I Got Sent MORE Free Lasers! Are Any of Them Good?

previously i mentioned the phenomenon of being a youtube personality and getting bombarded with many several poorly translated emails per month from chinese companies offering me free samples of junk for review a couple of videos back i mentioned that one of these emails actually five of them in a row offered me a laser engraver so i was intrigued replied to the email and received the or tour laser master blaster whatever it was called and it was a surprisingly fun little thing and an overall positive experience it was such a positive experience that i decided to do it again so i picked another email to reply to replied to it waited a few weeks and this arrived it's huge and then a week later this arrived from the same company unsolicited and then i picked another email to reply to and then waited a few weeks and this arrived and then this and then this for some reason they sent me the same attachment twice but that's all right this is the niji master 2s max this is also called the niji master 2s but it's not called max maybe it's called caleb or penelope and this is the x tool d1 counting the from the previous video that i've since given to my mom i now have experience with four different diode laser engravers so i have some important questions to answer which one's the best which one's the worst and are any of these worth your money at all no i mean let's find out work surface area the little niji which is not the mini by the way they make one smaller than this they do call them any has a work surface area of 170 by 170 millimeters the x tool has a work surface area of 432 by 406 millimeters rather odd size and the max has a work surface area of 810 millimeters almost a meter by 460 millimeters easily double the size of the x tool and the or tour had a work surface area of 400 by 400 millimeters so just marginally smaller than the x tool over there construction the uh both the niji's and almost every other laser engraver on the market is built from aluminum extrusions they have plastic v-rollers that ride on those aluminum extrusions and they have some other material that tie the extrusions together in the case of orter that other material is i believe aluminum possibly painted steel and in the case of the niges it's rather fittingly laser cut acrylic the x tool on the other hand is different these rails are still aluminum extrusions but they're c-channels and they're super thick and it doesn't have plastic v-rollers writing on aluminum extrusions it has steel rollers riding on steel rails does this beefed up construction add any practical upshots no and quite frankly this theme seems hilariously overbuilt for a hobby grade diode laser engraver but it looks nice and that might make you feel better about buying it connections all four of these laser engravers can work over a hardwired usb connection in addition both of the nigis have bluetooth although it's best not to think of them as having bluetooth since i couldn't get absolutely anything to connect to them while i'm at it the usb connection was also pretty finicky and unreliable there were a ton of drivers to install none of which worked the first time and i have to keep restarting light burn to make sure that these things stay connected it's annoying the one here also has wi-fi and much unlike the bluetooth on the nigis it's actually really good the wi-fi connects within seconds of turning the machine on and it's been so flawless and reliable that after the initial setup i haven't plugged this thing into usb again it's been really good let's talk about english i know i know bear with me i promise this won't go anywhere all of these lasers are from chinese companies which means from time to time some bad translations pop up that's totally fine translations are hard and english is a silly language but neji put no effort at all into proofreading their translations with some pretty hilarious results first and foremost there's the warning labels on the front of both of these laser engravers that say mind the fire wear goggles that one's actually pretty reasonable no touching and mirror object that one's open to interpretation here's an excerpt from the manual after a period of time the belt may be aging and relaxation resulting in image printing offset you can use screwdriver and inner hexagonal wrench to adjust the screws at the two positions of the machine so as to retighten the belt i mean i get what it's trying to say but that's not how we say those things then there's my favorite typo of all time it's on niji's website for each one of these diode lasers they have a chart that has a list of different materials and the speed and power setting of the laser you need to cut all the way through it well in this list of materials they have something called three millimeter ply never heard of a tree before i wonder that's part of the dogwood family to be clear i'm not making fun of these translations because haha they don't speak english good that it'd be silly i don't speak mandarin or cantonese i'm making fun of these translations because they could have at least proofread them a little bit but no instead we get charts telling us that we can do marking and craving on accurately software i had to re-record most of this video because right in the middle of filming xtool dropped a big old bombshell on me we'll get to that in a second with laser engravers you can use whatever software you'd like there's a few of them out there but the most common one and the one i use is called light burn it's full featured easy to use blah blah blah but with the xtool d1 here you can't use light burn or whatever you want to use you can only use xtool's own software laserbox basic it's essentially a stripped-down version of the software that they ship with their big co2 laser the makeblock laserbox that was until last week when i got an email from xtool that said we shipped out a new firmware update and now you can use this with light burn yeah you can use this machine with light burn now previously i went on ad nauseam about all of the flaws and oddities about the laser box basic software but now that it's not