Is The Elegoo Mars 3 Worth It?

the original led mars is one of the first resin printers that we tested out on this channel and still has to be the most used resin printer that i've had to date it was really easy to use it was very reliable and the only reason i swapped it out was to make way for the mars 2 pro which took everything that i already loved about the original mars and added a monochrome screen as well as a carbon filter there was a couple other upgrades to it but those were the main things and i've really enjoyed using the mars 2 pro in combination with its bigger brother the elegoose saturn well earlier this year elego announced the mars 3 which unlike the previous generations of the mars line looks quite different to all of its predecessors and around that same time they also announced the mercury x bundle which is their new standalone wash and standalone cure station which is definitely different than most of the two in one wash and cure combined units that have been available that have come out over the past year or so here so in today's video we are going to be covering these units with a major emphasis on the mars 3 but we're also going to talk about and take a brief look at the mercury x bundle like we normally do we'll go over the specs we'll go over what setup was like we'll go over what printing looks like and i will give you sort of my final overview or my final opinion on the mars 3 as a printer and as my experience in a hole if you are looking to get your first ryzen printer or looking to or considering upgrading to the mars 3 then this video is definitely for you so with all that being said and without further ado let's get right to today's video [Music] today's video is sponsored by psoriatech their resins have been incredibly consistent and easy to use on a wide range of printers that i've tested them on which is why they have been my go-to resin manufacturer for the past couple of years another huge plus is that they are some of the lowest odor resins i've used which is very important to me given the fairly small space i'm working in their fast line of resins is great for everyday model printing and they've been pushing the bar with a wide range of engineering resins like their high strength flexible castable and their sculpt line for high temp parts i'll place links in the description to our resin playlist if you'd like to take a further look into some of the resins that we've tested out on this channel as well as a link to their stores that you can try them out for yourself starting off let's run through the specs of the new mars 3 printer the mars 3 has a build volume of 143 by 89.6 by 175 millimeters which is slightly bigger than the 129 by 80 by 160 millimeter build volume of the mars 2 pro it also features a brand new 6.6 inch 4k monochrome screen which will give you an xy resolution of 35 microns compared to the 50 micron resolution of the mars 2 pro and its 2k screen the build plate is the same aluminum sandblasted build plate that they've used on previous models which does a fantastic job of holding on to your prints they stuck with the same ball head style attachment for the build plate which is very simple to get set up and i do like that the screws stay above the resin unlike some of the other styles of build plates we've checked out this rides up and down on a single linear rail and lead screw as far as the vat the mars 3 does have a beefier vat that is curved on the front and definitely seems to allow more resin to be poured in should you want to it is still aluminum with a max fill line and replaceable fep film on the bottom they do claim that there is a new version of fep or fep 2.0 but i couldn't find a whole lot of details on that i do believe it's probably something similar to the nfep that's gained a lot of popularity over the last at least few months here for having a lower surface friction which will really help with the peel force and minimizing that as the prints are raising and lowering out of the vat during the printing process i didn't notice it right away but i was a little bit disappointed to find out that they got rid of the carbon filter that was on the mars ii pro although the resin i use is very low odor and the carbon filter only filters out the actual smell and nothing else it was still something nice to have and because i am in such a small space i really liked having the carbon filter on the previous generation interfacing with the printer will be done with the touch screen on the front of the machine which looks great and is easy to navigate they did keep the usb port on the front and they went away with the power switch on the back of the machine replacing it with a button on the front initially i was a little bit concerned having the power button on the front out of here that maybe it was going to be something that's easy to bump but it's a pretty hard physical button that needs to be pressed in and then released and so i don't think that's something to be concerned with there are vents on both sides of the printer and the only thing on the back is the power input jack the printer is fairly quiet during operation and elegu mentions a new heat sink that is being used to help remove heat from the lcd screen which should help maximize the 2000 hours that the screen is rated for much like the previous versions of the lagoo printers it is running a chittu systems board which we will talk a little bit more about shortly as mentioned the mars 3 looks quite different to the previous versions of mars printers they sort of went away with the rectangular shape and gave it more of a roundish look i actually didn't mind the design of all of the previous generations of mars printers because it sort of was what i got used to and that was what i expected but i will say that there's nothing wrong with a little bit of a facelift and i do think that the new curve design does look nice it is also lighter weighing in at 11 and a half pounds