"What are you getting to justify the massively higher price?"
In my opinion, Formlabs is all about convenience. The fact that you can directly drop the build platform into the form wash is just so much nicer than having to directly fiddle with skin-irritating chemicals.
That said, my Form 2 is pretty low on speed, rather mediocre on reliability, and I keep having issues with it locking me out of the DRM-ed cartridges because the build quality of the valve motor is apparently rather bad. The printer thinks its dispensing resin while in reality it's not - because the motor is too weak - and then it thinks I drained 3L out of a 1L cartridge and it'll turn on DRM nag mode.
That said, the quality of the resulting prints is still insane. With a tiny bit of sanding you have parts that look like injection molding. I have never seen anyone get even close with FDM-ed prints. The transparency of prints is also so good, people sometimes think it's glass.
That’s more of an argument for resin prints in general over FDM, nothing specific to Formlabs offerings.
I have used both Form 2 in the past and now use Anycubic Photon line (one of the cheap Chinese brands). Main differences I noticed is
- Form software like the slicer is nicer and more polished and more features
- Support is obviously better with the Formlabs printer
- The Siraya resin I use in the anycubic ranges from anywhere of 1/4 to 1/8 the price of the equivalent proprietary DRM’ed Formlabs resin
- The end results of the two printers are mostly equivalent for my use case
- If you ruin something in the printer it’s a lot cheaper to replace it in the Anycubic.
In the end for my use case the Anycubic is way better value, but I could see for a business without in house expertise the support of Formlabs is probably a better pick.
In my opinion, Formlabs is all about convenience. The fact that you can directly drop the build platform into the form wash is just so much nicer than having to directly fiddle with skin-irritating chemicals.
That said, my Form 2 is pretty low on speed, rather mediocre on reliability, and I keep having issues with it locking me out of the DRM-ed cartridges because the build quality of the valve motor is apparently rather bad. The printer thinks its dispensing resin while in reality it's not - because the motor is too weak - and then it thinks I drained 3L out of a 1L cartridge and it'll turn on DRM nag mode.
That said, the quality of the resulting prints is still insane. With a tiny bit of sanding you have parts that look like injection molding. I have never seen anyone get even close with FDM-ed prints. The transparency of prints is also so good, people sometimes think it's glass.