the only software you can use none of it matters i'll be honest though getting this thing to work with light burn was a huge pain in the butt essentially all you're doing is updating the firmware which you do through laserbox basic then you download the device prefs package and then import that into light burn and bob's your auntie everything's golden but that didn't work quite right for me laser box basic didn't update the firmware it just sat there on the updating screen for literally hours so i had to go through the alternative way of doing this which was well documented on their website to be fair but on a mac anyway and involve terminal commands and running python scripts and none of these terminal commands were straight copy and paste i had to modify all of them so i imagine to the normal person that doesn't have terminal experience this whole process would have been completely impossible i managed to get it done but i have terminal experience hopefully if you have to go through this process and you don't have terminal experience the firmware updater in your version of laser box basic just works hopefully the actual d1 operates a bit differently from other laser engravers most laser engravers like the little nesji here use absolute positioning when you start up the machine it does its little homing move so it can find its zero zero position in light burn the canvas you have to draw on is a grid that represents the work surface area of the machine so if i draw a circle on this grid at position 100 100 this machine is going to engrave a circle at position 100 100. the x tool d1 on the other hand uses relative positioning in laserbox basic you still have a canvas that represents the work surface area of the machine but it doesn't matter where on this canvas you draw whatever it is you're going to draw when you hit the go button it's going to crop down around to only what you've drawn then in this screen you're given a dot that represents the start point of your engraving that you can place wherever you want this dot represents the crosshair laser beam that's in the laser module head of the one so if i want to engrave a circle right in the middle of this spray paint can for whatever reason i can go into laser box basic draw a 10 millimeter wide circle move my start point to the middle of this circle then i can move the crosshair laser beam so that it's right in the middle of that paint can lid hit the go button on the machine and now i have a circle pretty close to in the middle of this paint can lid it's worth mentioning that light burn also has a start from current position option so you can use all these other laser engravers with relative positioning just like you can with the x tool and it works fine but for some reason the first time i tried this option this is what happened [Music] okay that's enough that's enough i don't know what all that was about i told it to engrave a circle and now that the x tool supports light burn you can use this with absolute positioning but it's terrible at it the limit of travel on the y-axis is soft it's bouncy because this is where the cable goes there's no hard stop as such the repeatability is terrible i tested this out i engraved a circle at position 200 200 honed the machine and then engraved the exact same circle again and it didn't hit the same target twice now does this whole relative versus absolute thing make a big difference not really but it's something you should know about the x tool before you consider purchasing one personally i think the whole crosshair laser thing combined with xtool's very intuitive software make this the easiest to use laser and this is the one that i keep going back to for all of my silly engravings focus all these machines have slightly different methods of setting the focus on the laser module the or tour comes with a little bar that represents its focal length you set the bar under the laser module unscrew the thumb screw drop the module down onto the bar and your focus is set the process with the nedge max here is almost the same but they don't ship any sort of focal length spacer with the machine and they don't tell you what the focal length is i had to look it up i found out it's 22 millimeters so i made my own little spacer here to drop underneath the laser module head and now the process is close to what the or tour is except i have to use a hex key instead of a thumb screw so it's not a tool free operation so basically it's the same as the auteur just less convenient the process is the same on the x tool here except slightly more convenient instead of having a bar you can lose it has this arm that drops down on the side of the module drop that down loosen the thumb screw and now your focus height is set the focus procedure with the nigi penelope on the other hand is completely different this is not a fixed focus laser module it's adjustable focus so instead of physically moving the module up and down you tighten and loosen the lens cap on the bottom to adjust the focus of the laser so you just fiddle with it until the laser spot on your material is as small as possible caleb or clyde or penelope has a five and a half watt laser the same as the ortur the de one has two diode lasers in here that join beams to create 10 watts of output which is pretty impressive for a diode laser but not quite as impressive as the max this unit also has two diode lasers that join together but its power output is 15 watts the most they've ever seen out of a diode laser which is pretty impressive it's just too bad they choose to lie about it all over niji's website and in several embedded videos on their website this is called a 40 watt laser which is not true i already said this is a 15 watt laser that is the output power of this thing so why are they calling it a 40 watt laser because that's the input power of the laser module the output power the number that actually matters is 15 watts but it draws 40 watts of power so that's what they're calling it and that is incredibly deceptive and misleading okay so it's not a 40 watt laser but at 15 watts it's still the most powerful diode laser here and the most powerful one that i've