At Creator Warehouse, we like using printers with a lot of detail, but one of the downsides
is they're really slow. The Form 4 from Form Labs claims it can solve that problem by having most prints done in
less than two hours. Let's open it up and find out.
Getting first eyes on this? It looks super sleek, and it's pretty simple packaging.
Inside it is just the printer, some cables, resin tank, and a resin mixer.
Some other things they sent us were some of their resins. We have a black V5, an elastic 50A, which is almost like a rubber, and then a clear
resin, which we're going to be printing with today. And it's been a week.
Unfortunately, the first printer we got sent had a crack in the back of the cover, so we
had to get it swapped out. The RMA was super easy through Form Labs, and they got it to us within three or four days.
For resin printers, you want to make sure that they're level. The main reason for that is so that the thickness of resin that you're dealing with is consistent
across the tank. This printer has a built-in accelerometer or gyroscope that helps you level it.
Next up is putting the resin tank in. Slots in, and they have two little retention clips on the sides.
We are looking at the mixer, put up the clip, slide it in, and click the laver to lift up,
slide in, and lock into place.
Next up, putting in the resin, take it out of the bag and slide it into the receptacle.
I just went through and confirmed that all of the internals are ready to go. Here we're looking at Preform, which is Form Labs' slicing software.
It's pretty straightforward to use for especially their SLA printers, and it does most of the
work for you, which is pretty nice. All right, I've got the two parts in. I will just have it auto-generate the supports for me.
Their slicer is quite good at generating supports to make them easy to remove, and also very
sufficient for holding your parts sturdy enough while they're printing.
So for the selector, you can see there's a bunch around the outside edge, and then a
whole bunch of internal supports to support overhanging features.
I located these specifically because I cared about the outer surfaces more.
Preform naturally, orients them in a slightly different way. You can kind of massage things around depending on what parts of your part you care about
more. All right, now that we've got everything sliced up, let's send it over to the printer
and get it started.
Printer finished up. Let's take a look. Oh, it's so clean.
Look how clear it is. Wow.
Yeah. Is this a new one? Yeah, this is a new one.
It's very expensive. Holy. Can I just touch it?
No. See you're wearing gloves. Yeah.
Do not touch. The resins are not great to just handle. Is it done being cured or no?
No. I wouldn't like stick your head in it. Right.
Like I was doing before that you let me do. Some safety committee got me there.
Got them. Looks pretty clean.
Still have some washing and curing to do, so I'm going to take this off there and we'll
see you after. And we're back with some cleaned up parts.
So we have our 3X selector, our 3X end cap, and I threw a handle on just for good measure
as well. Looking at the parts initially, they look great.
The top surface is like a mirror.
It's crazy. Taking a look at the rest of the parts, even on the side faces, it's pretty smooth.
I know you can actually fully polish these parts and I took a little bit of a buffing
wheel to parts of the handle. I didn't want to spend too, too much time on it, but it was able to get a pretty good
mirror finish even on the side. Some of the normal things you do have to deal with for SLA is all of the attachment points,
which are kind of annoying to get off, but if you have the patience and some sandpaper
and scraping, it's definitely doable. But overall, the clarity of the clear resin that Form Labs has is wild, and the print
time is pretty spectacular too. For the two of these, it was around two and a half hours total, and then for the handle,
we were looking more like three, which for a part this big is really quick.
All in all, the parts that came out are super clear, look amazing, and fit together like
I'd expect from a printer like this. The last thing to talk about for this printer is the price, and they are not cheap.
The printer starts at $4,500 US, but to make full use of the system and be able to work
with it nicely, you're going to need to spend closer to $6,600 to get a curing station and
a wash station. You can make do with just the printer and have everything else done manually by you,
but it's going to be a lot of extra work and a lot of extra cleanup.
Working with the cure and wash stations makes it a lot easier, faster, and safer to work
with these resins. Having used Form Labs printers before and now this one, it's definitely a useful tool
for the top end prosumer and lower level professional use.
You would end up making pretty good use of a printer like this, both for video production
and for product development in the creative warehouse side. As a single individual, it's a bit of a tough sell.
Thanks for watching this ShortCircuit. If you liked this and wanted to see another really fast printer, check out our video on
the Prusa Mark 4S.