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.
"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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
