Can confirm this as well. Ran our first 50 micron Grey V4 print over the weekend. 5x one part. One placed across the seam line. All came out great. Seam line is barely there. Took me a long time to find it. Will need no sanding and will disappear after paint Preform said it was a 24h print which I though was quite fast. Printer said 28h and eventually finished after 36h 
Honestly don;t get it why it’s so hard to estimate. At least get within a hour or so.
2nd 50 micron print. 10 parts came out perfect.
Preform: 30h
Actual: 42h
I second what you are saying… I am always having 40-50% more printing time than estimated. I find that the printing times are long. Also, there is too many supports when I generate them automatically. So, I often have to manually put them if I don’t want too much points supports close together. I compare with the Form 2 and I see a lot of differences. A lot of side support points that I often does not want… But this a risk of getting warped parts.
By the way, I am happy to see that you are getting perfect results. 
All the resins are still in beta. From observation, much of the print time inaccuracy eem to come from peel timing, which changes as the resins are tuned for the printer. In other words, the times will change as the resins change during beta, so maybe there’s not much point in optimizing it right now? Just a guess.
That’s fair, although given the amount of telemetry they are collecting you’d think they could determine a “correction factor” based on real-world results being seen for each type of resin and use that to refine the estimated time before presenting it to the user.
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Unacceptable coming from an established company which spent at least a couple of years developing the form 3. They have now another year with the product in the market and print times are still off, now they launched the 3L (which according to their own marketing material and media, has been beta tested by several companies before launch and shipping the first units) an “industrial grade” machine and the only industrial thing about it is pricing.
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Well, it is what it is. In spite of using the same essential underlying technology, I’m not sure how much of the resin optimization is portable between the Form 3 and 3L; they have different build plates, tanks and build volumes; the 3L has multiple lasers; etc.
I would definitely prefer to have more accurate print time estimates, but assuming they are resource-constrained and have to prioritize work, I think a focus getting resins out of “Beta” makes sense.
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Just sharing a simple 50um print which came out great in Tough 2000 on my 3L. Direct-on-base with an aging tank. Took 4h:39m (vs 3h:11m predicted). Left the gloves in for scale.
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There’s a decent firmware update for the 3L:
- Added ability to Prime
- Added ability to Remote Print
- Added ability to weigh and determine the tare of cartridges
- Improved cartridge empty detection
- Improved print accuracy
- Improved mixer behavior
- Various bug fixes
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Thanks for the heads up Eks!
Regarding the new firmware, I noticed 2 things (still starting the first print with it):
- After calibrating (taring) the resin cartridges it now appears to show the exact amount of resin left. Annoyingly a message is sent when starting the printer (and another a few hours later) if you’re low on resin as I was.
- Right after starting a print, it takes a loooong time in the “Checking Optics” initial step. I thought it was some first time thing but, after aborting and restarting the print, it did the same thing. Before it lasted around 20~30 seconds (or so it seemed) and now I timed it at 2 minutes and 25 seconds.
After attending a FormLabs workshop yesterday we were told the following:
- Cure L and Wash L are now expected for next year but “probably sooner”.
- The cleaning mesh should be available for the 3L this summer.
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I asked for the option to weigh and Tare the cartridges, (I’m sure others did too) as it would seem to me a simple way to calculate what’s left, it’s great to see it’s been implemented, but where is it in the build process, as I can’t find it on the Dashboard or Preform or the machine.
Does it only appear as an option when one starts a build?, a heads up on this would be great, thanks.
regards
Chris
Hi Chris. It’s on the machine itself.
Go to “Settings” (by touching the wrench icon), then go to “Maintenance”. Once there, scroll down and you’ll find it as the last option:
Didn’t think to scroll down! By the way, if I abort a “prime” my machine hangs, is this a new “feature”?
Thanks
regards
Chris
Before you buy expensive cleaning solutions. I have been washing small and large objects in Grey V4 and tough1500 in the initial vegetable bucket that came with the 3L. I excite it a little with a magnetic stirrer underneath and have had zero issues getting parts clean within the prescribed 10minutes.
Getting a lot of FORCESENSE_NOT_RESPONDING errors since this update. Doesn’t seem to effect anything but print time, which was already super wrong. I will allow that it’s been a big improvement with these last few updates, as is shifting from v4 black to v4 grey. Not quite emotionally ready to test v4 black with the updates again quite yet.
My screen works but seems to just shut off based on bugs or something else? I aborted my first print because it seemed like the resin was taking too long to fill the tank (4.5 hours?) and then it just went blank…
Tried rebooting, caused more issues. Tried turning off, waiting a minute, then turning on again, now it doesn’t detect the build platform or the right cartridge (actually never detected the right cartridge even though it was properly inserted, wtf)…
Be careful that the tank hasn’t overfilled. Until a few firmwares ago my tank level detection didn’t work and it caused a spill. If you’ve emptied two cartridges into it it’s not working.
Hmm. I can also only use remote print if I’m NOT logged into my formlabs account in Preform.
Has anybody in this thread attempted putting a nest camera or similar inside their machine? With some prints taking >24 hours I was thinking of doing this to catch failures that might otherwise waste >24 hours.