Ice1 and Ice9 - First Ever Affordable SLS 3D Printers

[Hugues]

Are you saying that SLS is less user friendly then fff?

(SLS) Quickly dusting away the powder VS manually removing support material (FFF).

I'll pick SLS any day. It's far superior IMO.

Well, looking at the 70+ different FFF parts i printed in the last year, i'd say maybe 5, max 10 had support material. But with SLS i would have to clean each one of them. So...more post-processing with SLS in general.

But the finish is better with SLS i guess, compared to FFF. But maybe not that much better than DLP ? Which is my next printer i'm receiving in November (and no powder to remove, maybe a quick alcohol wipe).

[JSenior]

Well, looking at the 70+ different FFF parts i printed in the last year, i'd say maybe 5, max 10 had support material. But with SLS i would have to clean each one of them. So...more post-processing with SLS in general.

But the finish is better with SLS i guess, compared to FFF. But maybe not that much better than DLP ? Which is my next printer i'm receiving in November (and no powder to remove, maybe a quick alcohol wipe).

With SLS you don't have to worry about supports, you don't have to worry about warping. 99% of the time, what you try to print, is exactly what you'll get out of the machine. You can nest all your parts within each other so can fill the entire build area with multiple parts. It also very quick and very cheap once you own the machines. Post processing consists of some compressed air unless you want to do extra smoothing.

If this was a £20k order and I could have one now (as long as it is as good as it looks,) then I would buy one. I can't imagine there's going to be many takers on putting down the money now, with the hope you'll receive a working model in a year however.