Designing the WORLD'S BEST RESIN PRINTER

I've spent the last year looking at all of the top resin printers on the market there are some good ones and unfortunately some bad ones but right now at the start of the new year I want to look to the future I really want to just go on a journey of imagination we have all these great printers but what will the future bring what should the future bring and I'd love to hear your thoughts too what do you want am I right am I wrong please drop your thoughts down in the comments section as I plan to use them in future videos at the very least I hope this will serve as a wakeup call for the brands out there making these printers it should also make it easy for someone new to have a point of reference a list of boxes they should tick if they want to create the world's next leading consumer resin printer so let's get on with making things easy for the printer brands by telling them what we want hi I'm Ross and this is f Hammer videos so for the format of this video I want to go through all the different features and functions of a printer and talk about who's given us the best as a springboard for what we want going going forward and I was going to end with the style of the printer once going through all of the different features we'd finish on the housing to put this all in but in reflection if I'm watching this I'd kind of want to be able to picture it in my mind up front so when choosing the style of the best 3D printer out there I'd like to take some massive design cues from the hay Gear's ultracraft reflex I mean this is an easy pick surely the machine is gorgeous but beyond that there are a ton of functional elements in its form factor too I mean I don't know anybody who likes lift off Lids except maybe the few people who use their printers in a print farm and never have the lids on anyway because they just keep the whole place at room temperature there have been a few other printers with liftup lids but the two which come to mind most recently are the Frozen Mega 8ks and the Nova 3D whale 3 whilst the Frozen model has a nice strong hinge mechanism that keeps the lid in place as you lift it or lower it both printers suffer from the rais lid protruding out the back meaning meaning you need your printer a good distance away from the wall the gk2 has a lift up lid but the hinges are a bit weak and the rear chassis curves a good 2/3 around the sides as it covers around the build area the reflexes lid is both angled and hinged in such a way that it clears plenty of space for accessing the printer's internals whilst only taking up additional height in your workspace rather than empty depth too but yeah in taking up height they would lose a lot of customers in those forementioned print Farms who just don't have that height spare so however it's done design the lid mechanism in such a way that with only a few screws or such you could swap this mechanism over to a lid which can be removed entirely by just pulling it towards you and away from the machine but it's not just the functional feature of that design either the visual style of the machine and the materials all feel robust and solid even the colorway makes this come across as a more professional tool than the Cheapo plasticky of more affordable models like most elegu and any cubic machines I do wish however the lid was more translucent because it's hard to see inside this one and I also wish it was a brighter orange what it matches my branding of course I want a metallic gray and orange printer when we look inside the machine the next thing I want to talk about is the build plate when it comes to this component adherence is key and I suspect many people would want me to say they should come with a magnetic build plate now I do see the benefit in this where at the manufact ERS who installed them in such a way that would ensure that they won't come un stock but I see so many issues with people self installing third party ones that they make me nervous to the point that I'm not going to try them but as I said I do see the benefit that you can easily pop these off and the flex will allow you to break models base layers away much easier now personally I don't care if this build surface is textured or even laser etch like the satin printers or smooth like on the gk2 once you've got your base layers dialed in properly you should have no adherence issues during print and no over adherence after a print though got to consider everyone and if a bill play isn't smooth you'll end up with some texture and that could put off some buyers who do resin print direct from the plate rather than support models so I guess yeah if done right I would like to see removable flexible surfaces properly integrated into printers perhaps in a variety of styles and textures like on fdm printers it could be cool if they add this I just hope it includes some kind of Notch for easy one-handed alignment the other thing I want to talk about here is the shape of the build plate because so far only uniformation made a build plate that combats this and that's a build plate that keeps the top out of the vat and yeah the gk2 plate may look heavy and clunky but it's actually quite light because well it's plastic but I'm sick of having to wait every time a print is complete for the resin to run off the plate or to need to scrape it off myself before I can move the plate to my workbench for cleaning so if we aren't getting removable flexible print surfaces let's at least keep the top of the bill plate out of the resin please now when it comes to the connection to the Zed arm well it's easy this one enough with the bolts people and if you're going to do