3D printer dentistry

How to Choose a Dental 3D Printer for Your Practice or Lab

Additive manufacturing is the latest piece of the workflow in digital dentistry that has become a logical business choice for dental practices and labs, combining high quality with low costs and streamlined workflows. The market has been expanding rapidly, bringing this technology within reach for more businesses.

In this guide, we’ll look at the different 3D printing technologies for dentistry and all of the attributes to evaluate before investing in a dental 3D printer.

New to digital dentistry? Check out our guide to find out more about the difference between analog and digital workflows, and learn what’s involved in integrating 3D printing into your business.

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Today, two 3D printing technologies are common in dental and orthodontic practices and labs: stereolithography (SLA) and digital light processing (DLP).

In stereolithography, a vat of liquid resin is selectively exposed to a laser beam across the print area, solidifying resin in specific areas. Low Force Stereolithography (LFS) technology, used by Formlabs’ Form 3B+ 3D printer, is the next phase in SLA 3D printing that reduces the strain created on a part when peeling it from the resin tank between layers, producing parts with unmatched surface finish, clarity, and accuracy.

Digital Light Processing operates with the same chemical process as SLA and LFS, but uses a digital projector as a light source to solidify the resin, rather than a laser. 

The most common orthodontic and dental 3D printers work by selectively exposing liquid resin to a light source—SLA and LFS a laser, DLP a projector—to form very thin solid layers of plastic that stack up to create a solid object.

The way SLA, LFS, and DLP 3D printers work is similar—the differences in print quality, workflow, available materials, costs, and other factors are bigger from machine to machine more than technology to technology.  

Clear aligner thermoformed over a 3D printed model produced on a Formlabs Form 3B+ dental 3D printer.

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Guaranteeing high-quality, accurate, final parts is the most important concern for any dental practice and lab. Unfortunately, not all 3D printers marketed for dentistry or orthodontics can deliver the quality, precision, and accuracy needed for orthodontic applications. Additionally, comparing different dental 3D printers goes beyond looking at technical spec sheets.

Some manufacturers may try to confuse prospective customers with misleading statements and technical specifications. Most commonly, they masquerade layer height, laser spot size, or pixel size as “accuracy”, even though these specifications do not have a direct impact on the accuracy of final parts. While most companies refer to a single number for accuracy (i.e. 50 microns or 75 microns), these are typically marketing gimmicks, and most commonly represent the limit of resolution of the printer.

The basic units of the SLA, LFS, and DLP processes are different shapes, making it difficult to compare the different machines by numerical specifications alone.

Fundamentally, accuracy and precision depend on many different factors: the quality of the 3D printer, the 3D printing technology, materials, software settings, post-processing, and how well-calibrated all of these systems are, so a 3D printer can only be judged on its final dental parts. 

Always evaluate accuracy studies with real scan data of printed parts. Even better, ask for a sample part or a custom sample of your own design to check the fit or measure yourself against the original design.

Accuracy study of a full arch model with dies printed on the Form 3B LFS 3D printer. Dental 3D printers can produce high-quality custom products and appliances with superior fit and repeatable results.

Another important consideration is how easy it is to use a 3D printer. After all, you and your team are going to have to learn how to use the equipment and maintain it on a daily basis. Try to get a sense of the learning curve that will come with a new 3D printer by watching videos online, visiting a trade show, contacting sales teams, or asking colleagues about their experience.

Modern 3D printers, like the Form 3B+, are designed intuitively so that any lab or practice can get familiar with the process easily.

Consider the types of everyday interactions and maintenance the printer will need once it is up and running. For example, automatic resin dispensing on Formlabs SLA and LFS 3D printers means that you never need to worry about running out of material.

Some printers come with proprietary software to prepare 3D models for printing, such as PreForm for Formlabs 3D printers, while other manufacturers offer off-the-shelf solutions. Features differ by software tool, for example, PreForm offers a one-click print setup, powerful manual controls to optimize support density and size, adaptive layer thickness, or functions to save material and time.  

Curious to see how it works? Download PreFrom for free to test features.

Removing printed parts from the build platform can result in scratches, broken models, or part defects. Formlabs dental 3D printers also offer a build platform that instantly releases parts from the print surface with one simple movement of the stainless steel side handles.

Parts printed with SLA, LFS, and DLP technologies require post-processing after printing. 

