 of them for the price of the
| Form 3.
|
| The software and firmware is pretty bad from Anycubic but you
| can figure that out a lot faster than you can fix problems with
| the Form 2.
| rkagerer wrote:
| I would love to see a quantitative comparison of the Form 4
| against competing SLA printers, that measures and compares
| accuracy and repeatability of the printed parts (i.e. engineering
| applications, not artistic).
|
| Formlabs makes some bold claims, eg. 99% of surface area within
| 100um of spec when using Precision Resin [1].
|
| [1] https://formlabs.com/store/materials/precision-model-resin/
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-06-04 23:02 UTC)