One more thing.
As most of you know, the Formlabs creates it’s layers by using the laser to draw the image, essentially creating a “tool path” which the laser (with the help of the galvos, follows. As such, the exposed area is made up of solid cured resin.
The MSLA printers like the Photon, shine a UV light through a mask displayed on an LCD. LCD panels are made of tiny square pixels, separated my an internal grid mask (which is used to hide the separation lines and increase contrast and apparent resolution). When the UV light shines through the LCD, it cures a bunch of tiny adjacent squares called voxels. These are so close together that they fuse into one contiguous surface, but in the right light at high magnification, they can be seen.
Here is an example of voxels. open up the close up image to see it at full resolution. The voxels can easily be seen. The image is a 12x enlargement over the actual size.
