KAST 3d Printer - 12 Times Faster than Any Other 3D Printers - Coming soon!

[Hugues]

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Brian, I'm not sure I agree about cured resin being the future of desktop fabrication. I believe it currently has the highest growth potential due to 3D artists finally being turned on to 3D printing and demanding high print quality, but I don't think it will ever become more popular than FDM, because FDM is capable of employing a much wider variety of materials (polycarbonate, nylon, rubber-like, wood/metal/stone composites). SLA/DLP is great for precision items intended for investment casting or for art, but it's not real good at functional everyday products such as smartphone cases, R/C car parts, wooden jewelry boxes, etc...
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Cured resin being the future or not, i don't know, but it's hard to imagine substantial gain in speed and surface smoothness with FDM. Seems we have reached a plateau, at least with the typical extruder. Having to draw a layer line by line is a hard constraint. If you want to reduce the extrusion width to improve smoothness, it takes you so much more time to draw one layer, then you have to produce more layers per inch, again more time So we're talking orders of magnitude slower. I have my FDM printer for over a year now, it can do 100 microns layer, but i never really bother to print at that level because it's so much slower and you still see the layers anyway. So all my parts go out at 200 microns. ANd 100 microns is pretty much the accuracy of most if not all the new FDM printers that were launched in the past year, no substantial improvement on that side.

Printing one layer in one go, whatever the size or complexity of the layer, takes the same time with DLP (or LCD), complexity does not cost. And it can go down in layer thickness low enough for the layers to disappear to the human eye. That seems to have better chance in the future in my opinion. No reason why this would be reserved only to artist. I'm planning to use it on my bike for functional parts, visible on the outside. I'm also thinking of combining FDM and cured resin also in the same part, using FDM inside to save on costs and choice of materials and snapping cured resin covers on the outside.

My two cents only, fwiw, and patiently awaiting my Titan1 to be delivered end of this year, so i maybe biased :-)