compared to the two pros 13.67 pounds this is due to the base now being made of injection molded plastic that is much lighter than the materials used on the previous generations although i did like the more solid feeling weighty base of the previous generation of mars printers i don't see how there's going to be any issues with the injection molded base because they still have aluminum in all the right places and really the base is only to house the main board as well as the other electronics lastly the mars 3 uses a new cob or chip on board uv light source which should be an improvement over the previous led array that was already fantastic setup is going to be identical to all of the other mars printers where you're attaching the build plate you are loosening the two screws on the sort of ball head that it has putting a piece of paper down homing the printer and then tightening those two screws and you will want to make sure to tighten those two screws all the way not that you shouldn't do it on other printers but because there's only two and it has sort of that ball head pivoting system i have had a few times over the years of using the elegant machines where i had a part that was really stuck and from the prying force of trying to remove it it did cause the bed to shift ever so slightly which basically just meant that it had to be re-leveled for the sake of the mars 3 i actually have a wham-bam flex plate already ready to go and because there is no resin on the build plate it is a perfect time to install it so uh it does require a spacer because of the added thickness that the flex plate to the magnet and the sheet itself does have but they do have the little spacer available for you to print out so i didn't have to model anything i just really quickly printed it on the voron but you could also print it on a resin printer and then undid two screws attached it and then it was ready to rock and roll and i have made a complete video on these resin flex plates but if you are doing a lot of resin 3d printing these flex plates are absolutely the way to go just being able to quickly remove something and not have to deal with prying parts off and especially now if there are items with big flat bases i would dread printing those directly on an aluminum build plate because removing is just such a pain but with the flex plate even printing them completely flat you just flex them off and you're good to go so i can place links down below in case you want to check them out but again out of everything you can do for the resin printers the flex plates are absolutely insane once everything was set up i did go ahead and plug the flash drive into the printer to see if there were any pre-sliced files they did have their signature rook which has been the test print on every elegant printer i've ever tested out and although it is a super cool model i feel like you can only print out so many of these same rook models so i opted to hop over to the computer and find my own first file that i'm going to slice up and print out plugging in the flash drive i did find the install file for the chittoobox pro software which is 169 yearly subscription that includes one free year with the lagoon mars 3. currently this is windows only and although i do have a windows desktop my primary computer is a mac so i opted to just use the ch2 box basic tom recently made a video on gtbox pro that i can link you to in case you want to see the key differences between the pro and basic versions so for anybody in this or that's been looking into resin printers you might have seen some discussion lately about gt2 systems and the chittu boards i don't want to jump too heavily into it but i did think it was worth at least touching on again in case anyone watching this isn't familiar has no idea what i'm talking about so chittoo systems who makes the chittu slicer or chichibok slicer makes a lot of the hardware that goes into these desktop resin printers like just looking around here i'd say three quarters of the resin printers in this room have the chittu systems boards and the lagoo lined up machines is absolutely no different to that with the latest versions of different printers like the elugu mars 3 i don't think it's in the saturn but in a lot of the newer i think it's the the new lagoo 8k machine that's coming out our 6k machine and quite a few other machines that have 4k panels and up they have now made it where you are having to use their file type which has some sort of encryption where you have to use the chittu box basic or chit box pro slicer you don't have to use the paid version you can use the free version but this means that as of right now you cannot use other slicers like the lychee slicer that a lot of people that i've talked to actually prefer over chittoobox now uncle jesse did make a couple videos on this and ellagoo ended up responding and chittoo systems ended up responding and sort of where we're at right now is that chittoo systems is basically stating they're going to be releasing an stk that will allow other companies or entities or people to create their own slicers that will allow them to use this file type and hopefully lychee will be able to sort of splice this or implement this into their existing slicer but right now as far as i know it's it has not happened yet and it's just talk and so i hope that they stick by that i think that that's absolutely something they should do but it is a little bit weird to me that they would go that route and then just make it easy for others to circumvent that route so there's there's a lot more to this conversation again uncle jesse did a couple videos on it which i could link you to if you sort of want to look into it more personally tattoo box is my daily slicer i use it a lot more than lychee probably primarily because it's the first resin slicer that i got really familiar with and i'm not necessarily crazy about relearning the things that i feel like it does quite well that