bolts then do the asymmetrical Leever style used on the Nova 3D whale SE or the elu Jupiter SE because they are much easier to loosen and tighten but ideally a nice latch as seen on the gk2 or the ultracraft reflex would be ideal because that's really simple to put the bill plate in and pulled the latch down to lock it in place one-handed because your other hand is probably holding models or a tool or is just covered in resin for the Zed rail I'd say we'd like two rails but I think that's obvious no matter how big or small the print bed is stability across the width of the arm is key and when it comes to the screw for the mechanism the ball screws are much smoother than lead screws so yeah I'd really like to see more of those imprinters going forward especially if you want to be classed as a quality one as for the rotation of of this screw well manufacturers I think should be aware that we really need a motor capable of a 20 Micron increment of the plate lift height we already have screens with sub20 Micron pixels let's make sure we can match that in the Zed height too or at the very least hey Brands why don't you start publishing the minimum step distance with your printers if it's six microns cool but just tell us clearly at least then we can reduce the layer height to 18 microns instead of rounding up to 20 and having the printer compensate for us every few layers please just allow us to be accurate and when it comes to speed well the minimum movement speed I've Ever Needed on PFA film is 60 mm a minute or also known as 1 mm a second so it needs to be able to go at least this slow if it goes too fast it won't work with some of the higher quality resins and by quality I mean print quality and for those out there who want fast printers well the brands are now competing with the likes of the Frozen Mega 8ks which is a apparently capable of 1200 mm a minute or 20 mm a second and yeah that's far beyond what the materials and pull forces are capable of but since it's been done let's just call this The Benchmark set and let the materials catch up next on to the vat and the first bit is simple make it metal so you don't look cheap but if you are going to make it plastic at least make it translucent so that the few times when we're using translucent resin we might be able to see the layers before they start to rise out of the vat that would be handy and you should also all everyone should put a protruding Sprout on one corner not just a different shaped corner but an actual spout that sticks out of the vat again like on the ultracraft reflex so at least then when you're pouring resin out of it it doesn't run down and under the vat and risk going onto the Fe or just drip everywhere and the other thing this must have is an integrated heater within the vat itself this has been done on the Apex maker X1 it's the most efficient way to heat resin and it should be adopted by every brand and be in every printer perhaps I don't know give us the option to get a vat without it to save costs but there should definitely be an option for a heat on every single printer made going forwards and I know people talk about chamber heaters but they warm the resin in the vat last after heating the air in the chamber and the already cured model they're certainly useful as an addition to a vat heater or a heater below the resin chamber but alone they're not the best approach as for a release film well this might not surprise anyone PFA all the way for quality but ACF needs to be available as an option for those happy to sacrifice a bit of quality for an improved print speed and finally when attaching the vat to the printer no more bolts please once again I'll sight The ultracraft Reflex here give us some nice latches or like the gk2 have a way to lock it in place and whilst you're at it put some comfortable handles on the vat itself too please and finally something that I'm just just making up out of nowhere I'd really like someone to come up with a better way of attaching the release film to the vat itself because the current process just it takes forever to swap the film on any printer that's our main technical Parts covered I want to quickly talk about an important function leveling first off instead of spending the whole video imagining what we want let's talk about what we don't want and what we don't want is the stupid elu ball mount on any printer and to the seven of you who have never had problems with yours feel free to to voice your opinion in the comments below I know you will and I like when you do it because your interactions increase the reach of this video so thanks for your help while you're having a go at me look I know I'm having a crack But please understand that I've seen more comments in agreement with this than the few of you who don't need to relevel every three or four prints and the typical fourpoint screw mechanism used on every other printer out there is certainly the better option when done right but honestly neither of these are the best and that's what this video is about right the best of everything the best mechanism I've seen so far for leveling the plate is used on printers like the Apex maker X1 Frozen's Mega 8K printers and the gk2 just to name a few of them these use a set of inner grub screws that set the level of the bed To Each corner and then four outer screws which go in the opposite direction to lock them in place it's easy to level these when you understand it but because I'm yet to see one like this unlevel itself in my opinion they should be pre-leveled from the factory anyway and whilst we're on the inside of this imaginary printer let's talk about some other things we want to get