- What is the material in each process?
- What is the price per unit when accounting for materials?
- If the material is not a Form proprietary mix, does the cost of the printers include the Open Platform license cost? [0]
- What post-processing is required to wash and cure the printed pieces?
- How many human hours are required in the washing / curing of the pieces from each method?
- 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?
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 1/4 the price.
Their proprietary PreForm slicer has -some- features that are better than ChiTuBox.
But all in all, at 1/5th the cost, I wonder how fast you could print the same number of pieces with the equivalent (+/- 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...
My comparisons are against my own printer, anycubic photon mono. I can get a new printer with the same price of a bottle of formlabs material :)
The Form 4 Open Platform pricing is still "TBD," and given the two licenses for the Form 3 differ by $3k, it makes me shudder to think what they'd charge for their newest toy
I also was trying to understand what that license gives you: is it removing the DRM from their printers to allow non-OEM materials?
Yep - that's it! Well, in order to do so I imagine they also have to give you an unlocked version of PreForm (their proprietary slicer) because a lot of settings that we have control over in ChiTuBox are hidden behind just the presets for the material selection.
Isn't it 3d printing end to end from idea to existing faster than injection molding for smaller runs?
Isn't the entire point of this video that for a 1000 part sample 3D printing/Injection molding run time were actually more comparable than one might think?
Yes, 3d printing is vastly faster if you measure the time for me to get a part from the machine on my desk vs ordering a mold and shipping the results from Shenzhen. But that was true of the Form 3 et al. The speed of the printer makes no real difference, and they are bing disingenuous in suggesting it is approaching the throughput of the machine they are comparing it to.
The resins are also getting cheaper too, It looks like they are using the new Black V5 which costs a third less per liter than Black V4 from their last printer.
And the strength of the output is highly dependent on the material for both printers. The typical resin is extremely brittle, but rather heat resistant. But you can get flexible or tough material which are both less brittle but also less rigid.
So to answer your question: not necessarily :) nylon-like SLA materials are pretty good for usable everyday items if you don't mind the slight fidelity losses (still better than FDM)
But I can safely assume that they're using much better machines, materials, and processes than I have access to.
As always depends on the material, I think the glass filled ones are better, the flexible ones are a little worse but it has never been an issue for me.
A full accounting and comparison of cost and time including post processing, in a general way that applies to many parts, is tough to do well.
Given the costs, I'm surprised they didn't do more printers, too.
- 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).
- That the injection mold'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.
Obviously, 3D printing has its own advantages over injection molding as well. But for mass production of highly-repeatable parts (eg: not highly-customizable ("made to order") 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.
The material you get out of such a printer is of course entirely different from an injection molded part.
