Have not had this in my experience with formlabs. they recommend that you use a protective coating spray for parts that are outside in direct uv, I have never used it though and my parts have lasted fine.
As always depends on the material, I think the glass filled ones are better, the flexible ones are a little worse but it has never been an issue for me.
yeah the 6k is wild for sure, if you are looking to not use formlabs resin why would you buy a formlabs printer though?
The biggest advantage of formlabs in my mind is the ecosystem, the resins just work out of the box and you do not have to try and fine tune things. If I wanted to use Loctite or some other resin company (price per L is comparable) I would just buy a anycubic printer.
I do get where you are coming from though, I am not a drm fan but I am just curious why you would not just go with a different printer.
Yeah for sure, I see where you are coming from. I have used a form 3 a lot (4k of materials) and have my own form 2 and for my uses it has worked super well. There are certainly blind spots but for the consumer they are targeting who wants to print parts and not think about the details it is pretty slick.
I think for what it is worth formlabs has a pretty unique position in the market where their printers are low enough in price where they have to compete with enthusiast printers which makes it tough. If what you are looking for is a machine that you can tweak and set up exactly how you want it, formlabs isn't ideal. But for people who are not interested in working on a printer and just want parts to appear in the printer I d not think that anyone else does that better.
More the opposite than anything. The SLA parts are isotropic so you have the same properties in every direction and do not have to worry about breaking on the layer lines like in FDM. Formlabs has a couple resins which are very impact resistant or stiff etc, some similar to ABS, glass filled plastics or polypropylene
The resins are also getting cheaper too, It looks like they are using the new Black V5 which costs a third less per liter than Black V4 from their last printer.
Open platform allows you to use non formlabs resins, it works fine but tbh what you pay for with formlabs is getting the perfect prints every time. The form 3 works so well because all of the resins have such optimized settings and you can just let it print without worrying about issues. If you want to use some other resin I doubt you would see as high of a success rate.
They have a robust material library, silicone, polyurethane, glass filled polymers etc. The material is not really a bottleneck at this point. I have used their ESD material which was slick, even the weirder materials are super easy. Obviously at scale the parts will make more sense with injection molding but if you need a couple thousand of a part this seems much cheaper and easier.
As always depends on the material, I think the glass filled ones are better, the flexible ones are a little worse but it has never been an issue for me.