We could be moving into new worlds of 3D printer resin.
The popularity of resin 3D printing has exploded in the past few years due to interest in both industrial and consumer markets. On the industrial side, there are countless new devices that leverage exotic photopolymer resins to make production parts. On the consumer side, affordable desktop resin 3D printers, combined with widespread availability of complex 3D models for purchase, has resulted in perhaps millions of resin 3D printers on the loose.
To confess, I havenāt really been following the typical pricing of 3D printer resin for a while, so I thought it time to check things out.
In the past, there was a common approach by the few resin 3D printer manufacturers at the time. It went something like this:
- Build a resin 3D printer that could produce high-quality parts for a specific industry (usually dental, jewelry, etc.)
- Make sure the machine uses only proprietary cartridges
- Sell the customer proprietary cartridges at a high cost
It was typical for basic resins to be sold for US$200 per liter in those days.
Then we have the introduction of the low-cost machines, operated by (generally) low-cost individuals. They didnāt appreciate the high costs of resins, and the increasing number of them seems to have driven costs down substantially.
The manufacturers of these inexpensive MSLA devices have helped this price shift by increasingly introducing their own resin lines at lower costs.
By poking around a few sites, I see that pricing for basic resins used in MSLA devices tends to be in the US$20-50 range these days, with some premium resins a bit higher. I even saw one 1L bottle selling for under US$10, half the price of a 1kg spool of filament.
However, there are also quite a few industrial-focused resins, and these are priced far higher. These would include resins that might carry a regulatory certification, exotic engineering properties, or something else of interest to manufacturers. These now range from US$100 per liter up to, well, whatever. I saw one bottle of ESD resin priced at over US$1,000 per liter.
So we have two worlds of resins now: inexpensive and basic addressing the consumer market, and expensive and powerful addressing the industrial market.
The manufacturers each seem to be settling into one of these categories, which makes sense. However, there are a couple that appear to be bridging those two worlds.
One is surprisingly Formlabs, which for a while has been marketing resins with prices on the lower end of the premium range, usually US$99 and up per liter.
They recently announced reduced pricing on their general-purpose resins, now only US$79 per liter. Thatās not quite as low as the rest of that market, but Formlabsā resins are far safer than typical third-party resins because they donāt use the toxic chemical AMCO, which is frequently used in most inexpensive resins. However, Formlabs also announced a bulk purchase plan whereby their general-purpose resins are available as low as US$35 per liter.
Will we see resin prices even lower? Iām not so sure; US$10 per liter seems like the lowest it could possibly go. Will we see even higher prices for industrial resins? Absolutely.