being said to me it's more of a i don't like being told what i can and can't do with something that i purchased so for me it's even though i would still probably use chit to box i understand why others do not want to be locked in and why this is a bad thing so enough again on that rant i can i can um basically let you guys to those videos if you want to dive into that more but i did want to state that with the mars 3 you are having to use either tutubox basic or chittoobox pro once i updated chichu box the latest version i loaded the built-in profile for the mars 3 printer chelsea from chaos cortec recently announced that they were releasing a ton of their patreon models from last year over on things and while i was going through those models i found a model of a screaming banshee pumpkin that i hadn't seen last year and actually wanted to print out so i opted to do that as my first print i did end up scaling it down quite a bit to around the same small size as the test rook that i remembered coming on the lagoo printers and i left it solid i did end up tilting it as well as adding some supports just to make sure that the print would go successfully and then as far as settings go in to box i didn't touch anything i left all of these settings completely stock for the mars 3 with a layer height of 50 microns and that is how i tested all of the models that i've printed out so far on this so if you're wondering i just left everything completely stock as is in chitty box for the lagoon rs3 profile for the resin i went with psoriatech's smoky black fast resin which is tied neck and neck for me as far as my favorite resins i really like they're just standard gray resin but the smoky black is super super cool and gives a very unique effect with allowing light to pass through depending on the thickness of the model i then plugged in the flash drive hit print and a little over two hours later i had the finished part hanging onto the build plate and it looked awesome and i finally got to test out the mercury x cleaning bundle operating the wash station is done through a very simple wheel and button combo on the front holding it down for a couple of seconds will power it on or power it off then scrolling the wheel will let you adjust the timer in 30 second increments tapping the button will start the wash cycle and you can tap it again to pause it should you want to it is fairly loud when the wheel on the bottom is spinning but that has actually been my experience with just about every wash station that i've tested out so there's not much of a difference in comparison to noise of the other wash stations i've used and luckily usually when you're washing something it shouldn't be more than maybe five to ten minutes so it's not like it's running for long periods of time i do like how large the unit is with the max capacity of eight thousand milliliters of ipa it should take longer for the ipa to dirty and will allow for larger prints to be cleaned the cure station works in an identical way as the wash station with the same menu and timer system i duly like that there was only one power brick that is shared by the two units as i'm always struggling to find space on my power strips i also do like that the rotating platform has small pegs to hold your prints in place and that there is also a small strip of uv leds underneath the platform to cure the parts from the bottom which is not something that i've previously seen my only wish is that the two main pillars of leds actually went at an angle a little bit on the top so that way they would cure the tops of the parts you can just rotate them but i have seen that on a couple other wash and care stations and it is something that i think would have been nice to have on here but as far as functionality goes they had no problem washing and curing all of the parts that i threw at them after the first print i took more time than i'm proud of looking for a second model that i wanted to print and i ended up over on prusa printers where i found an anti-venom statue model that i sort of fell in love with i went ahead and downloaded the model before discovering that it was in multiple pieces which is something i wasn't stoked for because it meant i would have to ultimately glue it all together i still ended up printing out the model and i kept everything solid other than the two pieces of the base that were kind of bulky i should have curved the main rock at an angle because it was hollow and because it had quite a lot of surface area but because i didn't it did peel ever so slightly so i did end up reprinting it and i kept everything the same i just this time tilted it a little bit and added a bit of support to help grab onto the rock base i was super happy with the end result and my biggest issue was actually the gluing which i knew was going to be the biggest issue even with a little bit of sanding and trying to clean up the points where the arms were supposed to meet to both the lower arm and the upper arm i could not get them to go flush so i would really love to reprint this thing maybe a little bit bigger where it's easier to get those arms attached and glued in correctly and i do think this would be a very epic model to sit down and actually take some time to paint i did want to mention that like any video where i'm showing off models or printing models i will place links down below in the description as well so if you're just watching this and you see a cool model that you want to add to you're probably growing a list of things to print out then all of those links will be down below as well next i stumbled across the 3d modeler ben danzi over on things i was looking for a model i can print a bit bigger that had a lot of detail and boy was i not disappointed by just the crazy sculpts that he had over on his page i wish i could explain the character type that he makes a bit better but looking at them the word trippy is the main word that i could think of out of