I’m with Rebel about the Siraya Tech Blu resins… I’ve found them to be really good and easy to print. I keep them above 30C for printing, but I accomplish that with a cheap barrel fermentation warmer wrapped around the resin vat in the printer.
1 Like
I also mixed touchpoint sizes…glad you pointed that out.
When I did a Google search on a printer listed above, a page on the manufacturer’s site came up with a list of a heck of a lot of third-party resins and what settings you could use. Impressive.
I’ve used several third-party castable resins, and I spoke with one of those companies yesterday about the possibility of becoming “certified” by Formlabs on the Form 4. Their biggest concern was the high price of Formlabs’ printers, which results in a significantly smaller market when compared to other brands. They already have a good business model, and it sounds like they’re unsure about adding complexity with a seemingly small payoff.
Interesting to hear your experience. I am very intrigued and may very well buy a Saturn 4 Ultra to do some comparisons of my own.
I run a rapid prototyping service (amongst other things), so like you, I am always printing different parts, geometries and resins.
On the Formlabs machines, I’m always running at the same touchpoint sizes (0.3mm for softer materials and 0.4mm for harder ones). The only thing I ever tweak are support locations. I will generally not bother with auto generation and add supports manually. Once you have stepped through enough layers in Preform you gain a very strong knowledge of what you can get away with and Preform is extremely conservative. Post processing for me is the step that I hate the most, so I will routinely push boundaries and spend a lot of time up front placing and optimizing supports.
The fact that I am able to maintain the same support sizes throughout geometries makes me wonder if the peel forces are actually a bit better on Formlabs machines…or at least more consistent. I suppose we will never know unless I throw load cells onto printers to do a proper quantitative experiment, which perhaps I might end up doing in the end if I get the Elegoo machine 
1 Like
If you do it, I hope you let us know!
1 Like
Count me in for wanting to know about the touchpoints, also!
I hate to say that today I started looking at other options because of the open materials fees. I’m the original Formlabs fangirl, and it pains me to even think that thought. I know a rep said there might be some upcoming resin announcements, but I feel extremely betrayed and the past two days have completely rocked my trust. After years of fantastic user experience, I’m baffled and disheartened.
Here are my suggestions:
-
Charge a smaller Open Materials License fee. Something like $250 per machine. I might even go as high as $500, but at $5,000 ($4,499 + $500), I could buy TEN of another company’s decent-quality printer. Third-party slicers have come a long way in the past seven or eight years…this used to be a Formlabs advantage, but after downloading three other slicers today, I’m surprised how much more user-friendly they seem than in the past. And a pro version of one of them is $169 a year…totally fair.
-
Have different levels of material licensing fees. YOU’VE ALWAYS BEEN ABLE TO SEE HOW MUCH WE PRINT, so use that data to determine whether someone is a high-volume, commercial operation or a hobbyist. I personally haven’t printed in over two years because life got in the way…but was gearing up to start printing again. I’m small potatoes…not a big research university or large casting house with unlimited resources. I’m just Kat…bought a Formlabs printer to understand the process so I could be a better CAD instructor and recommend appropriate printing technology for my students.
-
A subscription model based on how much we actually print. Seriously…you want to put all users in the same bucket? You KNOW our industries, and you know how much we print.
-
If you think we’re going to “ruin our printers” by using third-party resins, EDUCATE US. Or have a disclaimer. Hell, I’m trusted to use Full Self Driving on my Tesla…Tesla puts up a dialog box and you agree to their terms. Easy peasy.
-
Partner with a reputable castable resin company with a PROVEN track record. It’s time for a NEW resin that produces reliable results. And can we drop the price of the castable resins to something more in line with the industry? Formlabs used us as guinea pigs and beta testers for YEARS, putting out resins that cost a lot of us a lot of time and a LOT of money. Forgive me for feeling bitter about now being banned from using resins that were much easier and consistent after spending thousands of dollars on resin, tanks, casting investment, and precious metals. I thought we had a partnership here.
-
Get us a list of resins that will be on the list. Surely you’ve been talking to companies and know who’s on board. Without that information, we can’t make an informed decision. I’d also like to see a resin MANUFACTURER certified, so if they quit making a resin and have a new version, we aren’t left out in the cold. Is Formlabs going to charge them to be “certified” also? You should try to make it easier for them in order to provide a better experience for your customers.
-
Publish REAL WORLD burnout schedules for the Formlabs castable resins in several different casting situations, including burnout schedules and recommendations for accessible casting machines such as the Kaya-Cast.
-
Have an ACTUAL CONVERSATION or focus group with your customers about their concerns and how they feel about this. It’s obviously from reading this thread and the jewelry forums that people are not exclusively using Formlabs printers. Has your marketing department ever asked WHY? This short-sighted thinking is reminiscent of freshly-minted MBA decision-making. Like when Dell decided it would be more cost-effective to have their highly paid employees take their own trash out to a centralized dumpster to save a few bucks. As we say in the US, “penny-wise but pound foolish.”
I’d welcome other suggestions. Off soapbox.
2 Likes
@Gary_Cairns yep still here! Try not to get in the way of good conversation. Where do you want more Formlabs presence on the forums?