First, the parts need to be washed in a solvent to remove excess resin. Biocompatible dental parts also require post-curing. For SLA and LFS 3D printers, Formlabs offers solutions to automate these steps, saving time and effort, and making a big difference in keeping a clean, low-maintenance production environment.

Form Wash and Form Cure automate post-processing, saving time and effort.

Lastly, depending on the design, some parts need to be cleared of support structures. To simplify this step, Formlabs’ Form 3B+ offers light touch supports that greatly reduce the need for finishing and costly labor.

Early 3D printers had an infamous reputation for spending half of their lives in service, with many failed prints even when they were online. Fortunately, the latest generation of printers delivers greatly improved reliability. For example, users of the Formlabs 3D printer reported a success rate of over 95% on millions of prints across tens of thousands of machines. Dig deep into published reliability information, and make sure that a manufacturer has appropriate warranties and service offerings to ensure you’ll be taken care of if service is needed.

When you consider adopting a new technology, it needs to make sense for your business. Dental 3D printer prices have dropped significantly since the early days and the systems on the market today offer the lowest costs for many applications. 

For example, a practice or lab printing surgical guides or dental models to produce thermoformed aligners in-house can often reduce costs by 75-95% for each part compared to outsourcing to labs or service providers—enough to pay for a 3D printer in a few weeks and save many times its price tag over the years.

When you compare dental 3D printers, remember to consider:

1. Upfront costs, including not just the machine cost, but also training, setup, and potentially software.

2. Running costs, best estimated with per-unit material costs.

3. Servicing and maintenance costs. Beware of compulsory service contracts that can cost as much as 20% of the upfront cost of the printer annually.

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Professional 3D printers are some of the most versatile tools found today in dental and orthodontic practices and labs, and the key to their versatility is dedicated materials.

The material selection varies by printer model. Some basic 3D printers can only produce diagnostic models, while more advanced systems can manufacture highly accurate crown and bridge models, surgical guides, and castable/pressable restorations; long-term and biocompatible dental products like splints, retainers, or digital dentures, as well as orthodontic appliances such as clear aligners and Hawley retainers by thermoforming over 3D printed models.

Dental 3D printers enable cost-effective, mass-customized digital production of a wide range of dental products.

Some 3D printers work only with proprietary materials, which means your options are limited to the offerings of the printer manufacturer. Others have an open system, meaning that they can use materials made by third-party manufacturers. 

However, when using third-party materials, it’s important to make sure that the results achieved clinically acceptable quality and accuracy. Furthermore, using biocompatible materials on non-validated 3D printers that claim to be “open” breaks the usage requirements and thus will produce non-biocompatible appliances. Be careful that you know what risks your business takes by using not validated 3D printers and materials.

Surgical guides 3D printed on a Formlabs Form 3B+ dental 3D printer.

Manufacturers release new materials on a regular basis, so there’s a good chance that the printer you buy today will become capable of creating an increasing variety of dental products in the near future.

When thinking about speed in 3D printing, it’s important to consider not just raw print speed, but also throughput.

Raw print speed for SLA, LFS, and DLP 3D printers is comparable in general. As the projector exposes each entire layer all at once, print speed in DLP 3D printing is uniform and depends only on the height of the parts, whereas, SLA and LFS 3D printers draw out each part with a laser. As a rule of thumb, this results in SLA and LFS 3D printers being comparable or faster when printing a single part or smaller parts, while DLP 3D printers are faster to print multiple parts that fill up much of the platform. 

However, there’s a trade-off between resolution and build volume for DLP printers. A small DLP 3D printer might be able to print fast, but you can only fit a few models on the build platform. A different machine with a larger build volume might be able to print more parts, but only at a lower resolution, which means that it might not be accurate enough for printing restorative models or surgical guides that require higher accuracy.

SLA and LFS 3D printers can produce all of these options in one machine and offer practices and labs the freedom to decide whether they want to optimize for resolution, speed, or throughput, depending on the case.

For example, the Form 3B+ LFS 3D printer can produce a single orthodontic model in about 20 minutes with Draft Resin and 8 models per print in ~1 hour, while the large build volume of the printer also allows you to produce up to 18 models at once for overnight “lights out” production. The Form 3BL, Formlabs’ large-format dental and orthodontic 3D printer can produce up to 52 models per print.

