The blazing fast Form 4/B is here! For any current Form 2 and Form 3 series printer owners, we’d like to say thank you for continuing to grow with Formlabs by offering you $/€/£/CHF 1,000 toward Form 4/B materials and accessories when you make a Form 4/B purchase.
nice offer that we can buy a printer then get a credit to buy from you again.
better offer $1500 loyalty off on a FL4
best offer $2500 off on FL4 with a FL2 or FL3 trade in
i ordered my form 4 three weeks ago and this was not an option then apparently, would love to get this applied retroactively or credited back to my card.
Better option would be a “loyalty” Open Materials License for ANY existing Formlabs owner. It doesn’t cost Formlabs ANYTHING to issue a code, and the value to us is huge. The fact that we’ll have to pay thousands more for the “privilege” of using third party resins is a dealbreaker. My Form 2 let me use ANY resin for FREE.
I was getting ready to finally upgrade from my Form 2, but the OML made me start looking at other options.
I couldn’t agree more regarding “looking elsewhere ” there are a number of other potential printers out there now.
I’ve had both FL2 and have a FL3 at the moment but the cost of the FL4 just doesn’t equate to making a profit from it.
Just doesn’t make sense.
Yes, I agree with you completely. I’m a form 2 owner and lost interest in Form Labs years ago after having to spend way too much to have it replaced twice. The fact that they have demonstrated no interest in loyalty towards the very people that kept them in business in the early days is very disappointing and leaves me feeling disrespected. At this point I’ll just hack the thing for a project one day. I will also never recommend them and have been frankly sharing my experience with many others - likely discouraging many potential buyers. They are earning their bad reputation.
Form 2 owner and Form 3+ owner. I too replaced my FL 3 several times under warranty, Now that my warranty expired. Not sure what I’ll do.
I have an Elegoo Jupiter. It needs a lot of adjustment to work and Chitubox, the slicer, is a pain to use.
I’ve had issues with cartridges being marked as “worn out” since day 1. Replacing the motor assembly (at my cost) did not fix the issue. The problem seems to be that some of the cartridges are manufactured to such a low quality that even squeezing them super hard with a screwdriver will NOT get resin out. I have to cut like half of them open with a knife just to make them work as intended. But that only helps if I check and repair the cartridge before putting it into the printer. Otherwise, I get locked out because the printer thinks I used up 3L out of a 1L cartridge … It would have been super easy for Formlabs to just add an option for me to disable the “cartridge worn out” warning. But they never did. Instead, I keep getting regular emails reminding me that my issues would be solved by me purchasing a newer printer.
As for the Form 3 and Form 4, to me both of them look like a quality downgrade. The Form 3 blurs small details. And the Form 4 is noticeably pixelated. I mean look at the official marketing materials for printing injection molds with the Form 4: Form 4: Blazing Speed Meets Industrial Production | Formlabs
Why would I tolerate those 0.1mm stairs on every diagonal side wall? It makes my molded parts look cheap. BTW, what you see there is probably the pixel grid from the Form 4’s rather low-res screen. Form 2 or Form 3 don’t have that issue as they still used galvos with almost unlimited XY resolution.
I’m sorry to be so blunt, but to me, the Form 4 feels like you gave up on the high-quality tech and became another copycat. Quality matches a $500 machine. So you’d need $3k+ of discounts to get me to consider a Form 4.
