**The Form Labs 4L: A Game-Changing Large Format Resin Printer**

As we took a closer look at the Form Labs 4L, it became clear that this machine is not just another 3D printing printer. It's a tool designed for professionals who need to produce high-quality parts on a large scale. With its ability to print objects up to 80 mm per hour, the 4L is capable of producing complex forms in a relatively short amount of time.

**Robust Design and Easy Setup**

One of the standout features of the Form Labs 4L is its robust design. The printer's tray is designed to be easy to use, with a mechanical mixer that latches into place. Everything from the tray to the build platform locks down securely, making it easy to run and install. This level of engineering ensures that the machine is reliable and easy to maintain.

**Scaling Up: Challenges and Opportunities**

As we explored the possibilities of the Form Labs 4L, it became clear that scaling up is not just about increasing the print speed. The resin used in the printer has a fixed mass per volume, which means that larger objects require more material than smaller ones. This can be expensive, especially when printing multiple liter objects. However, the Form Labs software has introduced features such as hollow prints, which allow users to reduce the amount of resin needed while maintaining high fidelity.

**Post-Processing and Cleaning**

Post-processing is another consideration for professionals who use large format 3D printers like the Form Labs 4L. While there aren't many cleaning tanks or buckets available that can accommodate these massive form builds, we found that PA and scrubbing off the resin was a effective way to clean up prints. Even without a flex plate build platform, the base settings for our tested resins made it easy to pry off support bases from the machine.

**Professional-Grade Quality**

Throughout our testing process, we were impressed by the quality of the prints produced by the Form Labs 4L. The machine's ability to produce parts with high accuracy and detail was evident in every print we ran. With its robust design, user-friendly interface, and professional-grade quality, it's clear that this printer is designed for professionals who need to deliver high-quality results.

**Conclusion**

The Form Labs 4L is a game-changing large format resin printer that is poised to revolutionize the way professionals approach 3D printing. Its ability to produce complex forms quickly and accurately, combined with its robust design and user-friendly interface, make it an invaluable tool for anyone who needs to produce high-quality parts on a large scale. While it may not be suitable for hobbyists or enthusiasts, the Form Labs 4L is sure to find a place in the workshops and labs of professionals around the world.