ever seen so how does this 15 watt niji compare to the 10 watt x tool d1 worse much worse in fact it did so poorly on the first cut test that i thought i've got to have something wrong here so i fiddled with the focus a little bit more dispensed with the focus bar and adjusted it by eye and the results improved marginally but it still did much worse than the results i got from the x tool d1 here's the cut test that i drew up in light burn it's a grid with the speed on the x-axis and number of passes on the y-axis and even at a glance you can see how much better the x-tool did than the max here the x-tool was able to cut all the way through this three millimeter thick or eighth inch thick piece of plywood in one pass at 240 millimeters per minute meanwhile the max could only do it at 120 millimeters per minute and across the board you can see the x-tool was able to cut all the way through this material at much higher speeds and just for funsies i ran the same test on the five and a half watt little niji and this is how well it did not exactly useful for cutting it's more of an engraving tool but it can still do the job in a pinch i suppose and for more funsies i also ran these tests on quarter inch thick plywood and the max was not able to cut through this at all the x tool did an okay job still not the right tool for cutting through quarter inch thick plywood but it can do it the max could not like i said i already gave the ore tour to my mom so i couldn't run these cut tests on it too but it's also a five and a half watt laser like the little niji so it's more for engraving duty while you can cut through thin plywoods like this with a five and a half watt laser you're not going to want to buy it for that sort of purpose just like in the last video with the uh i threw a bunch of samples at these laser engravers just to play with them i tried cutting wadded up fabric and caught it on fire i turned this coaster into a roller coaster i turned leather into a disgusting smell and with the higher powered lasers the axe tool and the max i turned eighth inch plywood into these little finger jointed boxes in addition to the samples i tried xtool sent me a box of samples to try it included stuff like raw cardboard interestingly cardstock some more thin plywood a very skillfully chosen sheet of acrylic they also sent me some other stuff like this lovely blue tumbler an assortment of coasters one of which is made of slate or shale some sort of rock material a blink photo frame that i proceeded to ruin and a rock not like the country like a rock most of it was pretty boring but i was really interested to see what happened when i tried to laser engrave the slate coaster or whatever rock it was i didn't know what to engrave on it so i just engraved a bullseye that's off-center what's interesting is i don't know what the laser did to it if it caused micro fractures on the surface or if it caused the surface to melt and beat up slightly but the texture that it engraved is raised it did the same thing to this rock here it caused a raised texture when i engraved it and yes this is a very creepy looking smiley face i'm terrible at drawing in addition xtool also sent me an attachment a rotary roller for engraving cylindrical objects then through some sort of mix mix-up they sent me a second one i played with the rollers a bit i engraved the focus bar that i had to make for the niji an aluminum beverage can the thermos they sent me which i screwed up because i put the roller in backwards so it printed the image not only upside down but mirrored and a stainless steel yeti which i also screwed up but for different reasons these rollers are incredibly easy to use first of all to change the width of the rollers all you have to do is unscrew one end of it and then the other end slides back and forth between three different indentations and it stays clogged with the timing belt the whole time it would be difficult to make this easier to use this is in stark contrast to the rotary roller attachment that niji and ortura cell which are built like erector sets they're completely componentized this thing ships as is and to change the width of those rollers you basically have to rebuild the entire attachment then to actually use the rollers it's just as easy you plug it into the port provided on the board then in laser box basic there is a toggle that says cylindrical working and that's it that's all you have to do to use these rollers it could not be easier in addition because these rollers take up so much vertical space x tool sells these little screw-on foot extensions that act as riser blocks to lift the laser up higher off the ground why do no other lasers come with a riser block like this it's such a simple idea annoyances caleb this has bluetooth but i couldn't get anything to connect to it is that the only complaint that can't be right max i couldn't get anything to connect to the bluetooth on this either to save money they mounted the control board on the end of the gantry here which means the usb and power supply connect to a moving target which can be really annoying at times the only thing that keeps this cable from being in the way is its stiffness and uprightness and i imagine over time this cable will lose its stiffness and uprightness be in the way and they don't make laser engraver viagra this is true for both nijis but their website is all kinds of wrong as an example on their website it says this laser can cut through three millimeter thick plywood in one pass at 420 millimeters per minute well i tested that and no it couldn't come anywhere near that number another metric on their website is it says the maximum speed is 1 000 millimeters per second one meter per second that's 2.2 miles per hour no it cannot move that fast whatsoever in fact i tested it to see what the actual max move speed is and the fastest i could get it to move is 4 000 millimeters per minute so i don't know where this number came from in fact their website is so wrong i wouldn't be surprised at all if this is actually not a 15 watt laser but as i haven't the foggiest idea how to measure laser output i'm just gonna have to take their word