Form 3L buy or no?

Support & Troubleshooting Form 3L
1

Hello,

we are curently in the process of choosing an SLA printer.
the only one from Formlabs that is big enough for us, is Form 3L.
I’ve noticed that there has been alot of issues with this printer so far. That’s why i’m turning to all of you for help.

Could you maybe tell me if problems with printer are solved? or will i be experiencing problems after purchasing this printer?
With the knowledge that you have now, would you buy it again or no?

Best regards, Aljoša

2

My 3+ (purchased March of 2022) has already been replaced once, and have a 67% successful print rate according to the dashboard. I have been using Tough2000, which seems to have the most issues, so I am hopeful that a different material will be more reliable.

Overall, I am extremely disappointed with this printer so far. I really expected it to be MORE reliable than the average $1k resin printers currently available, but that has not been my experience so far. The only thing I am happy with is how responsive the service department is - although they can only help so much.

What are the other printers that you are considering?

3

Have been using our 3L On and OFF for almost half a year…

So far, there is not much printing issue
There had been a few instances where the prints have some minor defects…
But so far we have not experience any print failure.

My 2 cents:

  • Overall, the printer work OK. Although most of us still tend to fall back to using our FDM printer as it has automatic support removal
  • Print quality and accuracy is OK, not the best, but OK. The support touchpoint and the manual support removal are causing more trouble to us, but that is more of a SLA limitation.
  • Material / Maintenance is wayyy overpriced. The resin tank had a lifetime, and start counting when it first exposed to resin. This make maintaining different material a real headache. It is really hard to justify the cost of maintaining different material when we only print like once or twice every week (sometimes once every month)

Would you buy it again or no?
Most probably no.

4

From my own personal experience, i would say No. for the following reasons:

  1. The overpriced maintenance.
  2. The print quality is just average.
5

thank you for your response

6

thanks

7

hi,

honestly i haven’t researched enough at all. Could you maybe recommend a printer for clear prints?

really again, thank you all for your response on my question

best regards

8

I REGRET buying our 3L. The Form 3L is missing a key feature that exists for the Form 3. Buyer Beware!

The parts print well but are inaccurate with no means to adjust. The printer software seems to overexpose or grow the parts so that the outer dimensions are consistently large by 1-2% and interior features are small by 1-2%. This occurs with both standard Clear and Grey resins. The Form 3 has a utility that can be used to tune these setting but this tool does not exist for the 3L.

I bought the machine and have not been able to get it to produce accurate parts in the 9 months that I’ve owned it. I regret purchasing this. Tech support has worked with me and been responsive. Unfortunately, they concluded that the machine is not capable of being adjusted like the Form 3 and they would not honor a return. I now have a $10,000 paperweight (or knickknack machine).

9

I’d be curious to know what you dimensional accuracy is if you run parts using Legacy settings instead of Default/Beta.

There’s some reports from others on the forum, and I’ve done extensive testing, showing some issues with the Default/Beta settings, so curious what you would find. When I run parts in Legacy, I’ve been having great success with my 3L.

Also agree that it would be nice to have a non-uniform scaling ability in Preform…I put in a feature request for that a long time ago with no update since. Doesn’t seem like a hard feature to implement.