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Comment by jglauche | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that's a lot of funding for just another resin 3d printer. We have had printers like Form1 in the low-cost segment.

I'm surprised about the funding amount, as the market is currently very very stagnating.

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Their method of manufacturing is different than others. It makes the process faster, allows for greater detail, eliminated the issue of having layers which weakens the structure, and it allows for much more complex designs without the need for temporary structures.

I think their funding is well placed and will indeed give the 3d printing industry a shake up on the consumer market.

Different from other resin printers? It doesn't seem different than them, at least from this material.

That's the impression I get. It's certainly better than traditional SLA, but still maintains all of SLA's major disadvantages (material/consumable/machine cost, low speed, resin smell/fumes/toxicity, general mess, part decay/degradation over time, limited materials). The tech might take over the SLA space, but I doubt they'll take a significant bite out of other printing processes.

> low speed

This is one of the primary things they advertise most improvement on. Their graphic[1] shows massive speed increases.

I don't know about most of the things you've mentioned, but it also looks like it provides far higher quality output than other products, given that it uses continuous deposition and the projector is precise enough to form smooth curved surfaces.

[1] http://3dprinting.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Carbon3D-CL...

Whoops, you're right - it does have speed benefits. That said, I really doubt that chart they're showing off. I know our SLA machines could print something significantly larger than the maximum object size on the Carbon3D machine in less than the 11.5 hours they list. I would like it see what the actual test case is.

I don't know what the test case is, but going from the article[1], at 100µm layers it prints at 500 mm/hour.

Form 1+ claims 10 to 30 mm/hour at this resolution, so Carbon3D is 20-50 times the speed. That puts Form 1+ about 2-3 times as good as the graph suggests.

CLIP (Carbon3D's name for their tech) isn't layer-rate limited, but cure-rate limited so the comparison isn't quite fair.

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6228/1349.abstract (free access if you sign up for an account)

Quantitative improvement, not qualitative. They don't need to separate the resin from the base plate after every layer, which means vastly improved speed and precision and much less complexity. It's the difference between a car that can go 5 miles per hour and a car that can go 50 miles per hour - only quantitative improvement, but now you have a reason to use it every day.

Of course, in manufacturing they're competing against injection molding, which can go a metaphorical 100,000 miles per hour.

But has its significant limitations, notably that it takes a colossal machine and days to weeks to design, optimize, and machine a mold. Injection molding works great if you want to get to Pluto, but it'll cost you two years, a partnership with NASA, and a thousand tons of LH2 and LOX, and that cost remains constant even you just want to hit the supermarket. Current 3d printers can get you to the grocery store pretty well, but you're out of luck for anything bigger.

Carbon3d offers a new middle ground - fast enough and good enough for small production runs, but without the titanic constant-time overhead demanded by injection molding. This isn't going to be used for parts that you need ten million of. It'll be used for parts that you need a few hundred of.

Seems like there is a huge opportunity for 3d printing injection molds. It's probably more a tool chain question than an actual 3d printing question. But, by reducing the cost gap from mid-scale 3d printing to full scale production seems like a large potential net win. AKA, if the costs are similar at 10k and drop after that.

3d printing of injection molds is already being used for some low volume medical products.

Injection molds need to be ridiculously precise, as in 1/1000 of an inch of can render it useless. Also, I have doubts that the layered result of 3-D printing can hold up to the extreme abuse these things get put through after tens or even hundreds of thousands of cycles. We are talking about foot thick plates of steel bending and warping from fatigue damage after a while. Even if you could 3-D print the bulk of it, the job of polishing and detail work would still need to be done manually.

Edit: after Reading the comment below, I admit I may be somewhat biased from working with more complex and detailed parts with very right tolerances, so there may be some applications where it is feasible. All the molds I've seen/worked with were made the old fashioned way.

tens or even hundreds of thousands of cycles

If it's reasonably cheap to print, then only lasting say 2,000 cycles would not prevent a useful mid-scale production runs. Also, the high end of 3d printing is a lot tougher and has tighter tolerances than you might think.

http://www.gizmag.com/ge-fires-up-all-3d-printed-jet-einge/3...

It prints about 100 times faster than other SLA printers.

http://carbon3d.com/

I dunno. Seems about right these days for the "cool" factor.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

That video looked pretty magical to me.

> That video looked pretty magical to me.

Is that the first resin-based printer you've seen? Because I agree, they look pretty cool. But this one doesn't look particularly different, just faster.

You do realize they were on the cover of Science Magazine? I don't understand how people think there is nothing technically new here when one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in the world features your paper on its front page....

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6228.cover-expansion

There is a trite, but not completely inaccurate statement about Science: if it gets published there, it's likely to be sexy and wrong.

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