3D printing: Precision arrives with Formlabs and the Form 1

We first heard about Formlabs’s high-resolution Form 1 3D printer back in September. Where most mainstream printers use the equivalent of a hot glue gun to lay plastic down layer-upon-layer in order to build up a part, the Formlabs’s approach uses stereolithography: an approach that uses a liquid photopolymer resin which hardens when blasted with laser light. This lets the machine print four times as precisely as low-cost competitors using more conventional approaches to printing.