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At Creator Warehouse, we like using printers with a lot of detail, but one of the downsides

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is they're really slow. The Form 4 from Form Labs claims it can solve that problem by having most prints done in

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less than two hours. Let's open it up and find out.

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Getting first eyes on this? It looks super sleek, and it's pretty simple packaging.

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Inside it is just the printer, some cables, resin tank, and a resin mixer.

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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

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resin, which we're going to be printing with today. And it's been a week.

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Unfortunately, the first printer we got sent had a crack in the back of the cover, so we

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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.

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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

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across the tank. This printer has a built-in accelerometer or gyroscope that helps you level it.

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Next up is putting the resin tank in. Slots in, and they have two little retention clips on the sides.

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We are looking at the mixer, put up the clip, slide it in, and click the laver to lift up,

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slide in, and lock into place.

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Next up, putting in the resin, take it out of the bag and slide it into the receptacle.

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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.

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It's pretty straightforward to use for especially their SLA printers, and it does most of the

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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.

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Their slicer is quite good at generating supports to make them easy to remove, and also very

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sufficient for holding your parts sturdy enough while they're printing.

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So for the selector, you can see there's a bunch around the outside edge, and then a

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whole bunch of internal supports to support overhanging features.

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I located these specifically because I cared about the outer surfaces more.

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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

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more. All right, now that we've got everything sliced up, let's send it over to the printer

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and get it started.

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Printer finished up. Let's take a look. Oh, it's so clean.

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Look how clear it is. Wow.

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Yeah. Is this a new one? Yeah, this is a new one.

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It's very expensive. Holy. Can I just touch it?

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No. See you're wearing gloves. Yeah.

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Do not touch. The resins are not great to just handle. Is it done being cured or no?

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No. I wouldn't like stick your head in it. Right.

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Like I was doing before that you let me do. Some safety committee got me there.

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Got them. Looks pretty clean.

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Still have some washing and curing to do, so I'm going to take this off there and we'll

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see you after. And we're back with some cleaned up parts.

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So we have our 3X selector, our 3X end cap, and I threw a handle on just for good measure

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as well. Looking at the parts initially, they look great.

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The top surface is like a mirror.

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It's crazy. Taking a look at the rest of the parts, even on the side faces, it's pretty smooth.

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I know you can actually fully polish these parts and I took a little bit of a buffing

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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

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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,

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which are kind of annoying to get off, but if you have the patience and some sandpaper

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and scraping, it's definitely doable. But overall, the clarity of the clear resin that Form Labs has is wild, and the print

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time is pretty spectacular too. For the two of these, it was around two and a half hours total, and then for the handle,

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we were looking more like three, which for a part this big is really quick.

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All in all, the parts that came out are super clear, look amazing, and fit together like

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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.

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The printer starts at $4,500 US, but to make full use of the system and be able to work

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with it nicely, you're going to need to spend closer to $6,600 to get a curing station and

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a wash station. You can make do with just the printer and have everything else done manually by you,

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but it's going to be a lot of extra work and a lot of extra cleanup.

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Working with the cure and wash stations makes it a lot easier, faster, and safer to work

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with these resins. Having used Form Labs printers before and now this one, it's definitely a useful tool

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for the top end prosumer and lower level professional use.

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You would end up making pretty good use of a printer like this, both for video production

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and for product development in the creative warehouse side. As a single individual, it's a bit of a tough sell.

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Thanks for watching this ShortCircuit. If you liked this and wanted to see another really fast printer, check out our video on

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the Prusa Mark 4S.