While the company did not have an exact cost available at CES, they did estimate that the final retail price would range between $1,500 and $2,000, which is considerably cheaper than the $3,500 Form 2. Houmin Li explained to tech blog Fabaloo how the Slash works: That makes the machine relatively autonomous so it shouldn’t need to be monitored too closely, and it also has built in Wi-Fi so it can be controlled and monitored from any mobile device. The resin canister is mounted upside down on the outside of the printer in a pretty slick looking dock on the side, so theoretically the printer will never run out of resin mid-job. In addition to the new LCD curing method, the Slash also has what sounds like a proprietary automated resin leveling system that keeps the optimal amount of material in the tank at all times. But the Slash uses an LCD light projector that is capable of selectively filtering UV light, which allows the entire layer to be printed instantly. A laser is only capable of hardening very small sections of resin at a time, like a pencil drawing a picture. It is that minor change in how the resin is hardened that makes all the difference and produced finished models at blisteringly fast speeds.

While it is a resin-based 3D printer like the Form 2, rather than using a single laser point to cure the liquid resin it uses a new LCD masking technology. The San Diego-based company has been developing the technology for the Slash for the better part of eighteen months, and CES was the first time that anyone got a look at it.

Not only is it going to be able to print up to fifty times as fast as the Form 2 SLA 3D printer from Formlabs, but it also offers a similar layer resolution and is expected to cost almost half as much. As the first product of new 3D printer startup UNIZ, the Slash is going to completely change the game for desktop, light-cured resin SLA printers. It says a lot about how much exciting 3D printing news there was at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas when a new 3D printer as exciting as the Slash 3D Printer didn’t get more coverage than it did.

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