**Additional Resources**

We'd like to thank Form Labs for providing us with access to their 4L printer and resin. For more information on the Form Labs 4L, be sure to check out our full review and testing process at [insert link]. We also have a range of excellent merchandise available, including a five-pack of demerit badges that are perfect for anyone who has ever had a DIY project go wrong. Get yours now at tested.com/store.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody it's Norm from t and well I got the rubber gloves on I'm standing next to a giant machine so yes today we're going to talk about resin printing this is the form Labs 4L it was newly unveiled this week and if you've been following our coverage of formlabs resin printers you can assume this is just a large version of the form four printer I reviewed earlier this year in many ways that's exactly the case but I think it's a fascinating machine uh the Technologies they've put in here what inherits from the form 4 and bringing it to the larger size and build volume that users of the form 3 l previously may have been used to uh worth diving into what you can do with this machine now right off the bat you should understand this is not a hobbyist machine formlabs well they sell machines to everyone they are expensive machines meant for industry and professionals people who are prototyping who need parts that are reliable consistent need the wide range of resins they have available from from flexible resins to clear resins to tough resins that you can mold and iterate on uh that's what this these machines are for and as we've visited workshops and Labs from startups Hardware startups all around the country you know these are kind of the machines we've seen set up or companies that prototype and manufacture at Large Scale well how does this machine differ from the 3L that you may have seen Adam set up in his shop previously a couple years ago as he was diving into large prop building with resin printing uh it's a different light engine and curing engine completely so with the form 4 we saw form Labs move away from the laser based resin curing system they've had with that lpu that was the laser system that went layer by layer scanned each layer uh across the line um and move into a more traditional now msla based system so in this machine on the bottom there's a a large array of UV curing lights then there's an LCD masking layer and this masking layer has like the form four this pebbl release texture that allows for the film on the bottom bottom of the tray to easily release No tilting required uh and then the trays themselves also have a mechanical mixer um that then holds a bunch of resin up to 2 lers here in these trays and then a massive build platform uh I have here for example the build platforms for the 3 l and now the 4L they're very similar uh the 4L is a little bit wider a little bit tall it's really decided by the shape and the dimensions of that masking uh layer that LCD and so this is about 14 in Long 7.7 in uh tall here and then the Z height is about 13.8 in so you can print things that are taller than a foot and compared to the form 4 this is the build platform of the form four you can do almost several form four build plates surface area of several of those on the 4L um it's not just double though in terms of the build volume when you scale up on the XY and z-axis and you're orienting your models diagonally and maximizing that build volume it really makes a difference so one of the things I like to do is Max out that build volume and show for example this is an X-Wing model that's the largest I could print on the form 3 or the 3 plus and it's not that big it's again limited by how I could arrange it with the supports on that build platform moving to the form four as I showed off my review pretty big in terms of the size difference and that was just an increase uh really in one dimension of that build plate making it more rectangular allowed this to be positioned and scale up that much more on the form 4L we're talking much much bigger I mean this is almost like a full miniature model kit that you could print in one go in one piece and paint and it would work on a film set as a model miniature I me the details are incredible this is printed at on the tough 2000 at 100 Micron layer height and then something list took about uh at 3,300 layers took about 18 hours to print but massive when we're talking about the build volume now also by changing from the laser base uh curing system of the 3L the 4L also doesn't have the seamline issue so the 3 L's build plate was actually a combination of two lasers units that move concurrently but because because they weren't perfectly flush next to each other you could get a little seam line that you'd have to clean up if you were printing a large singular model so you'd have to factor that in it was in the Slicer in preform that lets you know where it is uh with the 4L you don't have that it's one layer curing all at once with those UV lights through that masking layer now formlabs hasn't listed publicly the resolution of the LCD curing uh mask but they have said that the pixel dimensions the pixel size of the LCD is 46 microns a little bit smaller actually than what you'd find in the form 4 still a little bit bigger than like the high resolution LCDs you'd find in hobbyist printers but when you're printing at this size and scale you're really not printing at 50 Micron layer Heights most of the time it's 100 microns even 200 microns and so that 46 Micron pixel size with anti-aliasing I think gives plenty of feature detail where you can make out you know panel lines you can make out all this geometry and even organic geometry where you see the bumps on the textures on the faces it's all really really visible and clear now the other advantage of course it's speed CU it's curing that layer entirely at once so the resins that we like to test with we like the tough 2000 resins we love the clear resins and uh speed is really a factor of the layer height so it's really time per layer uh and so those are the variables we're talking about so like this x swing for tough 2000 3300 layers 18 hours the clear model kit over there the anatomical model which I couldn't fit into you know that whole leg into the form 4 build platform here fit the entire model all those component parts fit into the 4L that was about 1,400 layers and about 12 hours 12 hours for some of these other models as well um and so really with the 3L we were operating in a kind of uh like a weekend mindset printing