Reply To: What printer to choose.

[blinky465 17028xp 1]

Another thing I’ve found is that, compared to my FDM printer, the setting up and maintenance of the resin printer is a doddle. There’s only one moving part – so no worrying about slack belts, getting the frame square, filament feeder jams, hot nozzle clogs etc.

Personally, I’ve found getting the print bed level a doddle – leveling the bed on an FDM printer and getting the perfect first layer nice and smooth can take hours (and still you sometimes need to give things a hand with a smudge of pritt stick or something to help it stick). Simply drop the head onto a piece of paper, when you can pull it out, but can’t push it back in, tighten up and you’re done!

I’d say about 95% of resin print failures are down to software, rather than an issue with the actual hardware (yes, there are some who have screen failures, shearing issues etc. but it’s mostly down to preparing the models properly in the first place). This is where the classic Photon has it over on the Photon S – because you can load your .photon file into the Photon File Validator software, which lets you look at every bitmap layer and identifies any that have “islands” (and also lets you do some basic image editing to correct them too). It saves files back out as .photon, not .pws so I don’t know if it’s suitable for use with the Photon S.

Like all 3d printers, if you spend a little time understanding *how the machine works* and adjusting your files to suit (rather than treat it like a plug-n-play inkjet that you just hit “print” on) you’ll get far better and more consistent results.

I’ve found FDM printing problematic and a bit hit-n-miss compared to resin printing.

I only ever really use my FDM printer for huge pieces (where I’m not so fussed about the quality or am going to cover it with a heavy filler-primer or spackle or something) or anything structural (for use with moving parts etc). Resin pieces can be quite brittle (and don’t stand up to being pushed and pulled around by things like servos and motors). But I’d favour resin printing over FDM for anything tabletop all day long!