Total possible daily production = the number of possible prints in an eight-hour workday + one print overnight

A small build platform DLP 3D printer can quickly produce at most a handful of models at once. As you need to prepare the printer, set up the print in software, and post-process the parts for each print, which results in much higher labor costs per part to fully utilize its production capabilities.

Another important consideration, especially for labs is whether to fulfill capacity with a single machine or multiple units. Production with multi-machine print cells often reduces upfront costs compared to larger-format machines. By buying one low-cost machine at first, labs can test out production methods before ultimately scaling up production with demand. This provides the opportunity to pay for production only when it is needed, rather than making large long-term investments in a rapidly evolving market. Print cells with multiple printers also empower you to create multiple different indications at once and reduce risk through redundancy. If one machine needs servicing, production can be balanced across the rest of the print cell.

Alternatively, large format dental 3D printers, like the Form 3BL, can maximize throughput for every print job and reduce labor needs by requiring minimal operator intervention. 

Multi-machine print cells allow 3D printing for multiple different applications in parallel, balancing production needs and lowering risk through redundancy.

While a few years ago, 3D printers were only affordable to the largest dental labs and milling centers, now they are a common sight in many dental and orthodontic practices and labs.

Consider the factors discussed above and the needs of your business—different solutions might suit some dental businesses better than others. Make sure to do your research, evaluate actual parts, and avoid paying a hefty premium.

Explore the Formlabs Dental Academy for free guides, step-by-step tutorials, white papers, webinars to learn how you can integrate 3D printing into your lab or practice.

Curious to see the quality firsthand? Pick a material and we'll ship you a free sample part 3D printed on the Form 3B+ to evaluate.

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5 Ways 3D Printing has Redefined the Dental Industry

Additive manufacturing has affected many industries, but few stand to benefit as much as the medical fields, including dentistry.

3D printing technologies thrive in an environment where our unique bodies require custom solutions. As a result, the dental industry is going through a rapid digital transformation with digital workflows bringing increased efficiency, consistently high quality, and lower costs to dental labs and practices.

Read on to discover five ways in which the digital workflows are revolutionizing the dental industry.

While dentistry has always required high levels of customization, the industry has traditionally relied mostly on manual methods to create custom appliances. Today, digital workflows enable mass customization in a consistent, automated way, requiring less labor and incurring lower costs.

Everyone has a dentition—the pattern of development and arrangement of teeth—unique to them. Dental indications must, therefore, be made to match each individual patient’s anatomy. With traditional manual workflows, the quality of the finished products is highly dependent on the skills of a given technician. Achieving consistent and high-quality dental products with so many potential sources of error is incredibly difficult and expensive.

Intraoral scanners can capture scans directly from the patient, replacing manual impressions with fast and accurate digital impressions. Alternatively, desktop scanners in dental labs can be used to scan traditional alginate and PVS impressions.

With digital workflows, each dental product is precisely detailed to the specifications dictated by the patient's anatomy. 3D printers are like Swiss-army knives—no other tool can produce such a wide variety of dental products with consistently high quality. Using dedicated materials, labs and practices can use 3D printers to produce orthodontic models, highly accurate crown and bridge models, surgical guides, castable or pressable restorations, aligners, retainers, long-term biocompatible dental products like splints or dentures and more.

Digital technologies simplify workflows, reduce the room for error and the amount of labor required, resulting in time and cost savings on both the lab's and practice's side.

Orthodontics as a dental specialty has come a long way since traditional metal wired braces. While still necessary in some complex cases, removable clear aligners provide an appealing alternative today and have been used to treat millions of patients.

Clear aligners, one of the most popular orthodontic treatments today, couldn't exist without digital technologies such as 3D printing.

Clear aligners couldn't exist without digital technologies; their manufacturing process is a brilliant combination of multiple digital workflows. An orthodontist or dentist first captures an impression of a patient's dentition with a 3D intraoral scanner or takes a traditional impression for the lab to scan. The digital model provides a basis to plan the progressive stages between the current and desired teeth positions. Each stage is then 3D printed and the aligners are thermoformed over these 3D printed molds.

Traditionally, the 3D printers used in this process were large and complex to use and prohibitively expensive. Now, smaller format desktop 3D printers can create molds for thermoformed appliances, opening up the possibility for any lab or practice to produce aligners and retainers in-house and expand production without adding substantial overhead.