the awesome lineup i decided on nilgarath the wise which i did hollow with quite a thick three millimeter wall and i added some supports the print turned out absolutely insane and i highly recommend checking out his work i will place links to his main things page in the description so you can see this model as well as the rest of his just crazy awesome sculpts after that i was kind of wanting to find an architectural model to print and i guess i sort of did that i ended up stumbling across a model of the dark tower from lord of the rings which is a model that i have seen probably for a couple of years now that i've wanted to print and just never got around to doing it so i went ahead and printed that out and it turned out absolutely insane i kept it completely solid and i actually printed it flat up against the build plate and again this is an example where had i not had the flex plate system it would have been really tough to remove this part from the build plate and my biggest concern when removing resin prints especially ones that are again flat against the build plate is that they're still sort of soft or gummy in a sense and it's a it's pretty easy to damage them using a sharp spatula so being able to just take this thing off with the flex plate and flex it into the bucket was awesome but this is a very very cool model a very cool print and again with the smoky black resin i put it on top of my iphone's flashlight or flash on the back of it and you can just see how the light goes through the different parts of the tower and it is just it's absolutely beautiful i was very very happy with this and this is something that i'm super stoked to have and i'm definitely gonna have to figure out a place to keep this print after that i went ahead and printed a combination of two of these same rings they're just a really cool sort of detailed ring that i found over on my mini factory i know that there are quite a few people i've talked to that are into jewelry making that use resin printers maybe they're printing it in sort of a wax-like resin and then they're going to cast it or you know maybe they're doing some prototyping but i printed out a couple of rings which turned out great and i also printed out five miniatures and they were from mz4250 which i've talked about multiple times i was scrolling through some stuff and happened to find that he released a bunch of different bard models of different species and so i printed out five different ones and now i've got a miniature a little miniature band which is awesome and my favorite one was one of a it's the smallest one of the bunch and it's actually a little guy that is playing the bagpipes and i did my best to actually because the video uh i just can't show you guys all this detail but i did put on the macro caps that i picked up and got some close-up photos so hopefully you can see some more of the detail but these models are absolutely awesome i show them to aaron and she fall in love with them as well i've printed out quite a few miniatures but just seeing all these guys with their little guitars or uh yeah guitars and banjos and bagpipes are just they're amazing so yeah i did a fantastic job of doing all those and then the final print that i printed out was of this sort of medieval castle tower that i've actually printed this out before on a resin printer and it's just kind of one of those go-to's that i love to print out i think i posted a photo over on instagram of it but it's just incredible the level of detail with all of the different windows on this castle and all of the small trees and rocks if if you have a resin printer or pick one up this is definitely a simple well simple simple small print that you can print out that will blow people's minds just because of again the level of detail so um like i said links to all the stuff will be down below but the detail of these prints it still blows my mind i've been resin printing for a couple years now and it just is it is absolutely insane just how much these things are able to capture and how good they've gotten so with all that being said how do i feel about the elegu mars iii when i compare it to the previous generations of lagoon machines elegant mars printers and the many other resin printers that both we've tested out and that exist on the market today and i do want to start off by saying that the legume rs3 is definitely an impressive machine having a 4k lcd screen on such a small build volume gives you a very very high x and y resolution and the print quality is nothing short of amazing i the prints speak for themselves i they don't even do justice but like if you think they look good on camera just imagine that but multiply it and that's how they look in person they look really really good really the only two initial things about the mars three that i'm just not a huge fan of is that they got rid of that carbon filter like i mentioned which again is just for odor and the uh fast resin is fairly low odor but it's still something that i thought was just nice to have and i didn't see like i didn't see a reason why it couldn't be something they just start to include on their printers having a carbon filter is definitely something that i felt was a positive and then the second thing is being locked into using chittoo box although i don't know whether ellagoo was even fully aware that this was something chittoo systems was going to be implementing i'm not crazy about it and although tutu systems has said they're going to be making it where there's an sdk and you can use other slicers when they implement it until that happens it's just talk so that's those are the two things that i'm just not a not crazy about with the mars 3. when i was trying to figure out how i wanted to explain sort of how i feel about the mars 3 i kept thinking about my iphone and i apologize to anybody that's just not an apple fan but you can take this and imp you know sort of impose your own idea of something that's