- What is the price per unit when accounting for materials?
- If the material is not a Form proprietary mix, does the cost of the printers include the Open Platform license cost? [0]
- What post-processing is required to wash and cure the printed pieces?
- How many human hours are required in the washing / curing of the pieces from each method?
- What is the dimensional stability over time of pieces from each method? EG, do the Form printed pieces shrink over time when exposed to UV as resin typically does? As such is it appropriate for use outside of the UV protected print chamber?
Frustrated with our Form 3 after a year and having consistently gotten excellent results out of our little Elegoo Mars for five years, we purchased an Elegoo Saturn. It runs between 3 - 5x as fast and has less partially cured resin in our complex lattice (jewelry) pieces. The materials are half the price. And the printer itself was 1/4 the price.
Their proprietary PreForm slicer has -some- features that are better than ChiTuBox.
But all in all, at 1/5th the cost, I wonder how fast you could print the same number of pieces with the equivalent (+/- 20) Saturns. Or, factoring in the $4,499 of the Form 4 and the $6k price of Open Platform for the Form 3, how many you could produce with the 52 Saturns you could by for the same amount...
We have multiple form 3 printers at work too, and they are very slow! It takes an hour to automatically fill the resin tank (which I cheat by pouring myself) and supply costs are ridiculous. But I really like the rather consistent output quality and their software is awesome.
My comparisons are against my own printer, anycubic photon mono. I can get a new printer with the same price of a bottle of formlabs material :)
Yeah, you can't fill that guy without pouring it in. It just isn't happening with a new vat. The supply costs are indeed the worst part, too. However, we've had FAR from perfect, repeatable results with it. The Elegoo Saturn is DEFINITELY more consistent and repeatable. And yeah - lower end machines are kinda nuts. One moving part, etc. It's funny - they're a superior technology. How do we know? Form themselves went to mSLA on the 4 as compared to the SLA of the 3 with the complicated optical carriage.
It's just a problem with Formlabs. No one else in the consumer market does the same that I know of. Both Stratasys and 3d Systems had (and I'm guessing have) proprietary, DRM'd materials for their machines but that's in the professional space. Tethon, who specializes in crazy materials, does too.
> and the $6k price of Open Platform for the Form 3
The Form 4 Open Platform pricing is still "TBD," and given the two licenses for the Form 3 differ by $3k, it makes me shudder to think what they'd charge for their newest toy
I also was trying to understand what that license gives you: is it removing the DRM from their printers to allow non-OEM materials?
Open platform allows you to use non formlabs resins, it works fine but tbh what you pay for with formlabs is getting the perfect prints every time. The form 3 works so well because all of the resins have such optimized settings and you can just let it print without worrying about issues. If you want to use some other resin I doubt you would see as high of a success rate.
> but tbh what you pay for with formlabs is getting the perfect prints every time.
My 45 email chain with Formlabs would beg to differ.
I'm being a little bit silly. The reason for the (over)engineering of their products is to be as turn key as possible, and this includes materials. I give them credit for the ambition to try to be the "Apple" of 3d printing. I'm not 100% negative on Formlabs, and they've certainly played an important part in making even resin printing more mainstream and accessible to the consumer. That OG Form was the printer everyone wanted at the time, and for good reason. Not to mention the geometries we're printing are especially tricky (by design). So although I sound pretty negative in most of the comments here, all in all I both understand and respect what Form is trying to do. Things just... aren't as easy as they try to make them out to be.
Yeah for sure, I see where you are coming from. I have used a form 3 a lot (4k of materials) and have my own form 2 and for my uses it has worked super well. There are certainly blind spots but for the consumer they are targeting who wants to print parts and not think about the details it is pretty slick.
I think for what it is worth formlabs has a pretty unique position in the market where their printers are low enough in price where they have to compete with enthusiast printers which makes it tough. If what you are looking for is a machine that you can tweak and set up exactly how you want it, formlabs isn't ideal. But for people who are not interested in working on a printer and just want parts to appear in the printer I d not think that anyone else does that better.
I guess "allows" in the same way HP "allows" you to only use their ink. Fantastic, and only (at least) $6k for the privilege of using my hardware as I see fit
yeah the 6k is wild for sure, if you are looking to not use formlabs resin why would you buy a formlabs printer though?
