The Form 2 can also use cartridges to refill the printer’s resin tank while it’s printing, which helps solve one of the biggest problems in desktop 3D printing: losing a print because the printing process stopped part of the way through.
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The Form 2 is now available for purchase directly from Formlabs for $3,499.
Lobovsky and the company’s head of global marketing Colin Raney shared that the Form 2 printer will let commercial businesses produce items faster and at a much larger scale (this did happen to be a trend pundits have been on the lookout for). Existing Formlabs customers will get a slight discount, at least.
Of course, it’s the internals and intangibles that really matter. We believe that this is the “next wave” of the 3D printing industry: “high resolution output with a simple user experience packaged in a desktop footprint”, said Max Lobovsky, co-founder of Formlabs.
Formlabs isn’t alone in the marketplace as it competes with MakerBot, Carbon3D, 3D Systems (which sued Formlabs in 2014), and others.
“What we are trying to do is give people a tool that they can rely on just like a 2D printer or laser cutter”, Lakatos says. In addition to settings, you can now also initiate prints directly from the machine. There are any number of reasons as to why 3D printers never quite achieved the two-cars-in-every-garage phase; Raney, for his part, offers a brief history of 3D printing. They take digital content and make it physical in a 3D space. “The Form 2 represents the next wave of 3D printing technology”. You know, the desktop peripheral that you access with a quick tap of Command+P, so ubiquitous that it is absurd to think that 3D evangelists prognosticated that an underwhelming ABS extruder could ever be almost as widely adopted.
Without a doubt, the most annoying part about SLA printing is dealing with the photopolymer resin that it uses to print. It’s incredibly sticky, and tends to get all over the place if you’re not careful.
On the user-friendliness front, a colour touchscreen is provided for managing print jobs, and an intuitive interface is promised with the PreForm software that boasts features such as 1-click print to make the whole print process as easy as possible.
Consumer-level 3D printing is still in its infancy, and one of the missing links is bringing more of those industrial capabilities to the desktop.
Formlabs has always gone after professional designers, engineers, and architects, not hobbyists.
Now that the 3D-printing market has matured a bit, with everyone from amateur artists to fashion designers using the technology, the company is presenting the next generation of its easy-to-use device: the Form 2. “Where you can print it 30 seconds before a meeting, grab it, and don’t even need to check it”. The company first started offering printers on the funding site Kickstarter in 2012.
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Whew. That’s a lot of new and improved, but the real step forward here is making this scifi piece of tech actually usable.