over multiple days uh when we did the Bethesda Starfield project and we made the large Frontier ship those were all printed on form 3L printers and we would have a spreadsheet you know kind of optimizing and listing out all the components and thinking about how long each part would take the process and when you're on a deadline in an effect shop you know in a model shop you have to really make sure these printers are running Non-Stop and so they're running overnight they're running over weekends and some of those prints would be multiple days at a time with about a four to 5x increase in speed the prints here are really more of kind of like a overnight print 12 hours 14 hours 16 hours and at most something like this like 18 hours you can start a print afternoon one day and have it ready the next afternoon or the next morning to then work on your next iteration and where this really comes in the sharp relief is using their fast resin which is the version of I think previously called their giraffe resin I have Adam's head here printed in form laabs fast resins it's printed at a 200 Micron layer height so in the fdm world that's you know2 mm kind of standard for a high-end fdm printer but kind of a thick layer line layer height for uh for resin printing um this at about 1,300 layers took an astounding 2 hours and 45 minutes to print mindblowing our friends at fbfx uh did the 3D scanning and 3D modeling touchups for this model but this is human scale now it's a one to one scale version of a a human so you can imagine if you were printing things like eyeglass or human accessories for people to wear this is what that volume allows and if you're printing at 200 Micron layer height and you're printing using their fast resin you can get two or three of these printed in a day I mean these hands that Adam had for his Carbonite model also just a 4-Hour print again using that fast resin and this one at 1,700 layers and with a build volume both of these arms were printed at the same same time so in Just 4 hours you could get these props it's blew my mind away I mean we were thinking in terms of weekend or weekl long prints and overnight prints for the form four and for some of these draft resins same day prints if you divide the you know layers by the amount of time to print and you factor in things like the heating up of the uh the tray and the resin in the tray it's does reach that 80 mm per hour max speed time that they claim on their website so and on average you're printing using their standard resins about 1 in or 24 millim uh per hour and even at that speed if you're not printing tall massive objects uh you can get a whole tray full of objects done again in less than a day but scaling up isn't just about the robustness of the printer you know the tray here latches in the mechanical mixer latches in everything is super easy to run and install so you're not worrying with any bolts or anything the build platforms lock into place using that latch uh things just work which is a testament to the engineering of this machine but you also have to change how you think about the way you process your 3D prints because it's not just a matter of scaling up the model at hand the resin is going to be the same mass per volume and so when you're talking about objects of this size you know if this was a solid object it would be about 3 and 1/2 L worth of resin and even though there's enough space in the side to hold two 1 L cartridges and the resin tank itself will hold up to 2 lers um you really don't want to be spending the money printing you know multiple liter objects it's going to get expensive really fast uh so thankfully in the preform software form Labs has introduced features that we've been asking for for a long time uh namely the ability to hollow prints so at Touch of a button you can determine your you know your wall thickness how much Fidelity you want on the inside of these models uh and then a print that would have been 3 and2 lers if it was solid only consume 700 milliliters of resin which also not just a savings in resin but allows me to use finer touch points for the supports so it's easier to clean up and postprocess postprocessing at the scale also is another consideration because there aren't going to be many cleaning tanks and buckets you can use to process these form laabs of course sells their wash L station but the current wash L does need an adapter kit so it can fit these build platforms and sit in there um but you can get away with you know using PA and scrubbing off the resin and what I found that even without a flex plate build platform 2 equivalent the base settings for the resids we've tested it was reallyy easy to pry off the supports from the base um and I wasn't worried about gouging myself like the the lips that they have on the rafts still really nice to pop those support bases off pretty easily and that's what people are paying for when they go with form labs and they adopt a $10,000 large format resin printer uh I haven't had a single failed print yet on this in the two weeks that we've been testing this I've been monitoring them on the online dashboard getting images of the Finish prints using the time-lapse camera that's there um and it's a thing that just works I mean for professionals who don't want to be tinkering with uh machines who want who need to have parts to deliver for projects for their clients that's why we see these machines in those workshops in those labs for the companies at that scale um I know like it's like I said at the start this is not a hobbyist machine this is not the kind of thing that the vast majority of you out there are going to be in the market for but for us to get a sense of what it means for professionals and for Adam to be able to get model kits that he can get turned over in a day for his prop building and his uh projects and for things that allow us to make wonderful and fun content uh this is going to be an invaluable tool added to the tested 3D printing Workshop I want to thank for laabs for getting us access to the 4L and supplying the resin uh we'll be using this in future projects with Adam in the coming weeks and months um but hope you found it informative I'm Norm from tested and we'll see you next time thank you guys so much for watching that video I would be remissive I didn't tell you we have some excellent merch we have a five-pack of demerit badges for sale right now at tested store.com we've got the I hung it off of level demerit badge the I built the chair backwards demerit badge the I hit my thumb with a hammer demerit