inside there shall we one is a carbon filter like what elu has been giving us but a better one these shouldn't be running for the whole print because that just wears them out faster but it's definitely better to have one circulating the air inside the chamber and therefore keeping it running through the filter over and over rather than what elgu's done with the Mars mate and pump it all out into your room and it'd be nice to see these with some kind of air quality sensor inside the chamber too so then at least you know when it's safer to open the lid this is probably super expensive but again guys we're wishing for stuff here and despite this being in there I'd still also like to see an optional vent cover like we have on pretty much any of elgu's large printer lids and also on the mega 8 KS from Frozen with this at least we'd have the option to pump Vapors outside and then there's the resin pump I've said many times that well I'm personally not a fan of these because they're just too messy if you're going to do one do it but it needs some way of being compatible with all the bottle types or give us some empty containers like any cubic did with the wash and cure Max and the flip your bottle upside down options never seem to do so well the one on the Nova 3D printers just worries me and the one on the ultracraft reflex is well it's over engineered and in both cases when swapping the bottle out they drip everywhere so if you are going to offer this then I like Frozen's approach make it an optional extra for those people who don't mind paying more to have it and keep the pr inter costs down a bit and speaking of Frozen one thing they added on the MTI 8K that completely failed was the camera but this is not a bad idea for a feature if you're going to do this you should do this take a leaf out of Bamboo's book and put a couple of very good bright lights in your chamber so we can actually see the model printing when checking on it overnight and not just a silhouette because the only light in the room comes from outside of the printer case and since most cameras are widescreen it would make sense to orient it sideways however so we can see more height than width in the image make sure it's a decent 1080p camera but give us the option to upgrade to 4K if you can and make sure the printer automatically creates time lapses by taking a photo when the bed lifts for each layer you might be thinking that's an arbitrary feature but actually if you included that function everyone online would share videos of your printer on social media saying look at this that I printed on that yes it's an expensive component guys but it's also free marketing afterwards so moving out of the printer and back to the externals I'd like to talk about ports the power socket hole needs to be on the back of the printer along with any type of network interface such as ether a or anything else special that you want to put on there that's used by just a handful of people USB ports should be on the front if you're going to add Wi-Fi and you should add Wi-Fi because in this day and age even some toasters kettles and microwaves have Wi-Fi but if you're going to add Wi-Fi then please make sure the aerial for it is inside the chassis and not sticking out the side somewhere and the remaining key feature is well it's the interface with the printer this needs to be a capacitive touchcreen and my favorite interfaces so far are between the satin 3 Ultra and the Apex maker X1 the former has a lot of controls and it's very intuitive everything is well translated and all the options are in a sensible place but the much larger approach taken by Apex maker is really impressive it's just a shame that it's let down by a few unintuitive icons and an incomplete translation as a note to all printer makers this is one of the most important features of your machine it's how your user commands the printer to do things make it sexy make it fast and make all of the most common features be on the front and most obvious screen secondary functions on the next and any anciliary function should be on a third or even fourth level that's it also when the printer's printing show us meaningful info show us a Rend of what the currently exposed layer looks like show us some info about the temperature and other settings that are happening inside the machine at the time that are important that you might want to know when a print is printing but more than anything please show us a clear progress bar with a countdown timer telling us how long in time until the print is done and then external to this but also in controls please stop it with all the proprietary weird apps to connect to Wi-Fi and all that lock too we all know how smart phones work the UI designers surely have one so make all of the setup controls as simple as a phone app and if you're going to make a phone app too so we can I don't know remotely monitor the prints or control it from our phones please make sure it's nothing like reality Cloud's fomo style Hard Sell of absolute crap and its unintuitive storefront be like anchormate be like bamboo handy then build your storefront from a solid and sensible Foundation once everything else Works in a good way I mean it doesn't sound like this is too hard yet so many Brands get it very wrong disappointed and it will be the first thing that was reviewers slate when lazy design makes it harder than it needs to be to use a printer and finally some functional features all printers should come with a built-in series of exposure tests built into the onboard control system or UI and it should walk you through things like leveling and further testing on the UI it should have you print