As soon as I bought a competing brand and got to experience a metal tank where you only change the film on the bottom, I became a bit angry. I have been carting around my Formlabs tanks for 9 years, hoping for a solution to re-use them, because I feel bad dumping them in a landfill. This new printer has an easily replaceable FEP bottom that costs a few dollars. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on tanks that only last 1-2 liters of resin. And I will happily buy Formlabs’ resins for the convenience. But even now that the “Open Materials Mode” price has been lowered to $2499 and $4999, I’m not willing to pay that much in addition to expensive tanks that frequently need to be replaced and overpriced resin.
Perhaps you make it up over time when you’re only paying $17.09 per liter of a major brand printer company’s third-party resin. That’s almost a tenth of the price of Formlabs gray resin. Not insignificant.
And sorry, Formlabs Marketing—the name change to Open Material Mode doesn’t change the fact it’s a ridiculously overpriced license fee.
I did end up buying another brand of printer, with the intention of someday going back to a Form printer when they finally eliminate the OMM. I HATE THIS NEW PRINTER. I was spoiled by the ease of use of my Form 2, the Open Mode that was FREE, the cartridge system (not the tanks, though, because they’re wasteful). I never expected to have to learn about resin exposure times and to use the Chitubox slicer, which is painful. I WANT TO BUY ANOTHER FORMLABS PRINTER BECAUSE IT’S AN ELEGANT SOLUTION. But I simply can’t justify the already expensive printer with another $2500 tacked onto the price. And you won’t provide a good solution for castable resin—there are plenty of viable castable resins that you should have licensed years ago—and you won’t certify Bluecast’s castable resin, from a company who has sung your praises for years and provided us technical support for casting when Formlabs was unable to.