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Compared to the A8, the Photon is smaller, faster, neater, and more accurate; however, FDM and DLP are very different processes*, and the Photon deserves praise in its own right as a resin printer:
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Pros:
Machine is solidly built, weighty, with a quality feel
Incredible resolution- can make tiny parts with accuracy
Simple setup
Minimal (one!) moving parts
Multiple models on a build plate don’t add to the build time (unlike FDM)
One failed model does not spoil the whole build (unlike FDM!)
Small desktop footprint- neat and compact
Simple Slicer- for Mac and Windows- with essentially only two variables to tune.
Simple touchscreen interface
Cons:
As with all resin printers, it’s a bit smelly- but you’ll like the printed results enough to make a fume extract for it; I did, immediately after seeing the first test print!
Smaller build area than FDM- tho adequate for the sorts of items it’s suited to making, and with a surprising amount of height (the Eiffel Tower beckons..!)
Unless you’re building large objects, unlike FDM you don’t get to see the object being made- not really a con, as there’s no need to stay around looking over it!
I can’t count the post-processing as a con; our production department leases a $100k+ SLA machine at work, and I see its models need exactly the same post processing!
There is also a learning curve (I’m on it!) to design for resin printing- but that goes for any resin-based machine.
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The machine arrived well-packaged, and fully-assembled, except for the protruding door handle. Once that was screwed on, the hardest part of setting up was getting the packing foam (good quality, not crumbly polystyrene!) out of the build chamber. The build platform is a satisfyingly weighty chunk of aluminium (don’t drop it!), anodised blue, with a solid metal knob to secure it to similarly-solid Z-carriage. The resin tank is also solid anodised aluminium, with a powerful steel clamping system to tension the FEP sheet. It really feels industrial quality.
I had grand plans for my first print, but, sensibly, I decided to start with the example file that’s already on the included USB stick.
It’s about a 5-hour build, so I left it running overnight.
I came down in the morning to find, with nothing other than out-of-box setup, the cube lattice printed perfectly; no tuning or tweaking required!
Since then, I’ve been excitedly downloading from Thingiverse and running STLs through the Photon’s basic, but adequate, and fast, slicer**. Not everything I’ve tried to print has come out- but I put that mainly down to my inexperience. The detail in the parts that have printed is outstanding. While I’m learning, I’m printing most models scaled down to just an inch or so long, and the detail they retain is unbelievable- details that I assume won’t print, do! The great thing with DLP printers is you can put as many parts as you like on the bed, and printing takes exactly the same amount of time, unlike FDM, or even SLA, with a scanned laser. This is great for practicing, as you can try the same part in many different ways, to learn the effect of orientation, and supports, and it takes no longer to print. And if one part fails to print correctly, it doesn’t mess up all the others!
For really instant gratification you can print lithophanes- photographs converted to thicknesses of resin- which only take about 20 minutes.
I’m really impressed with the quality of this printer, and with the quality of its output. Definitely a little gem.
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*For those who don’t know (as I didn’t a week ago!), DLP printers work by trapping a thin layer of resin between the Build Plate and a clear plastic (“FEP”) film at the bottom of a tank of resin. UV light from an LED shines up through an LCD shadowmask, which is displaying one slice of the object, and hardens the resin where it is illuminated, sticking it to the build plate. Then the tricky bit happens: the build plate, with the hardened resin attached, moves away from the plastic film, to which the resin is also slightly stuck…. The film stretches, then suddenly peels away from the hardened resin with a slight “snap”. The build plate, with its areas of hardened resin, then lowers back down, trapping a new layer of resin under it, and the process repeats, with the built part slowly emerging from the pool of liquid resin.
Once the print is finished, the build plate moves right up, and surplus resin can be left to drip back into the tank. Then, wearing gloves, you remove the build plate from the machine, and carefully pry the built parts off it, into a bowl of (ideally 95%+) isopropyl alcohol to wash away the remaining uncured resin. Putting the finished model in the sun- or under a suitable UV lamp- finishes the curing process, hardening up the resin to full strength.
**Slicing for DLP is inherently easier than for FDM, as it simply has to produce a bitmap of each layer, at the resolution of the mask LCD.
