Your Brand’s Color in Resin: Formlabs Offers Custom Colors Delivered in a Week
New Color Resin V5 enables brand-specific or product-matched customized color resins based on any RGB value with consistency, Formlabs says.
Only available in the U.S., 3D printer and material manufacturer Formlabs is offering to deliver virtually any color of resin in one week from quantities as little as one liter. Cost: $99 per liter.
“Color Resin V5 is the newest addition to our General Purpose Resins for Form 4 Series 3D printers, enabling printing of parts in custom colors that represent your brand, product line, or creative vision,” Formlabs said in its product release.
Do you have to have a Formlabs Form 4 LCD 3D printer to use these resins? Well, maybe.
Formlabs could have put these resins in a regular bottle like its Creator Series resins, but instead, chose to offer Color Resin V5 only in the proprietary no-mess cartridges that only fit in Formlabs printers. (The no-mess part is really handy, though.)
Theoretically, you could open the cartridge and use the resin on any 405 nm wavelength LCD printer (Anycubic, Elegoo, 3D Systems, etc.), Formlabs told All3DP, but then there’s no promises about the outcome. Resin color can shift slightly after UV curing.
To ensure your part’s color is true, each order of Color Resin V5 includes a customized Formlabs Print Settings file that differs depending on the color.
“The print settings are fairly different for different colors, as lighter or darker pigments will respond differently to light exposure during printing,” Formlabs’ Senior Product Marketing Manager Eliza Margolin told All3DP. “End-users will be able to download a custom-generated print setting for the Form 4 series printers through our slicer, PreForm, using a unique color identifier for their particular shade.”
To post-process, Formlabs recipe says to wash the part in Form Wash for 10 minutes, then, post-cure at room temperature in Form Cure (2nd Generation) for one minute or Form Cure (1st Generation) for five minutes.
What Colors Are Possible in Resin 3D Printing?
Color-matching has never been easy with resin despite being highly sought after by product engineers and industrial designers who crave not only prototypes in the same color as the final product but also final products that match their brand.
Color Resin V5, as the name suggests, is not Formlabs’ first answer to custom color demand. In 2017, it launched Color Kit, which is still available for the older Form 3 printers at $175. It includes a base resin — in a cartridge — and five bottles of color pigment in cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and white, plus syringes for measurement and a recipe book.
The new customized color offering isn’t a CMYK match to your brand; rather it works on an RGB spectrum. To order a custom color, you enter Hex codes or RGB profiles. For example, All3DP dark blue is R0 G80 B150.
The Formlabs store page will show you your requested color and the closest achievable color in Color Resin V5, with the ability to use sliders to make slight adjustments.
For resin 3D printing, colors that are too saturated with pigment will not print correctly because the pigment blocks the 405 nm light used to cure the resin. So, while tens of thousands of custom colors can be directly printed in resin, certain colors or effects are not available due to their effects on curing, according to Formlabs.
Although Color Resin V5 doesn’t guarantee Pantone-level fidelity for color-critical applications, the match should be suitable for most prototyping and presentation needs and fills a real gap in color 3D printing.
As far as mechanical properties, Formlabs says Color Resin V5 is commensurate with General Purpose Resins for Form 4 Series 3D printers, “with a small amount of variability depending on the color ordered.”
Each order is manufactured on demand with one week of lead time. Formlabs says it plans to expand the product to other regions “in the near future.”
There’s a New Casting Resin From Formlabs, Too
Since Formlabs added LCD-based resin technology (Form 4) to its lineup of laser-based resin technology (Form 3 printers and older), it has had to develop some new materials, yet nearly every Formlabs resin is compatible on both technologies.
Its new True Cast Resin for the Form 4 is a wax-filled material designed for precision casting of intricate jewelry and complex engineering components, the company says. “Low thermal expansion, minimal shrinkage, and 0.03% ash content ensure clean burnout and consistently excellent casting outcomes.”
Formlabs’ other castable resins, Castable Wax Resin and Clear Cast Resin, also work on the Form 4, but Castable Wax 40 Resin only works with Form 3 printers and older.
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