Saying the quiet part out loud ... the terrible business and engineering choices of the world of SLA/DLP/MSLA resin 3D printing

by Brian Carnes

?So, I love the idea of democratizing the process of making a creative thing into a customer useable product with #3Dprinting.? But if you are thinking of going down that road or if you are a company in the 3D printer space that wants to make the world a better place here is some things that are not talked about enough.? This is my rant on what makes trying to print end user parts from resin with 3D printing very annoying.

There are essentially two silos in 3D printing…??? Makers and Commercial.?? Commercial started as enterprise class uber expensive SLA machines designed for “prototyping” because in the intellectually stunted world of big business, globalization, and massively over producing everything with injection plastics. It is the "only" way to go. With that being the established normal. these printers are mostly expensive ideation and prototyping tools.?? The machines are too expensive to scale and use overpriced materials often with less than stellar materials properties.

The “Makers” on the flip side are being sold supposed "desktop printers" but sold printers that assume a hobbyists who supposedly want to tune and tweak everything all the time,? Because makers have far more creativity then most enterprises, there are loads of hardware and material choices, more open source, more open material support etc.? The odd thing is that these super 3D printer "enthusiast" hobbyists are an extremely small albeit very vocal portion of the market actually buying these maker/consumer/prosumer class printers. MOST people buy a printer because they already have a hobby or business to fill their time, and the printer is to facilitate that.

? Without having hard data to back it up but by sheer observation I’d argue MOST of the market for the printers being targeted at these hobbyists are either consumers who just want to print models (and don’t want to spend all day figuring out or tuning the printers or materials) or small business owners, who need a printer to make things, but can’t afford the overpriced enterprise class printers. They want something lean and mean that makes a lot of products for a low unit and material cost so they can scale as they grow an audience.

So, the first problem is the engineering and design assumption by these companies that the customers are hobbyists.? If you buy a new resin printer you will be surprised to find that the hardware / software . materials most popularly used often expects you to become an expert on how that printer works, and to sit around all day calibrating resins and failing over and over with terribly under engineered products.?

The resin companies are even worse.? While they may have a “starting place” set of settings, they expect the user to calibrate by trial and error. They fail to realize or simply do not care that almost no one wants to sit and fail over and over trying to guess the settings that make their caustic/toxic/dangerous crazy messy materials to work well.?The price they are asking the customer to pay is handling a super dangerous VOC emitting, unstable photo polymer while they fish fail after fail out of a hazmat filled vat.

I have news for the printer and resin companies …? literally no one wants to do that.?? The consumer just wants to safely and reliably print a detailed, robust model for DandD night. The small business just wants to get the printer set up and crank out the product.

So people are using generic profiles, handling these materials in a not “optimal” manner or worse, even unsafely because the companies refuse to understand the customer.

Many of these printers have no sensors, or safety stops, and will literally destroy themselves when they fail … either by stretching or tearing the terrible “FEP” film they use, or worse, pile driving the fail into the glass and or LCD..

Even worse is that while these printers are fairly easy to repair, the companies making them are on a 6 month or annual cycle of new printers thus the printers become harder and harder to repair within a surprisingly short period of time.

On top of that the printers are using unsafe materials in a unsafe way. advertising them as desktop despite the fact that the materials are toxic, and emit hazardous fumes and offer little or no filtration or air handling.

There are better SLA and DLP printers originally targeted at the desktop market that solve many of these feature shortcomings for more money but the second these type of products hit the market they quickly become the 'go to' for many business class users. This is because as we stated earlier, the “commercial class” printers cost so much and are so unscalable, these “prosumer” devices are by comparison to a mid sized business an economical breath of fresh air.

As they pivot to business facing these devices quickly become locked ecosystems, with expensive warranty and cost of ownership.? In essence they quickly price themselves out of both the consumer and small business market.

There needs to be a middle ground... Safe, with good features and open material support, and a long term support window. Companies need to care about making these units more open, sustainable, and most on all less failure prone, easier to set up, and safe

So here is my “ideal” printer:

1.??? I want it to be open to all LED/MSLA/DLP/SLA materials so I can pick a balance between material characteristics and price.

2.??? It should either not use fep or have a more robust fep solution

3.??? It should have a tank stir system to deal with keeping materials properly mixed

4.??? It should allow material to be left in the tank for an extended period

5.??? It should have a heater that keeps the unit temp stable

6.??? It should be able to sense an obstruction or fail and not destroy itself.

7.??? It should use a slicer that employs print validation to avoid failures.

8.??? It should use standardized parts user serviceable parts so that the printer is still usable and serviceable for years to come.

9.??? It should have a much more robust air handling system to make these “desktop printers” actually safe to have on your desktop.

10.???It should have excellent Z axis stability

11.???It should auto level or be super easy to level and hold level well

Here is my ideal resin company:

1.??? For each material offers It should offer one set of settings that fit most printers and situations.

2.??? It should have the materials listed in all the common slicers so there is no need to hand key in profiles.

3.??? It should have a high detail flexible material at a reasonable cost for making small end user parts.

UPDATE 3/11/24

Speaking to some friends in the industry I'd like to stress that these are "ideals" with a lot of practical chemistry, engineering and market forces pushing back ...

A big concern is that at some level many of the new users of these printers simply don't have the expertise to run them properly and safely. Education is part of the solution, but we also need to chase reliability and safety at a platform level with better features, software, etc. rather than the 4K/8K/16K being the main selling points.

From a resin company perspective it's hard to lock in standard settings when the device quality and power applied to the resin by cheaper printers varies so widely... Doing more to define and standardize what the printer is capable of is important to making the products more predictable, which in turn will lower failure.

I think getting off the 6 month printer crowdsource cycle, and making longer lasting and more stable printer models that focus a bit more on these more nuanced features would be a good step towards making the materials easier to program software for and for suppliers to make materials that are easier to document.