Name: Form Studio 1
Brand: Formlabs

Formlabs, the company whose resin printers turn out dental models, jewelry masters and engineering prototypes, now sells one built for a hobbyist’s desk. The Form Studio 1 starts at $699, roughly a quarter of the $2,625 asking price of the Form 4, and Formlabs pitches it at people printing miniatures, scale models and props at home.

That is a different market for a company whose main customers are businesses such as assembly shops and dentists, and whose nearly 200,000 printers in service mostly cost $2,500 or more, as Wired reported. Resin printers from Elegoo, Anycubic and Phrozen already sell to hobbyists for less, and the 3D Printing Journal reads the Studio 1 as a direct shot at those brands. Formlabs is betting that home users will pay more for the workflow it sells to professionals: resin fed automatically from sealed cartridges, a flexible build platform that releases parts without tools, and a built-in camera for checking a print remotely.

The printer’s screen-based light engine works with 35-micron pixels, finer than the 50-micron pixels of the more expensive Form 4, which is what lets a tabletop figure keep the texture of a cloak or the edge of a blade. Its build volume of 5.9 liters is slightly larger than the Form 4’s, tall enough for a part 23.5 centimeters high. With the new Alpha Fast resin it prints at up to 130 millimeters an hour, and Formlabs says it can fill the whole build volume in under two hours.

Six Alpha resins launch with it: grey, white, black and clear, plus a matte, detail-focused Model resin and the Fast resin. The first bottle costs $29. An Open Material Mode comes included for third-party resins, although those call for the optional Resin Tank Pro, which uses a more chemically resistant film.

The lower price comes with cuts. Compared with the Form 4, the Studio 1 has no mixer for filled materials and no system that detects debris in the resin tank, runs five monitoring systems instead of six, and supports nine Formlabs materials against 22. It is also less precise on paper, with a stated accuracy of plus or minus 0.5% against 0.15% for the Form 4. And $699 buys only the printer, the tank and a platform. Every resin print has to be washed and cured before it is usable, so most buyers will also want the $199 Form Studio Wash+Cure, which Formlabs bundles with the flexible platform for $948.

Formlabs also says the Studio 1 is the first resin printer to earn UL GREENGUARD Gold certification for low chemical emissions. That claim holds only with Alpha resins and the $179 VOC Extractor, an add-on with two carbon filters that last roughly 330 hours of printing. Without both, the certification does not apply, and washing parts still involves isopropyl alcohol or a similar solvent.

Space is the other catch. Wired’s reviewer described a printer about the size of a mini fridge and a test shipment of more than a dozen boxes, between the printer, the wash unit, the tools and the resin cartridges. Formlabs’ chief product officer, David Lakatos, played the footprint down. “It doesn’t take a lot of space,” he told the magazine. “If you have a desk, then I think you should be good to go.”

Orders opened on October 14 and shipping starts on November 16. Formlabs’ US, European and UK stores list the printer, at €639 before VAT in the eurozone (about €773 in Spain with tax) and £549 before VAT in Britain; the company has not published prices for Latin America or most of Asia. The aqua, teal and violet Founders Edition colors are a limited run that ends on November 30 or when stock sells out, while graphite stays in the range.

In March, Formlabs chief executive Max Lobovsky told an industry conference that the company was focused on professional users. He also called Bambu Lab, the filament-printer maker he estimated sells more than a million machines a year, mostly to hobbyists, “by far the largest company in 3D printing.” The Form Studio 1 is the first Formlabs printer priced for the people who made Bambu that big.

Tags: 3D printing, Bambu Lab, Form 4, Form Studio 1, Formlabs, hobbyists