14 DAY TRIAL // There are several different 3D printing technologies in the world, and they don't all have the same potential for speedy delivery. Stereolithography is the sort most inclined towards speed though, and the Kast claims to be the fastest model yet.
It's not clear exactly how quickly the Kast prints, as it has never been stated, not by observers and not by the founders of Kast3DP, Nirvana Jay and Compiler Liu.
Not that shocking though, considering that, technically, the product doesn't exist yet. Or if it does, the prototype hasn't been revealed yet.
That will only happen once the Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign gets posted, which won't be for a while.
Not too long a time, but still enough that the founders think they should raise some awareness, hype as it were.
Claiming to have invented the fastest 3D printer in the world is a bold statement after all, and making it before the actual release will ensure a good initial level of attention on the part of the world's populace.
Moreover, if Kast delivers on the “fastest” claim, it may mark the shift from the current “standard” 3D printing technology (FDM) to stereolithography.
You see, FDM will always have a certain limit to how fast it can go, because fused deposition modeling relies on an extruder to basically build items drop by drop (micrometer-sized drops to boot).
Stereolithography uses rein tanks, which are cured via exposure to light. It doesn't even have to be ultraviolet light, and depending on the type of resin and how strong the light is, items can be “cured” into the necessary shape quite quickly, by comparison.
Stereolithography 3D printers have another advantage in that if the build chamber is large enough, you can make more than one item at the same time. That's the key to making a 3D printed item quickly: layering the plains directly.
And the best part about the Kast is that, apparently, it's not that expensive at all, at $1,790 / €1,790. Well, the retail price will be closer to $3,000 / €3,000, but early Kickstarter backers will have the luck of the draw as it were. Now we just need to wait for the crowd-funding campaign to be started, and for this vaunted "Retina Casting" to be detailed.
“A traditional desktop 3D printer is made with a motor and a printhead, the object is shaped from a point to a plain, which makes the speed of printing very slow. When I talked with my friends about this technology, we all agree that it should not be the way how 3D printers work, if we can layer plains directly, it will make the printing process way faster, this can be achieved by SLA,” Nirvana Jay explained.