a load of squares at different base exposure times s in one print so you can see which one's stuck and which ones are too stuck from this you can then determine what your best base exposure time is and all printers should do what any cubic offers and let you print a resin exposure Rangefinder at different exposure times on one plate and then the UI should explain to you how to determine which one the best is and it should then let you walk through a series of further test to determine things like best lift speed again this should all be on the UI and explain how to work out what fails look like and finally it should let you then use these daring settings to test different amounts of anti-aliasing to remove all traces of voxal and layer lines with minimal impact on detail would this take some time for a person to do yes but to dial in your printer perfectly anyway you need to do this anyway and everyone in the world needs to learn how to do it with a myriad of different tests and opinions out there hoping that they've guessed and have the best results yet they have no validation this is why the printer should do this and that's how bamboo won the fdm race by having things like calibration already set for the user or it walks them through it and holds their hand from the slicer and I also want to talk about a feature that most of you have probably never heard of these home printers need a way for increasing the exposure time or ideally intensity of just the supports layer times are so fast now anyway that it's the lift and retract speed slowing down resin printing so we have plenty of time to even double up our exposure times and still get fast prints and since we don't have Direct Control why can't a brand already figure out some way of when the bed lowers it cures the objects layer and then without moving dynamically increases the light intensity and cures the supports separately before lifting and why would you do this well this would actually Harden the supports more and make them more brittle which means as you pull them away from the model the supports themselves are the weaker part of the object and are the more likely failure point this is what industrial printers do in order to make parts that are needle thin break away from supports without any damage and doing this would be a complete resin game Cher and another thing that should be baked into slices is some kind of test similar to the cones of calibration where different amounts of material are supported by different thicknesses of material by printing something like this and telling the slicer which ones failed it would go a long way to informing the slicer which supports or even just parts of the model would fail before you even start a print because it would have been able to determine the maximum pull forces on different diameters of material and how much material each of them is expected to hold once we had something like this Auto supports would become an absolute Breeze but that requires someone to actually spend time in developing one of these slices alongside the printer hardware and thus far every brand has relied on chitubox lchi or Tango and done little more than Rebrand one of those apps to their own right then as always we leave the best to last the screen and as I read through this and realize how much of my scripts I've got to go probably should have made this a separate video so I'm going to try and give you the cliff notes and then I'll do that another time now the first thing I want to say is considering the screen is a replaceable part everybody should do what uniformation has done and make it so that it's easy to access that component with pretty much every printer ever it's half a tear down to get access to the screen in order to replace it with the gk2 you pop out four screws flip up a latch for a ribbon cable and put the new screen in now coming back to Imagining the final parts of the printer I honestly don't care what the screen size is the screen size should cater for the needs of the user and the size of the screen and the cost of the printer should increase or decrease accordingly based on how big or how small it is and as I talk about this I've got no idea how these things are made I have no idea how any of this is made nor do I even care I'm just saying what we should have much cleverer people than me need to work out how to actually do it but whatever the screen size is it's the pixel size that matters and please stop chasing 8K 12K 24K 62k whatever let's go through some math and by that I mean insane math that I got off the internet and pulled a couple of bits chucked it all into Excel got a result and it kind of make sense as we've learned from retina displays the human eye cannot see a difference between pixels when there are around 326 pixels per inch and you're holding it about a foot away from your face now this is where I once again talk crazy math in a video but go with me and tell me if my theory is wrong in the comments so here we go first of all yes we'd all love this screen to be DLP but nobody's driving DLP technology forward as much as LCD we are years away from seeing these resolutions on DLP if not decades or even never but with Technologies like cob light sources for even distribution of UV light across the display and forel lenses LCD is actually close to matching the sharpness of DLP now anyway but for the math go with me let's assume we have a pixel density of 326 PPI like on the retina display and let's take the Saturn 3 as our subject to use a pretty standard size of the x-axis print volume which is 28.8 mm in inches this would be around 8.62 in multiplying the width in inches by 326 