Formlabs is one of the successful stories that changed the world of additive manufacturing by bringing SLA resin 3D to the desktop market at an affordable price. The company has announced the launch of the latest additions to its range, the Form 4 and its medical-and-dental-use 4B version. The new Form 4 has ditched the resin-blasting lasers to provide better impressive print speeds.
Formlabs has featured a custom LCD technology inside Form 4’s Low Force Display (LFD) print engine giving it the ability to print two to five times faster than the Form 3 Plus.
A lot of manufacturers have recently turned laser-based SLA to DLP or LCD as these optical systems can improve print speed. In contrast, they also often had to pay at the cost of surface finish, hardware longevity, reliability, or resolution.
Formlabs claimed that Form 4 can address these challenges while delivering speed, reliability, and part quality in a single printer. LFD offers a lot of cutting-edge functions, including a backlight unit, release texture, integrated camera, and light processing unit. Not only that, but it also comes with significant improvements, the 3D printer manufacturer provides updates to the flexible film tank, resin cartridge, automatic resin handling, and intelligent control systems.
LFD light engine also can cure resin and a series of new faster curing resins. Speed is greatly increased up to 100mm per hour vertically, most prints can be completed in less than 2 hours. Moreover, the Form 4 can spit out more and larger parts than its predecessor with 30 percent more build volume and 19 percent more build area, making parts 10.7 inches long, compared to 8.8 inches previously.
It’s not only integrated with the 5-megapixel camera to monitor prints and generate timelapse videos but also a larger seven-inch touchscreen and Gigabit Ethernet. Additionally, Wi-Fi 5 is up from Wi-Fi 4, and USB-C replaces USB-B.
Apart from the new printers, Formlabs also introduced six new resins to its resin library, including four newly reformulated General Purpose Resins, a Precision Model Resin for highly accurate dental models, and the last is Fast Model Resin used for high-speed prototypes and orthodontic model production.
