Remember that awesome Form 1 3D printer from yesterday? The group behind the project, Formlabs, were asking for only $100,000 to help fund the manufacturing and material costs of the printers. They got the required amount in two-and-a-half hours. Amazingly enough, the funding didn’t stop there.
At this time, the Form 1 3D printer has raised a total of $741,981. They are completely sold out of the first two 3D printer models on offer. There’s only a few left of the other sub-$3,000 models. Somebody has even pledged $5,000 to get the collector’s edition of the printer.
The demand is obviously coming from those who have been waiting for a low-cost, high-end 3D printer. The current cheap 3D printers on the market use extruded plastic solutions that require a lot of post-printing work. The Form 1 promises high-resolution prints right from the start.
The Form 1 printer is impressive to say the least, but how did Formlabs get the price down to an extremely affordable $2,299? TechCrunch asked Formlabs co-founder Maxim Lobovsky that very question. He said that the biggest decrease in price came from the use of a new laser that recently hit the market – a 405nm Bluray laser diode. They were also able to cut costs thanks to some expensive patents expiring and the reduction of unnecessary components found in more expensive 3D printers.
The Form 1 3D printer is not the first of its kind to be featured on Kickstarter. There have been other attempts in the past to fund the future of 3D printing, but none have been as successful as this. The closest that another 3D printer has come to the Form 1 was another high-resolution polymer resin based 3D printer called the B9Creator. The Kickstarter only asked for $50,000 and was able to raise $513,422 in a little over a month.
For now, Formlabs has been enjoying their early success. The Kickstarter still has 28 days left and nobody knows exactly how much money this project is going to pull in. It will at least pull in over a million, and it could end up being one of the most funded projects on the site. At the very least, it will enshrine 3D printing as one of the many industries that has benefited greatly thanks to Kickstarter.
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