The biggest advantage of formlabs in my mind is the ecosystem, the resins just work out of the box and you do not have to try and fine tune things. If I wanted to use Loctite or some other resin company (price per L is comparable) I would just buy a anycubic printer.
I do get where you are coming from though, I am not a drm fan but I am just curious why you would not just go with a different printer.
> is it removing the DRM from their printers to allow non-OEM materials?
Yep - that's it! Well, in order to do so I imagine they also have to give you an unlocked version of PreForm (their proprietary slicer) because a lot of settings that we have control over in ChiTuBox are hidden behind just the presets for the material selection.
All kinds of pessimism in the comments of course. Obviously they are different processes with different tradeoffs. But there are a growing number of applications where 3D printing is the better choice. But it's interesting that the video didn't even highlight the 6 week tooling lead time or the cost of the tooling! How many more batches or different parts could they have done in that 6 weeks time, or adding more printers with the saved cost? Hardware companies and manufacturers can and will get creative with their mix of production methods and scheduling options available to them.
So 500 cycles on the injection moulding machine and 42 across the 4 3D printers. Yes, this is super impressive; yes, if I wanted <1,000 of something I am probably going 3D printer (cheaper, more flexible, less lead time) but it is still 50 times slower.
I don't understand your last sentence. If "you want less than <1000 of something you'd choose a 3D printer but it's slower." What does that mean?
Isn't it 3d printing end to end from idea to existing faster than injection molding for smaller runs?
Isn't the entire point of this video that for a 1000 part sample 3D printing/Injection molding run time were actually more comparable than one might think?
The video chooses a very slow injection moulding machine; creates a mould that only produces two parts per cycle even though the machine could clearly handle far more; then has to use four of their machines and a human to match its pace.
Yes, 3d printing is vastly faster if you measure the time for me to get a part from the machine on my desk vs ordering a mold and shipping the results from Shenzhen. But that was true of the Form 3 et al. The speed of the printer makes no real difference, and they are bing disingenuous in suggesting it is approaching the throughput of the machine they are comparing it to.
They don't want to focused on price if one machine is using bulk pellets and the other UV resin. It is many orders of magnitude more then 4x and much larger over the lifetime then the initial purchase price.
Not to mention an injection molding machine would be expected to run at least 20 years; which seems high for a Form 4 still being in full use.
Seriously, that injection molding machine is slooooooow, and I produced parts faster in middle school in our shop class with an injection molding machine that was entirely manual and looked to be from the 20s, the 1920s.
They are printing a full bed of parts for each 3D printer run, but only two per injection cycle? And what's with that giant spike of flash on their injection molded parts? This video is so disingenuous.
Depends on the plastic and the wall thickness of the part. We don't know what the requirements actually are, but I bet they would be a way to make 4 times as many parts in a cycle half as long if you had to.
Even when ignoring the per-part cost, are the parts even the same material? Looking same != Being same. Not sure what Formlabs is trying to prove here.
They have a robust material library, silicone, polyurethane, glass filled polymers etc. The material is not really a bottleneck at this point. I have used their ESD material which was slick, even the weirder materials are super easy. Obviously at scale the parts will make more sense with injection molding but if you need a couple thousand of a part this seems much cheaper and easier.
More the opposite than anything. The SLA parts are isotropic so you have the same properties in every direction and do not have to worry about breaking on the layer lines like in FDM. Formlabs has a couple resins which are very impact resistant or stiff etc, some similar to ABS, glass filled plastics or polypropylene
The resins are also getting cheaper too, It looks like they are using the new Black V5 which costs a third less per liter than Black V4 from their last printer.
I use both kinds very frequently so I can comment on this. The main difference is that SLA strength is more uniform and FDM strength is very directional.
And the strength of the output is highly dependent on the material for both printers. The typical resin is extremely brittle, but rather heat resistant. But you can get flexible or tough material which are both less brittle but also less rigid.
So to answer your question: not necessarily :) nylon-like SLA materials are pretty good for usable everyday items if you don't mind the slight fidelity losses (still better than FDM)
SLA prints don't have the same layer shear issues as FDM prints, but you have to spend on engineering resin to match the same strength as a cheap ABS filament.
