Formlabs Form 4 Teardown

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2024/formlabs-form-4-teardown/

by zdw • 2 years ago

163 63 2 years ago

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.

ZiiS2• 2 years ago

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.

ZiiS2• 2 years ago

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.

teruakohatu2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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_a2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

teruakohatu2• 2 years ago

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.

bloggie3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

SR2Z• 2 years ago

I hope that OSS hardware gets as cheap as these tiny proprietary chips in the future, but I think it'll take a while.

bsder2• 2 years ago

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.

mkj• 2 years ago

Their efforts keeping up to date with current Linux kernels is better than most boards of that nature. That deserves some open source credit.

archi422• 2 years ago

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

varjag3• 2 years ago

All resin printers have converged to the same tech years ago for good reasons. The differences are mostly aesthetic.

archi422• 2 years ago

I disagree. DLP resin printers use what can be described essentially as a UV beamer. The DLP IC is called DMD - digital micromirror device. It is what it says, and contains lots of micromirror that can direct the light. The resulting image projected onto the FEP film on the resin vat is quite sharp. They also require little power without affecting the exposure time.

Normal resin printers use a UV LED array with lenses to produce a more or less uniform light field. A display is then stuck underneath the vat to block light at certain spots. Since there is some distance between the display and the resin inside the vat, the resulting image has a slight blur on the edges; I think isn't an issue and is countered by using high resolution displays.

However, they consume a lot more power and require active cooling.

The display on a LCD resin printer has a limited lifetime, while the DLP is rated for 20000h. Being able to focus the image on the resin also allows for using arbitrarily thick (and thus stable) glas plates, while on a LCD the distance between LCD and resin needs to be minimzed.

Mind we're talking about a device that costs 4500US$ (before taxes).

Or am I missing some good reason to use a LCD display over a DMD in that device class?

edg5000• 2 years ago

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.

torginus4• 2 years ago

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.

michaelt4• 2 years ago

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.

varjag3• 2 years ago

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.

michaelt4• 2 years ago

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)

iCarrot• 2 years ago

The common wisdom (this is back when I was still fiddling with an Elegoo Mars 2-3 years ago) was to print the model at an angle and elevated from build plate. There should always be rafts and supports under the model.

numpad03• 2 years ago

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.

bearjaws2• 2 years ago

From my experience you will have these problems with Form Labs printers. Especially as a novice in resin printing.

torginus4• 2 years ago

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.

mdorazio4• 2 years ago

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_a2• 2 years ago

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.

mdorazio4• 2 years ago

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.

washadjeffmad• 2 years ago

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.

fxtentacle2• 2 years ago

"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• 2 years ago

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.

LeifCarrotson2• 2 years ago

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.

Tossrock2• 2 years ago

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.

bsder2• 2 years ago

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.

numpad03• 2 years ago

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.

bearjaws2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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/

drekipus• 2 years ago

I don't understand how this is any different to what we've had more than 6 years ago.

Ie: this [0] is a $300aud (maybe $200usd) LCD SLA printer.

[0] https://au.elegoo.com/products/elegoo-mars-4-msla-resin-3d-p...

fuzzfactor• 2 years ago

Here we have the most important findings about this particular printer:

The past few years has seen a step-function in the competitiveness of products out of China, and SLA 3D printers have been no exception. The Form 4 sits at a pivotal moment for Formlabs, and has parallels to the larger geopolitical race for technological superiority. In general, Chinese products tend to start from a low price point with fewer features and less reliability, focusing on the value segment and iterating their way towards up-market opportunities; US products tend to start at a high price point, with an eye on building (or defending) a differentiated brand through quality, support, and features, and iterate their way down into value-oriented models. We now sit at a point where both the iterate-up and iterate-down approaches are directly competing for the same markets, setting the stage for the current trade war.

From somebody who obviously knows more about things like this than the general consensus (or lack of it) in places like Washington, DC.

No surprise, that's a place with very little ability to understand complex things, especially technology and its impact.

Formlabs Form 4 Teardown

Related Stories