Define “production”. For dental models, I’m sure it works great. For actual volume, i.e., more than a handful of parts, I would stray far away.
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Resin. It’s insanely expensive and the market is poised to blow up. The big chemistry players are making a massive push in the resin market. So we continue to see insanely good resins for prices much less than what formlabs is charging. So you are losing on cost, performance and flexibility.
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Workflow. These printers are not designed for mass production work flows, lots of labor which drives up costs. From what I’ve gathered even form cells are kind of a novelty which you can’t purchase through normal channels. No support for part packing on multiple levels, you’d probably have to manually do the packing and then export the STL into preform. Formwash and cure are not ready for prime time. Volume constraints, takes way too long to wash and cure and many times they don’t actually wash parts fully. You could come up with a custom workflow, but you won’t get any help from formlabs.
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Speed. We haven’t taken delivery of our Form 3 yet, but speed has always been an issue and will be with any laser system. Projection systems can cure entire layers in a few seconds and then move on to the next layer. The technology just can’t compete. This will also affect your bottom line.
For me formlabs has always been about convenience and presumably will continue to be. The software is easy to use and for non-complicated parts that aren’t too large, you can get good results in a decent amount of time. We generally try to outsource large, 500 ml or >, parts if we have the time to wait, as we’ve had too many failures or it just takes too much post processing time.