pixels per inch to tells us that this imaginary screen would have 2,810 pixels on the x-axis so if we divide the 2.88 mm of that access by the number of pixels in it that tells us that we would have a pixel width of 78 microns and let's just assume that this display has Square pixels just to avoid any confusion and I didn't need the printer in the math I could have worked this out from the same just using 1 mm but then I've have nothing to show on screen and this is a printer's video so if the logic of written and the displays is correct and that the human eye can't determine the difference between pixels at 326 pixels per inch or on pixels that are 78 microns in size when they're 12 in away from your eye how then are we able to see voxal lines on prints with screens where the pixels are as low as 50 microns well here's my theory with Retina displays it's a flat 2D plane but your eyes have a special power when you're lucky enough to have two of them you can also register depth an additional Dimension that is not present on 2D screens these three-dimensional objects are also affected by light bouncing off the edges differently which accents the forms and due to the Cinematic lighting I tend to use in my videos I always light subjects from the side which makes things stand out more light things from the front and those voxal lines start to disappear and blur so okay let's account for that special depth Power by doubling the PPI to 652 and using the same math in Excel the pixel size goes down to 39 microns and this is where things start to become a little less obvious this is the same in Zed resolution too for those of you still printing at 50 Micron layer Heights also as an additional FYI most of the industrial DLP printers used in the production of things like Miniatures operate at around 38 microns in pixel size anyway and that's because the industry manufacturers know that this is as much as you probably need and when you're around this size you just need to add the smallest amount of anti-aliasing and you don't need to push the technology further to improve the detail Beyond reasonable bluring the surface on the edge of each layer projection will soften all of that out without any distinguishable loss of detail to the overall piece and I know there's a few of you out there who are still thinking but I've watched your videos F hammer and I can still see voxal lines on your prints with much smaller pixel sizes but again let me stress the retina example on phones is when the phone is 12 in from your eyes that's a lot different to me shooting images of it on my macro lens and you watching it on your big screen the model I always show of me wearing power armor built with parts from atland Forge is about as tall as my thumbnail or 15 mm how many 15 mm can you fit in the area of the screen that you're looking at this model on and again consider that the lighting also accents all of the sharp edges and also when any of us are out there shooting Miniatures to share photos with our friends how big are they on your screen compared to the model itself if it's two times bigger you'd need a printer with 19 Micron pixels to hide those lines and we have that in a way because these new 12K screens have 19 Micron pixels on the x-axis but as I look back at my Mars 4 reviews I can't see any box or lines when I zoom in with its 18 Micron Square pixels only the layer lines are visible and they're 30 microns and if you wanted four times magnification which isn't realistic for Miniatures when you're seeing them on a computer screen you'd actually need 10 Micron pixels for them to Disappear Completely so as I've said now for over a year just enable anti-aliasing and be happy with what your printer does I think no matter what printer screen size we go for yeah we should aim for all printers to have sub 20 Micron pixels and we should print at 20 Micron layer Heights for the most detailed prints which will allow for two times magnification without these lines being significantly visible but even then you may as well enable antialiasing to smooth everything out perfectly anyway and to avoid any light cast highlighting them but the thing I want to see the most is Brands need to stop chasing this resolution metric because well I hope I've kind of theoretically proven here it's pointless and we're all sick of it and besides no matter how good the screens are getting most resins can't render that level of detail anyway I hope my insane math and specious logic Mak sense and I hope you enjoyed coming on this journey with me hope hopefully now we will get some Brands listening and heading towards this more than anything I'd like to see all the companies released finished printers you'll see on my channel I haven't reviewed the Athena yet and that's because they aren't releasing it until it's done and for that alone I have very high hopes for that printer and also printer brands if you're going to give us a USB drive and expect that to be a key part of the machine please give us a decent quality one or just don't bother I want to say thanks for watching and thanks to our members who help us make these videos please consider join in to get some benefits there is a link below this video unless you're on iPhone the link is in the description please don't forget to like hit subscribe the notification Bell but especially leave a comment what do you think what do you want in a future printer until next time life finds a way faux hammer [Music] out

Channel: FauxHammer

Views: 60,610

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Id: JUjIL4IUgZg

Length: 27min 7sec (1627 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 09 2024