Formlabs Form 4 3D Printer Beats Injection Molding Machine in Speed and Quality [video]

Form 3 owner here.<p>- What is the material in each process?<p>- What is the price per unit when accounting for materials?<p>- If the material is not a Form proprietary mix, does the cost of the printers include the Open Platform license cost? [0]<p>- What post-processing is required to wash and cure the printed pieces?<p>- How many human hours are required in the washing &#x2F; curing of the pieces from each method?<p>- What is the dimensional stability over time of pieces from each method? EG, do the Form printed pieces shrink over time when exposed to UV as resin typically does? As such is it appropriate for use outside of the UV protected print chamber?<p>Frustrated with our Form 3 after a year and having consistently gotten excellent results out of our little Elegoo Mars for five years, we purchased an Elegoo Saturn. It runs between 3 - 5x as fast and has less partially cured resin in our complex lattice (jewelry) pieces. The materials are half the price. And the printer itself was 1&#x2F;4 the price.<p>Their proprietary PreForm slicer has -some- features that are better than ChiTuBox.<p>But all in all, at 1&#x2F;5th the cost, I wonder how fast you could print the same number of pieces with the equivalent (+&#x2F;- 20) Saturns. Or, factoring in the $4,499 of the Form 4 and the $6k price of Open Platform for the Form 3, how many you could produce with the 52 Saturns you could by for the same amount...<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;formlabs.com&#x2F;materials&#x2F;open-platform&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;formlabs.com&#x2F;materials&#x2F;open-platform&#x2F;</a>

All kinds of pessimism in the comments of course. Obviously they are different processes with different tradeoffs. But there are a <i>growing</i> number of applications where 3D printing is the better choice. But it&#x27;s interesting that the video didn&#x27;t even highlight the 6 week tooling lead time or the cost of the tooling! How many more batches or different parts could they have done in that 6 weeks time, or adding more printers with the saved cost? Hardware companies and manufacturers can and will get creative with their mix of production methods and scheduling options available to them.

So 500 cycles on the injection moulding machine and 42 across the 4 3D printers. Yes, this is super impressive; yes, if I wanted &lt;1,000 of something I am probably going 3D printer (cheaper, more flexible, less lead time) but it is still 50 times slower.

Even when ignoring the per-part cost, are the parts even the same material? Looking same != Being same. Not sure what Formlabs is trying to prove here.

Isn&#x27;t the big downside to SLA prints that they have terrible structural integrity? Like worse than FDM prints?

Speed... OK, maybe, with a small&#x2F;slow enough injection machine. Quality, maybe, especially for parts that aren&#x27;t structural. Price? No fucking way.

I&#x27;ve had white plastic SLA prints (not Formlabs afaik) go very yellow in less than a few months, curious if this is common with white photosensitive resins vs plastic you might get injection moulded?

They’re ignoring the time to cure and process resin prints though so doesn’t seem all that fair.

This is borderline flag-worthy material (the post). Two main things missing:<p>- What other commenters have pointed out already: Post processing time for the 3D printed parts (as an aside: the quality of a 3D printed would never match that of an injection molded part).<p>- That the injection mold&#x27;s mold in an ideal setup for such a small part would have multiple units per mold, thus with each injection one could produce 10+ parts of this small part shown in the video.<p>Obviously, 3D printing has its own advantages over injection molding as well. But for mass production of highly-repeatable parts (eg: not highly-customizable (&quot;made to order&quot;) items such as dental related, or shoe insole related, for which 3D printing works well in mass production), plastic injection molding beats 3D printing hands down.

Am I misunderstanding? They’re no longer using lasers but LCD?!

Is the injection molding machine just doing one part per shot?

<i>eyeroll</i> this is a part that&#x27;s extremely well suited to being printed quickly with an SLA printer (flat), and it feels like next to no effort was put into optimizing the injection molding. We have long been in a situation where you can construct a race where 3D printing makes sense, but the way this is framed is disingenuous as hell.

I&#x27;ve been 3d printing molds on a sla printer and making injection molded parts on my injection molding machines. A much better approach

But it&#x27;s still an order or magnitude higher material cost