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Share the amazing things customers are saying about your business. Double click, or click Edit Text to make it yours.
3D Printing Technology
3D printing has since continued to expand, with affordable 3D printers starting to hit the market, giving hobbyists a chance to design and build their own creations.
This has also brought a rise in numerous 3D printing applications such as medical, dental 3D printing, industrial, model prototyping, jewelry 3D printing, and more.
What is 3D Printing?
3D printing technology has been around for more than thirty years. Since then, a wide variety of 3D printing technologies have been developed. Briefly speaking, 3D printing is the process of using or creating a digital file to produce complex and solid 3D printing models, bringing objects from the digital world into the real world.
Today, we will be focusing on four types of 3D printing techniques: FDM, SLA, DLP, and LCD printing.
Fused Deposition Modeling Printing (FDM)
In an FDM printer, a thermoplastic filament is loaded into the printer. Once the printer reaches a certain temperature, the material goes through the printer’s extrusion head, where it is melted and processed. The filament is deposited layer by layer before it cools and solidifies in place.
Though printing with an FDM printer does come with a few issues such as warping, low dimensional accuracy, and low-resolution printing.
Warping occurs after newly deposited layers shrink after cooling. When this happens, dimensions of printed materials’ are decreased, resulting in the layer underneath it being pulled upwards. Due to its low dimensional accuracy and low resolution, detailed, intricate models can't typically be printed with an FDM printer.
Liquid Crystal Display Printing (LCD)
Let's talk about LCD 3D printing.
LCD 3D printers use a wide array of UV LCDs as a source of light.
These UV LCDs are on an LCD panel and shine directly onto the printer’s build area, flashing an entire layer at once, meaning that an LCD printer’s print quality depends on its LCD density.
We, Amman3D, have a wide range of LCD 3D printers designed specifically for your needs. Those LCD 3D printers are consumer-friendly, easy to use, and suitable for hobbyists, jewelry 3D printing, and dental 3D printing.
LCD 3D Printing vs. FDM 3D Printing
As the 3D printing market grows and becomes much more accessible to the general public, there are a wide variety of 3D printing techniques to choose from these days.
There is resin 3D printing which includes SLA, DLP, and LCD 3D printing, as well as FDM 3D printing and SLS 3D printing. Though FDM 3D printing is thought to be much more common than resin 3D printing, resin 3D printing — specifically LCD 3D printing — is catching up fast, as it can be used to produce high-quality 3D printed models at an affordable price.
Today, let’s take a look at the differences between LCD 3D printing and FDM 3D printing:
LCD 3D printers use liquid resin which instantly hardens into plastic as it is exposed to LED light via an LCD screen. Most of the LCD 3D Printers use ParaLED technology in which an array of LED chips project light through the LCD screen which is then uniformly distributed over the print area.
By contrast, FDM 3D printing, also known as Fused Deposition Modeling, uses plastic filament instead of liquid resin while printing. Plastic filament is deposited into the 3D printer which is when it melts into liquid and prints out a 3D model layer by layer via a nozzle onto the printing area. With FDM 3D printers, warping may occur as layers are deposited. As newly deposited layers shrink after cooling, the dimensions of the 3D models may be affected, causing the 3D printed model to change in shape.