Elegoo Mars 4 Vs Mars 4 Ultra

okay okay I know loaded thumbnail but I'm not kidding there are things you need to know about these printers before spending money on the wrong one it may seem simple on the outset there's the Mars 4 and the Mars 4 ultra surely the ultra is better than the normal Mars 4 well it depends on what you want because if you want the best print quality then out of the box the Mars 4 ultra is not a better printer and don't get me started on the Mars 4 Max and the Mars 4 DLP those are completely different things and I recommend you check out the reviews of each if you're considering them links above and in the description today I'm focusing on the direct differences between the Mars 4 printers which are the direct upgrades to the previous Mars 3s so hi I'm Ross and this is faux Hammer videos so yeah that's true the Mars 4 ultra is not immediately better quality but don't fret you can make it slightly better quality than the bass Mars 4 with one quick tweak you may already know what it is because I've screamed about it enough but this video is is really for those people wondering shall I get the Mars 4 or the ultra what are the key differences and is that worth the extra Outlet so let's talk about them both printers are almost identical in silhouette the basic Mars has a red lid and the ultra comes in black but as you look closer you'll see that the ultra has a metal chassis whilst the other is plastic no benefit but it's a bit sexier for your money otherwise it's pretty much the same externally power and USB ports are in the same place on both printers and that means that the power's on the back and the USB port is on the front thanks elu however it's worth noting that with the ultra what cheapens the experience slightly is that the metal case is not flush to the upper body and so you do get some slight UV leak during a print it's not a big deal but a rubber gasket wouldn't have gone a miss here inside each printer is what elu is calling a 9k screen but 9k isn't a real thing and even if it was this isn't it for more info on that check out my rant on my Mars phone 9k video but what they do have are screens with 8520 pixels on the x-axis and 4,320 on the Y AIS in an area of approximately 153 by 78 mm this means the pixels are only 18 microns which as you may know is currently the smallest pixel size on the market and therefore capable of the highest quality LCD print out there there's also DLP printers but they are far more for print ACC accuracy than pixel toxel quality now whilst you would expect that each printer provides the same quality because it's the same screen there's more under the surface on each model to consider and I'll come back to that in just a sec each printer comes with a box of supplies including face masks paper filters enough gloves to last about a day maybe three prints and you also get a plastic scraper and a really decent metal scraper and a cheapo USB drive that you should replace with a sandis one ASAP though with the ultra you don't actually need it and I'll come back to that too both printers come with a USB powered carbon filter that plugs into the USB port and these work to remove any nasty resin smells though in my testing it seems that they do nothing to remove voc's when it comes to printer operation the main physical difference is the leveling mechanism the base model has elgu's usual ball joint and I've said for ages that these come dislodged and are a much weaker mechanism to the alternative I know many people have said I'm wrong and yeah my experience with them has been hit or miss but even elegu themselves must agree to a point because the ultra comes with a fourpoint bolt mechanism and I've never had one of these fail when leveled properly and on that regard for either printer just loosen the bolts however many you've got send the bed to the home position then hold down on the plate as you tighten the bolts and for the ultra do this in alternating corners and do it with a quarter turn on each bolt at a time tightening just one corner fully could dislodge the other tighten them all as far as you can just not so much that you thread the socket and you'll know when the Mars 4 ball screw comes loose because you'll find that subsequent prints just aren't sticking to the bed you can relevel it with resin in the vat but it's messy so wear gloves and have tissue handy but anyway once tight just back out to the menu press Z equals 0 and so many people miss this step and it's a big reason for printing fails eligo please put this button inside the Zed movement menu now you may have noticed from the footage that each printer has a different UI whilst the basic Mars UI has everything you could really need it does look a bit Bland and outdated by now by competitor standards the new UI on the ultra is thanks to the whole printer running on Linux OS this UI is not only sexier but a bit more in-depth too the main feature is that you can edit a print settings from the UI and whilst this may seem useless try and imagine you're just dialing in a printer's exposure time there's no need to go and reslice it just edit the exposure on the printer and then go again or or if you get a fail print and you know just a couple of tenths of a second exposure time would fix it just clean the bed change the settings and print again and another unique feature in the ultra menus is Wi-Fi because it's only available on this Mars 4 model so far and the antenna for Wi-Fi actually connects up inside the printer under the hood to get Wi-Fi working all you need to do is use the UI to connect your local network and so long as your PC is on that same network when you slice your models in chit box you'll see a network send option and from here you can just send the print to the printer and start it remotely too no need to ever use that USB drive again now one thing of note is that elu has been pushing for Tango that's the slicer and I'm not keen on this slicer for one reason moving models around the bill plate before slicing is just so cumbersome so until they make this most basic of functions easier I'm not touching it so as mentioned I've been using chitu box for all my slicing but there is an issue I've found when I print Miniatures even with 18 Micron prints I'd still enable anti-aliasing on them just to eradicate all the visible voxal and layer lines but these printers now use eligo proprietary. Goo format and this is still new and is having some teething issues for one when you enable anti-aliasing the far size is absolutely huge sometimes so large that the files won't actually fit onto your USB drive but the slicer won't warn you and you'll end up printing a truncated file which will just fail at a certain percentage through and the other problem is that well anti-aliasing just doesn't work at least in the case of the satin printers anyway but on the Mars 4S when I enabled this it caused everything on the lcd's horizontal axis to weirdly merge supports and all of Parts just blended into different parts of the models now at least on the Saturns you could export your slices in the CB format and resolve both of these issues entirely with the Mars though you're stuck with do goo unless you send it wirelessly and it uses CB as as