badge we've got the stapler in my finger Dem merit badge and my favorite I stuck the duct tape to itself Dem merit badge get yours now test Ted SL store. store Das store tested Dash store tested it's right here there just click therehey everybody it's Norm from t and well I got the rubber gloves on I'm standing next to a giant machine so yes today we're going to talk about resin printing this is the form Labs 4L it was newly unveiled this week and if you've been following our coverage of formlabs resin printers you can assume this is just a large version of the form four printer I reviewed earlier this year in many ways that's exactly the case but I think it's a fascinating machine uh the Technologies they've put in here what inherits from the form 4 and bringing it to the larger size and build volume that users of the form 3 l previously may have been used to uh worth diving into what you can do with this machine now right off the bat you should understand this is not a hobbyist machine formlabs well they sell machines to everyone they are expensive machines meant for industry and professionals people who are prototyping who need parts that are reliable consistent need the wide range of resins they have available from from flexible resins to clear resins to tough resins that you can mold and iterate on uh that's what this these machines are for and as we've visited workshops and Labs from startups Hardware startups all around the country you know these are kind of the machines we've seen set up or companies that prototype and manufacture at Large Scale well how does this machine differ from the 3L that you may have seen Adam set up in his shop previously a couple years ago as he was diving into large prop building with resin printing uh it's a different light engine and curing engine completely so with the form 4 we saw form Labs move away from the laser based resin curing system they've had with that lpu that was the laser system that went layer by layer scanned each layer uh across the line um and move into a more traditional now msla based system so in this machine on the bottom there's a a large array of UV curing lights then there's an LCD masking layer and this masking layer has like the form four this pebbl release texture that allows for the film on the bottom bottom of the tray to easily release No tilting required uh and then the trays themselves also have a mechanical mixer um that then holds a bunch of resin up to 2 lers here in these trays and then a massive build platform uh I have here for example the build platforms for the 3 l and now the 4L they're very similar uh the 4L is a little bit wider a little bit tall it's really decided by the shape and the dimensions of that masking uh layer that LCD and so this is about 14 in Long 7.7 in uh tall here and then the Z height is about 13.8 in so you can print things that are taller than a foot and compared to the form 4 this is the build platform of the form four you can do almost several form four build plates surface area of several of those on the 4L um it's not just double though in terms of the build volume when you scale up on the XY and z-axis and you're orienting your models diagonally and maximizing that build volume it really makes a difference so one of the things I like to do is Max out that build volume and show for example this is an X-Wing model that's the largest I could print on the form 3 or the 3 plus and it's not that big it's again limited by how I could arrange it with the supports on that build platform moving to the form four as I showed off my review pretty big in terms of the size difference and that was just an increase uh really in one dimension of that build plate making it more rectangular allowed this to be positioned and scale up that much more on the form 4L we're talking much much bigger I mean this is almost like a full miniature model kit that you could print in one go in one piece and paint and it would work on a film set as a model miniature I me the details are incredible this is printed at on the tough 2000 at 100 Micron layer height and then something list took about uh at 3,300 layers took about 18 hours to print but massive when we're talking about the build volume now also by changing from the laser base uh curing system of the 3L the 4L also doesn't have the seamline issue so the 3 L's build plate was actually a combination of two lasers units that move concurrently but because because they weren't perfectly flush next to each other you could get a little seam line that you'd have to clean up if you were printing a large singular model so you'd have to factor that in it was in the Slicer in preform that lets you know where it is uh with the 4L you don't have that it's one layer curing all at once with those UV lights through that masking layer now formlabs hasn't listed publicly the resolution of the LCD curing uh mask but they have said that the pixel dimensions the pixel size of the LCD is 46 microns a little bit smaller actually than what you'd find in the form 4 still a little bit bigger than like the high resolution LCDs you'd find in hobbyist printers but when you're printing at this size and scale you're really not printing at 50 Micron layer Heights most of the time it's 100 microns even 200 microns and so that 46 Micron pixel size with anti-aliasing I think gives plenty of feature detail where you can make out you know panel lines you can make out all this geometry and even organic geometry where you see the bumps on the textures on the faces it's all really really visible and clear now the other advantage of course it's speed CU it's curing that layer entirely at once so the resins that we like to test with we like the tough 2000 resins we love the clear resins and uh speed is really a factor of the layer height so it's really time per layer uh and so those are the variables we're talking about so like this x swing for tough 2000 3300 layers 18 hours the clear model kit over there the anatomical model which I couldn't fit into you know that whole leg into the form 4 build platform here fit the entire model all those component parts fit into the 4L that was about 1,400 layers and about 12 hours 12 hours for some of these other models as well um and so really with the 3L we were operating in a kind of uh like a weekend mindset printing over multiple days uh when we did the Bethesda Starfield project and we made the large Frontier ship those were all printed on form 3L printers and we would have a spreadsheet you know kind of optimizing and listing out all the components