My trusty F2 is near the end of its life, but I am not so sure if I will be considering another FL printer. I love the workflow, but I am so fed up with the error messages. No cartridge when there clearly is a cartridge, no tank when there is a tank, and the endless resin sensor errors. I really wonder if FL has been looking at the needs of its users. And the unblock fee is scandalous.
1 Like
I must agree, I have the same problems with my F3 at times. As for the F4 there are so many other options for this kind of printer now.
I’ve been looking at two possibilities that are very much like an F4. One of these has cartridges, much the same as FL and the other will take anyone’s resin. The high price of resin is one of the biggest problems with really using your FL printer to its fullest. If the printer resin was priced the same as most other commercial and hobby resins, then it would be viable to print and sell the prints on. The possible speed of the printer is great, you can fill the whole of the available space with items to print. It takes no longer to print one item than it will to print many. This becomes commercially viable, but only if the resin’s are priced more reasonably.
2 Likes
Flutelab, we have made huge progress on those erroneous error messages
- improving sensor systems to make them more reliable. For example, moving the cartridge and tank ID system to an RFID system that has no issues with electrical contacts and the resin height system to an ultrasonic sensor that is more accurate and robust than either the F2 or F3 system
- Making as many error messages as possible easily skippable
Build platforms that are not installed, mismatching tanks and cartridges, etc cause lots of failures on other systems. That’s why we include these sensors. We didn’t get them perfectly right on Form 2, but we have improved significantly over the generations and now they work as you expect.
1 Like
I have a FL3+ and an Elegoo Jupiter.
All I need for set up on the FL is level the printer.
With the EJ I need to level the printer, level the print plate by moving the plate up and down until it strikes the tank surface within a paper thickness , add an air filter, connect an exhaust hose, add a support at the top to support the vertical lifter., hope the resin bottle fills the tank, get the slicer program to properly support the model with at least 50 different settings that vary with the type of resin.
the FL is more expensive, but that’s the price for ease of use,
1 Like
curious if the prices are different in different countries or is it a set priced by formlabs ,for the form 4? i live in Israel and its priced nearly double the prices compared to any other market
Would love to know that Formlabs is actually LISTENING to its users…it’s not just about errors, for me it’s the SCANDALOUS (thanks, @Flutelab for the perfect word) fees to use third party resins. I’ve always used standard FL resins, but the castable resins are not good and way too expensive. But to charge us to use Open Mode? I like the ease of use, but for the price of the Form 4, I can get an awesome new MacBook M3 Max, M4 iPad with 2TB drive, AND DLP resin printer that allows me to use any resin I want. When I start looking at it that way, it’s hard to make a case for an upgraded Form 4.
I’ll follow BlueCast…if BlueCast is not one of the “certified” resins, that’s it for me. I’m moving on. But I honestly don’t want to start testing resins again. I did way too much of that with Formlabs over four formulations.
I guess Formlabs has made its decision and is focusing on dentists and universities with big budgets.
Hi Gary! Just wanted to update you that we’ve launched our Form 4 Loyalty Upgrade Program!
I guess the initial sales figures haven’t been what formlabs has wanted. And seeing the recent revised (for the worst) packaging on the resin that I’m receiving I’m wondering if the company isn’t doing the best financially right now.
Going to wait this launch out and see what happens in a few months if I want to bother swapping out my form 3s rather than being first in line this time.
1 Like
@Gary_Cairns what do you think is worse about the updated material packaging? It uses space better, uses less plastic, fills the tank faster. Would love to hear your thoughts.
On loyalty upgrade – we have done it for every one of our products so far. Took a bit longer to get it out this time.
I’m talking about the outer packaging of the form 2 and 3 cartridges. The last one that I received leaked not only out of the cartridge and all over the inside of the plastic bag but outside of that too making quite the mess when I opened the parcel. Mainly due to the fact that there’s no longer a piece of foam protecting the dispensor nozzle, the plastic bag the cartridge is in is much cheaper and easier to rip and the box itself is significantly less stiff and made of much poorer quality cardboard.
1 Like
I cannot use the new packaging to store unused partially filed cartridges.
1 Like
@Gary_Cairns that’s not the experience we want you to have. Passed this feedback onto our manufacturing team. Our material production has increased quite a lot in the past couple years and made several upgrades to how we package (think lots of automation). We test packaging decisions individually (for example foam insert) before we change and ship them. But a leaky cartridge is what we exactly want to avoid so I make sure the right folks see this feedback internally.
If you haven’t yet please contact support / DM me to make sure we make this right (get you a replacement cartridge).
Those are all great, but what about Open Mode licensing fees? I’m about to buy two different printers that allow me to use 3rd party resins…at this point I can’t justify a Form 4 because of the extra fee to use non-Formlabs castable resins.
Still feeling betrayed. I will pay extra for Formlabs quality, but I refuse to pay thousands more for an Open Material license. It is unnecessary in this day and age and just plain greedy.
The brand new iPad M4 I just bought has way more features than the one I bought three years ago, at the same price. Technology over time generally gives more features at the same price, of the price comes down. This is unheard of.
How about a free Open Materials License as a loyalty reward? It costs Formlabs nothing. It is literally the only thing stopping me from upgrading.