default now look eligo will remedy this and chances are it's fixed before my video even goes live so make sure you do the latest firmware updates at least on the ultra that's as easy as pressing the option in the menus and it'll do it over the internet now the final thing I want to talk about before print quality is the screen protector now I accidentally said in one of my reviews that there is no screen protector yet the elegu website says the mar 4 comes with a plastic screen protector and the ultra comes with a tempered glass one but I can't see or feeler screen protector on either printer if there is one there then it's under the tape around the LCD which makes replacement tricky if not impossible now both printers did come with a sheet of plastic on the screen that clearly said remove before print but under those was nothing was this the screen protector elu wrong about it or have I just been unlucky with the QA tester who checked both of these printers and my satins if you've got one of these or any of these and have got similar findings please let me let me know down in the comments cuz I'm wondering if it's just me also while you're looking at stuff below the video if you are considering buying either of these printers it would do us as solid if you would just click our affiliate links in the description before making a purchase this cost you nothing but a click and will'll make a commission but more importantly it tells elu that our videos are valuable to you it means they keep sending us printers and we can do more reviews for you in the future in the case of this I was sent the ultra and I bought the normal Mars myself just to do some comparisons right quality now both printers are great and if you watch my Mars 4 Ultra review you may have thought I was hating on that printer I wasn't I said the printer's great but ACF is a bad thing and whilst I'm saying the printers are great I just can't say amazing because in this generation we simply haven't had the quality jump we had when we went from say 4K to 8K and even that wasn't that huge when we look back now 2K to 4K was big but when we look back between now and 2K it has hasn't been that huge a jump prints have been fine since then but the point is we're now well beyond the point of diminishing returns these are great they just aren't going to wow anyone who's had a last generation printer if you're going from 2K to this then oh my God but you'll get the same reaction if you went from 2K to 4K or 2K to 8K so it is what it is let's stop judging these around quality it's great here but it's not mindblowing and the thing is in order to get the most Bo out of a super high resolution printer like this you're going to need a resin capable of rendering that detail and all the ones I've seen which are this sharp are very brittle and by polling my own Community I found that most people don't use those resins by the odd few specialist cases most people just use standard or more durable resins so that the models they print can actually survive basic transportation and this is exactly why we released wargamer because it's the perfect balance of sharpness and durability for Miniatures and you can see how detailed it is and yet it's still smooth where it needs to be and models printed with this are just like store-bought plastic models if not a bit more durable and have the benefits of being sharper because they're 3D printed now when it comes to these printers you need to know that the ultra uses a different type of release film now whilst I've seen no indication that the ultra Z AIS motor is any faster this film will allow the resin to release 30% easier so you can up your print speed settings just a tad but the drawback is because this ACF film is frosted it will diffuse the projected image on each layer and that will soften the prints now don't get me wrong these prints aren't bad and this diffusion is another element that reduces layer and voxel lines but it's a very analog way to do it I much prefer the accurate control from using printer settings and enabling anti-aliasing whilst keeping the print as sharp as possible however I've now had mixed results with ACF film on most printers it does does soften the print and shows some weird crazy cross-hatch lines on the surface and voger has shown this on his videos too just like Uncle Jesse but for some reason I still don't understand I just don't get this with the satin 3 perhaps that's a different brand of ACF or I just got lucky and there's a bit of a lottery with the material over how good it is when you get it but in the case of the Mars 4 ultra the ACF did diffuse my prints and leave a cross-hatching on every surface however you can easily Swap this CCF with the clear PFA film that you just get on the normal Mars 4 and I know I had complaints that I should have just done this earlier by swapping the ACF like Bogman did but I knew the Mars 4 was coming and if I'd done that I wouldn't have then been able to do this test where I used the ACF on the base Mars 4 to now the good news is when you use PFA on the ultra the prints are as good as the Mars 4 if not slightly better the ultra uses a fral lens which directs lights upwards towards the build plate without this you do get some LCD blow difference wise if you squint and turn your head and convince yourself a little then the ultra is slightly better than the Mars 4 when using PFA or is it I don't know it's not enough that it matters and similarly with the Mars 4 stick some ACF on this and it blurs the print but you can lift faster so in summary if you want the ultimate quality from an entrylevel siiz printer both of these are absolutely Ace but the Mars 4 ultra needs you to replace the ACF film with PFA if you want to get that extra quality most people have just opted to buy a second vat and have one with PFA and one with ACF so that they can choose fast or detail depending on what they want at the time but the ultra is still well worth the small upgrade price to me just for the ease of use that's Wi-Fi and the more stable build plate leveling mechanism and if you are looking at one of these and your budget slightly bigger don't discount the satin 3 range because honestly the difference in print quality from this compared to the Saturn 3s which have the convenience of a bigger blate I'd go for the Saturn 3 any day of the week the difference there is nothing I can't even tell even under a macro lens I can't see it but anyway we're talking about the marzes yeah the Mars 4 is worth it to me to go for the ultra is it worth it to you well that's for you to decide and whatever you go with that is the best decision I can only show you the door you have to walk through it please click the like button if this helped you and drop a comment below to feed the YouTube algorithm so we can help more people just by being seen I want to say thanks for watching and thanks to our members who got Early Access to this video along with many others and exclusive content too so until next time hle of Easter babies faux hammer [Music] out

Channel: FauxHammer

Views: 32,704

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Id: mxJmg6cwreM

Length: 14min 7sec (847 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 10 2023