for it i noticed when engraving this work surface grid here that there's lots of alignment issues every other row is not in line with the row before it and in several places where it was meant to engrave the same line twice it didn't hit the same mark in the x direction twice so it engraved two lines next to each other in some cases it's offset by almost a millimeter which when you're talking about a cnc machine is way too little precision i also noticed when doing these cut tests here that the top line of each one of these squares seemed to be shifted to the left by again almost a millimeter you can see it over cut on this corner in undercut on this corner but wait there's more the nijimax is too big for its own good let me show you what i'm talking about by engraving a perfectly straight horizontal line and now i shall do this home the machine and draw the same line again and there's the issue not only is this second line shifted downward it's also significantly skewed from the first line that i engraved y-axis movement on the max is controlled by two completely independent stepper motors on either side of the gantry so if the gantry gets bumped out of square which as you can see is rather easy to do it has no way to re-square itself thanks to the singular limit switch over here so if it does its homing move it'll move the gantry back until this limit switch is bumped but because there's no limit switch over here the gantry stays out of square next tool regardless of what the laser is doing if this machine's on this fan is on it's kind of loud and that's kind of annoying there is no way to route this cable that feels right or puts it out of the way in fact this cable is the entire reason there's no hard stop on the back of this machine because it plugs into the back of this stepper motor here and then fouls against this back rail keeping it bouncy and this last one is kind of a big one this x tool has no limit switches zero it has no idea where its boundaries are so if i draw something in laser box basic that is the size of the work surface area but i start the laser head in the middle what do you think it does what's even more curious is in laser box basic there's a home button so what happens when you hit the home button if there's no limit switches well it just moves to one corner until it can't anymore not quite as violently as if you tell it to engrave to somewhere off of the machine but it's still crashing into itself and that's unpleasant i also have some annoyances with the laser box basic software that ships with this machine they're not that big of a deal now that you can use light burn but i'll still go over them the only unit it supports is metric and the only speed unit it supports is millimeters per second there are no other options in the material drop down list instead of saying basswood it says basswood well i guess they updated the software it didn't say bassword now that it's right it's not funny anymore the cut past the software generates are meandering and decidedly unoptimized as an example when i engraved that grid between each row it moved the laser head back and forth without the laser on i guess it was just taking a break i haven't seen this again but when i engraved this grid here and engraved these horizontal lines that weren't in the drawing and there's the same complaint with all of these machines they're wide open laser engravers so the vaporized version of whatever you're cutting or engraving is going to fill the room you're in earlier i tried to slice a piece of bread with a laser and that smoke was delightful most smoke won't be like that and to shield your eyes from the hazardous laser light that's coming off of these they all come with these glasses of dubious efficacy but unquestionable style now for the important bit price how much does each one of these machines cost and are they worth it the auteur laser master blaster 2 pro 2 furious is currently listed on or tour's website for 480 dollars this is for a five and a half watt laser the niji master ii s with its five and a half watt laser is currently listed on digi's website for 190 dollars the big niji the niji master 2s max with its 15 watt laser maybe is currently listed on eg's website for 580 dollars the x tool d1 with its 10 watt laser is currently listed on xtools website for 650. although you can buy this thing in a bundle with the rotary roller and the riser blocks and that will set you back 793 dollars the o2 doesn't look like such a good choice anymore once you find out that the xtool d1 here is also available in 5 watt form for ten dollars less than the ore tour and for ten dollars less you get better build quality higher ease of use and more features at the very least this looks better the little niji is so cheap it's practically an impulse buy and there's nothing majorly wrong with it so it'll work just fine the next max is under baked and quite massively overpriced you probably shouldn't buy it it's worth noting though i'm not condemning eg as a whole just the max niji makes a whole wide range of diode laser engravers that you can check out on their website and i imagine most of them are just fine then there's the xtool d1 it is the most expensive but it's also by quite a wide margin the best it's not perfect but it's the only one of these diode laser engravers i've seen that seems like it's had i don't know actual thought put into its development what a novel concept since i've declared the xtool d1 the winner of this not a competition what do you say we give it a victory lap [Music] this is going to take a while well it took the laser engraver inside last night in the dark so it wouldn't get rained on and oh well i guess this is a dodged a rag no now i suppose i could tell people it's french de grano no one's going to believe that well it did a good job anyway some rough spots oh look at engraved some bird poop there anyway thanks for watching bye

Channel: Under Dunn

Views: 130,880

Keywords: Neje, Master, Laser, Diode, CNC, CO2, Glowforge, XTool, Makeblock, Laserbox, Basic, Light, Craft

Id: u2LH7SAdnZ0

Length: 23min 30sec (1410 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021