I've had white plastic SLA prints (not Formlabs afaik) go very yellow in less than a few months, curious if this is common with white photosensitive resins vs plastic you might get injection moulded?
Have not had this in my experience with formlabs. they recommend that you use a protective coating spray for parts that are outside in direct uv, I have never used it though and my parts have lasted fine.
As always depends on the material, I think the glass filled ones are better, the flexible ones are a little worse but it has never been an issue for me.
There are post processing steps in injection molding. As you can see in the video, parts come off with gates on them that need to be removed. In the case of these printed parts, you can wash 1000 in one 10 minute cycle.
A full accounting and comparison of cost and time including post processing, in a general way that applies to many parts, is tough to do well.
They also ignore making the mold, so I guess that evens it out? Mold tools are very expensive and commit you to a lot of design constraints as well as lock you in to minimum production cycles that make sense. I agree its not fair, thought.
Given the costs, I'm surprised they didn't do more printers, too.
Design constraints aren't an issue for prototype runs, since you'll have the same constraints for the production mold. Actually, now that I'm writing this out.... the constraints issue is a plus, since it's a dry run of how the actual production parts will be produced. Doing the 1000pc run on a 3d printer won't expose an 'oops' that can't actually be made in a molded part.
I agree with you, but what I was getting at was that if you're just going to print the parts for the entire run, you aren't constrained by the issues like draft, etc. Obviously, if your run is 10,000,000 pieces, then you have no choice, but if your run is <100,000, you might be better off making different design decisions and just getting more printers.
This is borderline flag-worthy material (the post). Two main things missing:
- What other commenters have pointed out already: Post processing time for the 3D printed parts (as an aside: the quality of a 3D printed would never match that of an injection molded part).
- That the injection mold's mold in an ideal setup for such a small part would have multiple units per mold, thus with each injection one could produce 10+ parts of this small part shown in the video.
Obviously, 3D printing has its own advantages over injection molding as well. But for mass production of highly-repeatable parts (eg: not highly-customizable ("made to order") items such as dental related, or shoe insole related, for which 3D printing works well in mass production), plastic injection molding beats 3D printing hands down.
Lower cost printers are absolutely using LCDs with an LED UV light source. These resin curing printers are pretty darn cheap as well, and have a ton of resolution. They also excel on volume as they do expose the entire plate at once and don’t require scanning a laser around.
The material you get out of such a printer is of course entirely different from an injection molded part.
Yeah, I’m a pretty big 3D printer enthusiast. I’m surprised they shifted from lasers to LCD. I guess the laser and galvo setup was too expensive. Probably also easier and cheaper to ship new “Low Force Display” for people with formcare. End of the day, no matter what these vendors say, the crystals in LCD get damaged by UV light and would need to be replaced eventually.
It also opens up a whole bunch of material options. If you go to resin providers websites they have only a few resins for laser printers and tons and tons for lcd printers.
eyeroll this is a part that's extremely well suited to being printed quickly with an SLA printer (flat), and it feels like next to no effort was put into optimizing the injection molding. We have long been in a situation where you can construct a race where 3D printing makes sense, but the way this is framed is disingenuous as hell.
- What is the material in each process?
- What is the price per unit when accounting for materials?
- If the material is not a Form proprietary mix, does the cost of the printers include the Open Platform license cost? [0]
- What post-processing is required to wash and cure the printed pieces?
- How many human hours are required in the washing / curing of the pieces from each method?
- What is the dimensional stability over time of pieces from each method? EG, do the Form printed pieces shrink over time when exposed to UV as resin typically does? As such is it appropriate for use outside of the UV protected print chamber?
Frustrated with our Form 3 after a year and having consistently gotten excellent results out of our little Elegoo Mars for five years, we purchased an Elegoo Saturn. It runs between 3 - 5x as fast and has less partially cured resin in our complex lattice (jewelry) pieces. The materials are half the price. And the printer itself was 1/4 the price.
Their proprietary PreForm slicer has -some- features that are better than ChiTuBox.
But all in all, at 1/5th the cost, I wonder how fast you could print the same number of pieces with the equivalent (+/- 20) Saturns. Or, factoring in the $4,499 of the Form 4 and the $6k price of Open Platform for the Form 3, how many you could produce with the 52 Saturns you could by for the same amount...
[0] https://formlabs.com/materials/open-platform/