When Formlabs unleashed the Form 3 (and its dental counterpart – the Form 3B) upon the world back in June 2019, it changed the game for desktop 3D printing by bringing an array of features never seen before in this form factor. On top of that – the company tried to allow for finer details to be printed with less support material by introducing their LFS technology – which boils down to the bottom of the resin tank being flexible, thus allowing the layers to be peeled off gradually, instead of being torn right off the surface by the Z-axis motor.
This produced amazing results, with smooth surfaces and never-before seen versatility when printing free-standing walls and overhangs. Having had the pleasure of owning a Form 3 for over a year, we have to say that it was truly a great printer – delivering with most prints, no matter how challenging the geometries were.
In January of 2022, Formlabs dropped a new pair – the Form 3+ and the Form 3B+, which brought new software and hardware to the table. The software part of the announcement promises 20-to-40 percent faster printing – with the company also promising to bring it over to the older Form 3 and 3B machines. The hardware part promises better thermal control, due to a redesigned heating element, a more stable LPU (the part that houses the optics and laser – and that actually does the printing) and better early layer performance – making these first layers print 5-15 minutes faster.
Since we’ve still had a Form 3 when the new software came out, we had the chance to try it out – and indeed, the company kept its promise. When trying it out, we managed to get significantly faster print times with some parts (3h 12m for a certain model, down from 4h 23m, for example). Supports also seemed to have finer touchpoints, which made removing and post-processing much easier.
Through a chain of unforeseen events, we ended up with a Form 3+ as of recently, and we have to say that it’s truly an upgrade. Testing out a few prints, the thing that sticks out the most to us is the much shorter resin heat-up time (the Form 3 had a tendency to take upwards of 45 minutes in colder environments, whereas the Form 3+ finishes in minutes) and improved optical clarity of parts (and just a better surface finish in general). The latter is in part due to the new, more stable LPU revision which simply stacks layers more precisely.
Another quirk that got fixed, and that we’ve experienced first hand is an odd type of print failure that used to happen on the Form 3 – where the first few layers of the model itself, if it was positioned parallel to the raft, delaminated at the edges. This was easily mitigable by repositioning the print, but our Form 3+ seems to not suffer from the issue (this is a consensus several other users also reached).
It’s important to note that the Form 3+ is a very incremental upgrade over its predecessor. With all of the improvement we’ve listed, it seems like a huge step forward, but for the most part, the improvement is either a workflow one or a minor part quality one. If you’ve got a Form 3 and are happy with the results, you should by no means be considering an upgrade – and to us it also seems unlikely that the Form 3+ will outlive the Form 3 in terms of software support, as they share many of the same components. These new printers are simply a logical continuation of Formlabs’ philosophy of always improving – once software updates could take the platform no further, they opted for a hardware refresh to keep things going.
The Form 3+ and Form 3B+ have now fully replaced their predecessors in the lineup, and retail for the same $3,499 price on the official website, though this price seems to be higher elsewhere. Aside from the new printers, Formlabs also released the Build Platform 2, retailing $229, offering easy tool-free removal of sensitive parts without risk of damage.
He’s also the key person behind our English translations, especially of education- and maker-oriented texts.
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