@EvanFoss and all, a little bit about what we’re doing here in engineering — apologies for not being super-present here. We’ve got a lot going on, and there are more of you than there are of us! First off, a spatial filter or collimator might indeed do the trick to improve your printer’s optics and produce better prints (in fact, we already use a collimator for the Form 1+ laser), but a lot of design and validation testing is required before issuing an engineering change order. We have several engineers at Formlabs who are investigating potential print issues caused by laser aberrations. The previous forum thread has been instrumental in helping us design methodologies for our tests. Thank you.
Our first step is to reproduce the issues that have been described. It’s actually been really tricky to do so because the laser aberrations are quite rare. No doubt they exist, as we’ve seen in the photographs in the forum thread, but it only shows up noticeably in a small fraction of Form 1+ lasers. We’re working on ways to improve detection. (As a side note, I had similar issues with my Form 1+ several months back. The laser spot looked speckle and most of my prints were failures. The few successful ones has significant rashing. It turned out the first galvo mirror had a smudge on it, and once that was cleaned my printer was printing great. So I didn’t have the same issue described here, but it took a while for me to figure that out).
The most important thing for us is to ensure that any change we make is clearly beneficial. We want to significantly test any change before releasing it to the wild to ensure that there are no delayed negative consequences, and if there are, how we can reduce them to make sure that they impact fewer customers than are currently affected. In the case of these laser aberrations, already just a small fraction of customers are seeing the issue, so we are working extra carefully.
This process of system improvement through rigorous design and testing doesn’t just apply to the laser aberrations discussed here, but to everything we do at Formlabs. We want our products to work great and require minimal troubleshooting, so we work incredibly hard on the backend to make that a reality. It doesn’t always work, but when it doesn’t we work tirelessly to correct our issues. And I’m not talking about putting a bandaid on a problem as a temporary fix or a way to hide it. That’s the last thing we want to do. I’m talking about real, significant improvements.
So hang tight. Your voice is definitely being heard. Sometimes we’re quiet here at Formlabs HQ, but that’s because we only want to communicate information that we know is accurate from theory and practice, that has been proven substantially in-house.