Formlabs Forum Community,
Join us LIVE on YouTube March 24th for a virtual keynote. We have some big news on hardware, materials, and software releases that you’ll want to hear first-hand!
When: March 24th 9am EDT
Where: live on YouTube
Any guesses?? : )
SLS related?
That would be my guess with their recent acquisition of Micronics
I was thinking it would take a while longer to get a product out of that merger.
Maybe, but Micronics technically had functioning units (that I tried to buy…), but got acquired by Formlabs before they shipped out to all of the backers.
I followed them closely but did not partake in the kickstarter. Their printer did not seem ready for prime time in my view, but maybe in the several months at formlabs they have worked the bugs out.
i’m gonna guess new larger format (or faster) model - Form5… why else did the Form4 get a big price drop a few weeks back? 
@Davidwedge, the bigger version of the 4 is the 4L unless you mean something in between. I’m also not sure if they can go much larger than the 4L with an upside down approach because gravity will pull those heavy prints off the build platform at some point.
My serious hope is either a significantly cheaper SLS machine or a larger version. A metal based one would be cool as well, but I don’t think they’re there yet.
Well i would guess a new smaller sls printer.
Happy announcement day everyone!! Join the YouTube keynote happening now!! 
We’ve already heard from Max about Tough 1500 v2 our toughest material yet, and now Kyle, head of SLA Hardware is telling us about Cure 2!!
Great announcement, are there any plans to expand on resin colors? We’ve been very successful using 1500 and 2000, but several customers ask for 1500 natural and 2000 black.
Considering 1500 mimics PP and most items made of this material are natural color it makes sense.
And well ABS is black for like 90% automotive applications.
Thanks for the feedback @Mario_Martinez, we’ve passed this request to our Materials team!
Love this, thank you!
SLS:
While I do appreciate the newer and better resins, it seems the Form 3/3L people get left out yet again. First it was significant pricing reduction and now we don’t even get the potentially better resins. It would be nice to have a way to use the newer resins on the older printers.
As a Form 2 and Form 3L owner, I feel very disappointed and would like to see a little love especially since the Form 3L was very expensive at launch.
The easiest way to pave the way and to get rid of old machines is leaving them useless because the materials are not available anymore. You either upgrade to F4 or are left behind.
I get that companies want people to move to newer products, but the Form 3 lineup isn’t that old and the wavelength for curing is very close if not the same so it seems like it should be doable. This just seems anti-consumer of them when people have spent thousands of dollars already on their products.
Yup it sucks, but the F3 family was a big failure slow, producing less detailed parts than F2, not able to compensate tolerances easily etc etc. Also the division created between 3 and 3B for dental purpouses locking in users to less materials or paying extra for a full unlocked machine and even more for an OMM.
Now F4 is “blazing fast” but just as fast as any other LCD/DLP machine available, of course you have to tinker with material parameters and slicing can be a pain in the ass using chitubox. The great thing about ecosystems is they just work most of the time, but they are more expensive. I guess time will tell if leaving behind thousands of users with brick machines was the best choice, aftermarket resins are available but you got to be ready to test and waste material/tanks etc.
I’ll be the odd one out here and say that the Form 3 ecosystem has been around for ~5 years now. That’s actually pretty long considering how fast additive is changing…so although it sucks, I think it does make business sense to have some newer resins that don’t work with the previous tech.
It does suck though that these older machines are now really difficult to sell and are so obsolete though 
I am struggling to find a home for my 3B and 3L.
I realize that I’m not the target market: low volume, small parts, and care more about accuracy than speed. I’m still using a form2 that still works fine, has a good variety of compatible resins, and I have a reprogrammable cartridge for playing around with 3rd party resins (and open mode if I really want to experiment). But it would still be nice to be able to use newer materials if the laser wavelength is close enough, and the other parameters don’t exceed the capability of the machine.
You may not be the target audience, but I feel like there’s a good portion of users such as myself who don’t want to be forced into a new machine if their current ones are still good enough for their purposes.
And I feel like there is a slight disconnect for users such as @leonhart88 who seem to make quite a bit from their printers and can probably justify getting new ones. Also, he is an ambassador and does get a little bit of different treatment like some of the other businesses that get to test out equipment early etc.
There is nothing wrong with this, but I’d like people to try and see it more from your average consumer’s perspective and realize constantly updating and paying high prices on consumables is not really practical. It’s also become ever more evident that Formlabs has shifted their focus on these big money makers rather than the average consumer.