Formlabs brings professional resin printing down to $699
Formlabs Studio 1 $699 Resin Printer
Formlabs' Form Studio 1 is a $699 MSLA resin printer aimed at anyone who wants professional-grade output at home. It prints most parts in under two hours with fine detail, includes Open Material Mode for third-party resins, and pairs with Alpha Resins and an optional VOC Extractor to become the first resin printer with UL GREENGUARD certification for low emissions. A 5.9-liter build volume and a wash-and-cure combo round out the workflow.
Form Studio 1 is the first affordable, professional-grade resin 3D printer with a powerful, long-lasting print engine and an open platform.
- pen2l
Formlabs uses a proprietary resin cartridge... it's the paper printers situation all over again, the printers themselves are not that expensive but the disposable ink costs an arm and a leg.
Don't go with Formlabs, support any of the open-platform alternatives.
And also, be aware that these printers require some serious development work (you need solvent to wash away uncured resin (if you ask me, this basically necessitates a chemical hood... Formlabs will happily upsell the "Form Wash" for this for another 699). If uncured resin falls on your floor (which has happened to me a little too many times), boy is it a horror cleaning it up even if you have industrial grade solvents; FDM printers are easier and their "ink" is much, much less expensive by comparison.
- RantyDave
I have a resin printer (elegoo mars 2p) and have done a number of small "production" runs of things that don't really matter.
I have to say that it is the biggest pain in the arse thing I even own. While the prints come out "good", I find that dimensional accuracy is often really not good at all; and that the whole rinse in isopropyl, finish in the sun process is just a sticky, irritating, and probably carcinogenic drag.
And I can't imagine why USD700 is regarded as a bargain.
So this has served as a fine reminder - I need to sell this damn thing, it just takes up space.
- regretsresin
You don't want a resin printer. They are nasty, chemically, they require you to set up a "hot zone", you need ppe, venting is really important. When your print works good, you still have to wash it and then cure it. Changing colors ids like a whole event.
FDM printers are amazing now. Strongly recommend an FDM printer.
- rfrey
This thing is all over YouTube, they really backed up the truck to the Influencer Club and started handing out the goods. Lots of people I like and respect have showcased it, like Applied Science, Jeff Geerling, among others.
But although there's a lot of discussion about how large a discount this is from FormLab's 8 billion dollar printers, there is absolutely NO comparison that I can find to other brands! OK, it's a cheaper Bentley - but how does it compare to the Toyota or Honda that we can get down the street? There are loads of options with --on paper-- better specs for half this price or less.
- nikkwong
I'm in the market for a new resin printer (I have a bunch of old ones) and no idea why I would buy this/why this is an improvement off my current printer based on what is presented on the marketing pages. Pass. I didn't buy the prusa resin printer but at least they were really good at communicating what the actual value was for folk who already have resin printers. This just seems like it's aimed at SLA novices
- vl
This page really needs to explain what is “resin printer” and why would I need it. I have no idea how is it different from my regular 3D printer.
- jborichevskiy
Jeff Geerling has a great video about this printer that got me up to speed on resin printing as well - coming from the 3d printing world I'm stoked to see the price dropping but it also seems like a lot more hassle to me at this stage
- karlfrohlich
Man how the prices have fallen from the early days. I recall the one my lab had in college was >10k (>20k even?)