Ashford Orthodontics, the largest orthodontics laboratory in the UK produces thousands of clear retainers using 3D printed models.

Digital technologies can augment complex surgical procedures. CBCT, virtual placement planning, and surgical guides are becoming the new standards of care in implantology. With them, the accuracy of implant placement during surgery is all but guaranteed, the risk of surgical complications fall, and clinical results are improved overall. Let's look at the workflow-enhanced production of a surgical guide as an example.

To create a guide, implantologists combine intraoral scan data of a patient's dentition and anatomy of the patient osteotomy from a CBCT or cone beam scanner. Based on the anatomical data, practitioners use CAD software to plan treatment with high accuracy and then use a 3D printer to produce a guide that is ready to be used in surgery.

A 3D printed surgical guide used in surgery.

Formerly, the only ways of producing surgical guides was through milling or 3D printing on industrial 3D printers. But due to the complex and expensive machinery involved, these guides could easily cost hundreds of dollars, which made them cost-prohibitive in most cases. Now with desktop 3D printing, the costs are down by a factor of 10-100X, paving the way for guided surgeries to become the standard.

Traditional denture manufacturing is a time-consuming and labor-intensive analog workflow that involves multiple patient visits and production steps. It is a complex craft with a steep learning curve and dental labs increasingly struggle to find technicians with the advanced skills and expertise required to produce them.

Dentures are one of the latest innovations in digital dentistry. They offer an efficient and cost-effective manufacturing solution and a major step toward the overall simplification of the dental laboratory manufacturing process.

Digital dentures are cost-effective and offer a consistent workflow for a high-quality end product.

Denture production with the digital workflow includes fewer steps and less variability, resulting in a more consistent workflow for a high-quality end product every time. Digital denture designs are also reusable, shareable, modifiable, and easy to reproduce with 3D printing. The affordable hardware, lower material costs, and time savings (less labor) all contribute to a substantial cost advantage over their handcrafted counterparts.

Scanning solutions, software tools, and materials are developing rapidly to take digital dentures to their full potential. As they do, digital dentures are bound to replace or supplement the traditional workflow for an increasing share of the 50 million dentures produced a year globally and pave the way for more inclusive denture solutions for everyone who needs treatment.

At the end of the day, it's the patients who stand to gain the most from the advances in digital dentistry.

Starting with the visit to the dentist or orthodontist, being able to visualize a dental procedure can be as reassuring for the patient as it is helpful for the practitioner. Virtual treatment planning, diagnostic wax-ups, and highly detailed replicas can help patients envision and understand the treatment they will be receiving in great detail, reducing anxiety and increasing patient acceptance.

Highly detailed replicas can help patients envision and understand their treatment.

Considering workflow and treatment improvements, taking an impression of a patient's dentition with intraoral scanning is quicker and more comfortable than traditional alginate and PVS impressions. The products themselves can be more aesthetically pleasing (clear aligners) and treatments more accurate and less invasive (digital implantology and surgical guides). Processes are generally faster as digital elements remove superfluous steps, making the patient's visit quicker and easier.

Precise and consistent treatments mean that patients are vastly less likely to need to return for repeat work on the same problem, saving their time and money. But a satisfied patient is more likely to become a return customer and refer others, contributing to the long-term success of all dental businesses.

These are just some examples of the wider scope of changes that digital dentistry and 3D printing processes are bringing to the dental industry.

Despite the narrative of “traditional vs. digital workflows” used frequently to promote the latter, contemporary dental workflows can combine the best of both. The support of digital workflows translates to a plethora of new possibilities for the industry and a raft of improvements for the customer.

Find out more about how Formlabs is driving this change, learn about the range of dental indications, and request a free sample part for yourself to see the quality firsthand.

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All about a 3D printer in dentistry: features, applications, technologies

The first attempts to use 3D printing in dentistry were made by specialists from Align Technology in the 1990s. Using a 3D printer, mouth guards were made, which served as a start for the development of this technology in the dental industry. The process of making teeth was looked at from a radically new point of view.

But development did not progress as fast as we would like: it took almost 20 years to achieve satisfactory print quality and optimize performance. The first implant was printed by Layer Wise in 2012. In the same year, for the first time, it was possible to implant a patient with a titanium lower jaw, which was made using a 3D printer. Since then, the technology has evolved and raised the quality bar.