and thinking about how long each part would take the process and when you're on a deadline in an effect shop you know in a model shop you have to really make sure these printers are running Non-Stop and so they're running overnight they're running over weekends and some of those prints would be multiple days at a time with about a four to 5x increase in speed the prints here are really more of kind of like a overnight print 12 hours 14 hours 16 hours and at most something like this like 18 hours you can start a print afternoon one day and have it ready the next afternoon or the next morning to then work on your next iteration and where this really comes in the sharp relief is using their fast resin which is the version of I think previously called their giraffe resin I have Adam's head here printed in form laabs fast resins it's printed at a 200 Micron layer height so in the fdm world that's you know2 mm kind of standard for a high-end fdm printer but kind of a thick layer line layer height for uh for resin printing um this at about 1,300 layers took an astounding 2 hours and 45 minutes to print mindblowing our friends at fbfx uh did the 3D scanning and 3D modeling touchups for this model but this is human scale now it's a one to one scale version of a a human so you can imagine if you were printing things like eyeglass or human accessories for people to wear this is what that volume allows and if you're printing at 200 Micron layer height and you're printing using their fast resin you can get two or three of these printed in a day I mean these hands that Adam had for his Carbonite model also just a 4-Hour print again using that fast resin and this one at 1,700 layers and with a build volume both of these arms were printed at the same same time so in Just 4 hours you could get these props it's blew my mind away I mean we were thinking in terms of weekend or weekl long prints and overnight prints for the form four and for some of these draft resins same day prints if you divide the you know layers by the amount of time to print and you factor in things like the heating up of the uh the tray and the resin in the tray it's does reach that 80 mm per hour max speed time that they claim on their website so and on average you're printing using their standard resins about 1 in or 24 millim uh per hour and even at that speed if you're not printing tall massive objects uh you can get a whole tray full of objects done again in less than a day but scaling up isn't just about the robustness of the printer you know the tray here latches in the mechanical mixer latches in everything is super easy to run and install so you're not worrying with any bolts or anything the build platforms lock into place using that latch uh things just work which is a testament to the engineering of this machine but you also have to change how you think about the way you process your 3D prints because it's not just a matter of scaling up the model at hand the resin is going to be the same mass per volume and so when you're talking about objects of this size you know if this was a solid object it would be about 3 and 1/2 L worth of resin and even though there's enough space in the side to hold two 1 L cartridges and the resin tank itself will hold up to 2 lers um you really don't want to be spending the money printing you know multiple liter objects it's going to get expensive really fast uh so thankfully in the preform software form Labs has introduced features that we've been asking for for a long time uh namely the ability to hollow prints so at Touch of a button you can determine your you know your wall thickness how much Fidelity you want on the inside of these models uh and then a print that would have been 3 and2 lers if it was solid only consume 700 milliliters of resin which also not just a savings in resin but allows me to use finer touch points for the supports so it's easier to clean up and postprocess postprocessing at the scale also is another consideration because there aren't going to be many cleaning tanks and buckets you can use to process these form laabs of course sells their wash L station but the current wash L does need an adapter kit so it can fit these build platforms and sit in there um but you can get away with you know using PA and scrubbing off the resin and what I found that even without a flex plate build platform 2 equivalent the base settings for the resids we've tested it was reallyy easy to pry off the supports from the base um and I wasn't worried about gouging myself like the the lips that they have on the rafts still really nice to pop those support bases off pretty easily and that's what people are paying for when they go with form labs and they adopt a $10,000 large format resin printer uh I haven't had a single failed print yet on this in the two weeks that we've been testing this I've been monitoring them on the online dashboard getting images of the Finish prints using the time-lapse camera that's there um and it's a thing that just works I mean for professionals who don't want to be tinkering with uh machines who want who need to have parts to deliver for projects for their clients that's why we see these machines in those workshops in those labs for the companies at that scale um I know like it's like I said at the start this is not a hobbyist machine this is not the kind of thing that the vast majority of you out there are going to be in the market for but for us to get a sense of what it means for professionals and for Adam to be able to get model kits that he can get turned over in a day for his prop building and his uh projects and for things that allow us to make wonderful and fun content uh this is going to be an invaluable tool added to the tested 3D printing Workshop I want to thank for laabs for getting us access to the 4L and supplying the resin uh we'll be using this in future projects with Adam in the coming weeks and months um but hope you found it informative I'm Norm from tested and we'll see you next time thank you guys so much for watching that video I would be remissive I didn't tell you we have some excellent merch we have a five-pack of demerit badges for sale right now at tested store.com we've got the I hung it off of level demerit badge the I built the chair backwards demerit badge the I hit my thumb with a hammer demerit badge we've got the stapler in my finger Dem merit badge and my favorite I stuck the duct tape to itself Dem merit badge get yours now test Ted SL store. store Das store tested Dash store tested it's right here there just click there\n"