similar but every single year apple releases a new iphone and i love my iphone i have the iphone xr which i just it just hit the three year mark with this thing and as someone that loves having tech and loves having the latest tech like that's quite a long time and each year they come out with a new iphone that is better than last year's whether it's a faster you know cpu whether it's better cameras whatever it is but there are some years where the difference between current gen and last gen aren't substantial enough for people to make a jump and they said okay well i'll hold off one more year and next year they'll add a feature which will make it where that gap is big enough where it makes sense to upgrade and that is that is sort of the way i feel about the mars 3 printer i have loved using the mars 3 and i have no doubt that it's going to become my sort of smaller form factor daily driver for resin printer similar to how the original mars was similar to how the mars 2 pro has been for me and the if if you're looking like if you're just getting into resin printing and you're looking for resin printer or if you're just like i got to upgrade my resin printer you're not going to be disappointed with the lagoon mars 3 and even if you've got let's say a generation one elegant mars which was 2k but it was not monochrome and you're making the jump to this which is now 4k with monochrome meaning you're getting high resolution and substantially substantially quicker print speeds then that is a pretty big jump but if you already have an elegu mars 2 pro which is 2k and a monochrome screen then you've got that quick speeds and the main thing that you're going to be getting is the higher x and y resolution which if you are someone that just needs insane tight tolerances then i i get it or if you're someone that just has to have the latest greatest then i absolutely completely get it but for those others that are just wondering the difference really at least visually to the eye is not as substantial as you'd think uncle jesse did a fantastic video where he took the original mars he took the mars 2 or 2 pro and he took the lagoon mars 3 and he printed out the same models with i believe it was 50 micron 30 micron and 25 micron or something like that layer uh resolution and he took pretty high res photos of them all side by side i think they were all with the same gray resin with the same backdrop so that way you can visually see the difference in quality and although there is definitely some difference in quality it is quite minimal and even tom over at tom's 3d or thomas sandlander he did he didn't do a full video i don't believe on the difference of the previous but i did see he had an article where he had a photo showing that yes if you look really closely there is some slight smoothness difference but the elegu mars 2 pro does a fantastic job of printing as does the mars 3 the quality is absolutely insane and again if you handed me one of these models and didn't tell me it was from a mars 3 or if you handed it to me and said it was from mars 2 i don't think that with my eyes i would be able to tell you which came off of which so that is something that i definitely think is worth considering but like i said if you're on the fence uncle jesse did do that video i think that is absolutely worth watching i'll place links down below because it might help to sway you in one direction or the other one thing i did find interesting as well in uncle jesse's video was that the mars 2 pro and the lagoon mars 3 even with the exact same print settings the mars 3 was a bit quicker than the mars 2 pro and the only thing i could think of is that there is something set in firmware that allows the mars 3 to whip up and down quicker or perhaps has something to do with loading the images off of the uh off of the flash drive for printing but that was something i wasn't expecting but yeah as far as the quality goes go take a look at that and i think that might help to again justify help you and your justification of whether you should go with the mars 3 or maybe hold off on that and that has been the lagoon mars 3 as well as the mercury x wash and cure separate bundles i feel like there was an absolute ton to cover in this video and i hope that i was able to answer the majority of your questions if you do have any additional questions let me know in the comments down below i'm also debating on on the second channel the modbot army channel that i mentioned a couple weeks ago which is going to be for live streams when i do reviews or product showcases i'm thinking about the following week maybe having the live stream be dedicated to that product so that way if there's a certain question you have or maybe something you want a little bit more information on regarding let's say the mars 3 or the cleaning stations or whatever you could just hop in over there and ask the question so let me know if that's something you're even possibly interested in i'd like to get some feedback on that don't forget to like and subscribe for more great videos we make a video every single week so there's always fresh content coming your way and if you did want to support the channel furthermore i will place links down below in the description over to my patreon where there are some really awesome rewards huge thank you to all of my existing patreon supporters i appreciate each and every one of you allowing me to come back every single week and spend more time doing what i love which is making content for you all to enjoy on that note this has been diana from modbot and i look forward to seeing you guys in my next video peace guys

Channel: ModBot

Views: 9,345

Keywords: elegoo, elegoo mars 3, mars 3, resin printer, mars 3 3d printer, mars 3 resin, siraya tech, high resolution resin printer, tight tolerance 3d printer, mars review, mars 3 review

Id: 0Dms5rTOFXg

Length: 25min 33sec (1533 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 09 2021