Afinia started accepting preorders today on their H800 filament based printer. Any thoughts?
(ps. Sorry Formlabs if this is not an appropriate place to ask this - I’ve seen some other threads on other models)
I don’t see whats different from that and any other FDM printer.
I’d also add that you are posting to FormLabs forum where, presumably, most people here have shelled out a good amount of money for an awesome SLA printer. My point is that this printer is bush league in comparison to FormLabs.
I don’t mean to sound sour but this post feels like an advertisement.
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Hi @eokeefe, it’s not an ad. I’m a somewhat-content Formlabs customer (and yes, I’m one of those folks you mentioned who’ve shelled out thousands to them for equipment, resin, accessories, etc). I had the original Form 1, now own a Form 1+, and love it. But I’ve been considering supplementing my SLA printer with an FDM one. I still get failures more often I’d like, and dimensional accuracy is sometimes a bit underwhelming. It would be nice to have a second printer with a different set of strengths, for when finish / resolution isn’t as important as getting a quick, cheap, repeatable print. I trust the community here hence seeing if anyone has an opinion. Thanks for yours - appreciate it.
Well, @rkagerer, in that case I would look into a FDM machine that has dual print heads. This way you can print with dissolvable filament, such as HIPS. This feature will save you time and produce amazing prints. I’d also point out that when you print with dissolvable filaments you don’t run the risk of breaking small model features while taking off the supports!
Anyways I would say that the above printer is fully enclosed which is nice when printing ABS to reduce warping. But as I alluded to in my previous comment, FDM is starting to over saturate the market. There are so many of them with more or less the same features that the only way to be competitive is to lower costs. So when looking for one look for the features you want then pick the cheapest one, because at that point they are all the same.
I have to ask though. What do you mean by:
The link you supplied was quite old (last post was from March 2014). I didn’t have a FormLabs printer in march 2014 so I can’t comment on what they had available for them. However, currently, Preform has a fine tuning feature (Help → Fine Tuning) where you can make x or y axis adjustments. I am a mechanical engineer and I use my printer for prototyping everything from consumer products to test equipment, with no issues regarding dimensional inaccuracies. In fact at work we work with professional rapid prototyping companies and they don’t do any better then my Form1+ (except they usually have way better material choices).
I just want to make sure you are aware of Preforms fine tuning, because ‘underwhelming’ is not how I would refer to Form1+'s dimensional accuracy.
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