Nova 3d Whale Ultra 14k Review - OMG WOW! The World's First 14k Printer

I honestly don't know how to conclude on this printer it tis a lot of boxes and it has a ton of features that I should like and I do like it I think but then the way most things have been implemented com across is cheap but actually are these simpler engineering choices for the better as they make a more cost-efficient product but then there's some marketing BS that I absolutely hate but you already know that if you know me if you don't hi I'm Ross and this is fire Hammer videos and I think I'm going to need your help with this one let's get into it so I've already reviewed Nova 3D's whale SE printer and I mentioned in that video that they also had the super and Ultra versions of the same thing each adding some extra features I said back then that their original whale 3 Ultra could have been the first real Contender against the gk2 and this whale 3 Ultra is more than that whale 3 Ultra this is the whale 14k Ultra and the whale 14k Series has two versions the whale 3 super 14k and this one and I want to spell this out because it's a first taste of the odd jankiness from this brand when you browse the website you select the different models from a tiny thumbnail below the text super 14k Ultra 14k But whichever image is selected brings that thumbnail to the left rather than leaving it where it is and putting the Highlight around it so when you have the ultra selected it's now below the text which says Super 40 ink when you have the super selected it's the same you can't easily tell unless you pay close attention to the header text even the main image of the printer isn't distinctly different enough that you can tell look I know this is minor stuff but here's my view on things if this brand wants to be taken seriously with a printer like this they need to do better and I gave them this feedback and More in my wsse review none of it's been addressed and it's all very easy stuff and we're a couple of minutes into this video already and all we've talked about is the bloody web page but the reason is this pretty much sets the precedent for what we'll see from this printer going forward it's a lot of ooh followed swiftly with some oh here's another example this should excite you if you didn't know it has a built-in heater there's your first proper ooh and I'll come back to the ah later this is a 10-in printer with a build area of 223 by 126x 250 mm and as for the claimed 14k resolution well I'm going to come back to that when we talk about print quality and for those of you who know my content oh boy are we going to come back to that and you know what I mean it's going to be another ah moment first because it's a review I have to go through some of the advertised features some parts are Innovative some are smart some are as I said really cheap it's an odd J to position of quality elements that leaves me wondering just how good this printer potentially is in the long term so diving into different things the print bed isn't anything special it's just machined and looks roughly swn from a larger sheet of metal there's no sexy laser etching here but again it works so do you even care bed movement is controlled by a large ball screw typically smoother than printers with normal lead screws only premium printers tend to use these but when moving the bed itself with the printer's UI movement is incredibly slow the handle for tightening the bill plate is now a small black knob rather than the old asymmetrical lever that they had on the whale SE in my opinion it's a step backwards that was so much easier to ensure a good tightness it does have an integrated heater as I said which you can see embedded into the chassis with a cable running into the base of the machine once again it works but the visibility of this cable also looks cheap and I'll come back to the functionality of this heater shortly I'm not trying to drag it out it just goes more into the actual function section of the video it makes more sense later but some of you'll complain that's what the comment section is for go complain I promise I'll read it but yeah go winge there the vat is very large in fact it holds over a liter of resin before it gets to the max fill line and the good thing is there's no sign of ACF which is a blessing and this strange outward protrusion in the corner is for the resin refill mechanism and I'll talk about that more shortly the vat has handles and unlike others I've tested before these are comfortable to grip and large enough for average size hands and they don't get in the way of the bolts but if for some reason you aren't a fan of the handles you can't really remove them because the bolts for them are used to guide the vat into place these bolts though also keep the vat raised off a flat surface so should you ever need to put it down somewhere else to perform maintenance this stops the Fe from touching your worktop and that's quite smart when putting all this together though cuz there is a little bit of building to do make sure you put the VAP bolts through the VAP before you attach the handles because they won't fit once the handles are in place and One Premium feature that I've never seen before is that these vat screws are incredibly comfortable with large rubber covers now whilst you do get an up and over lid one thing to be aware of is that you have to install the hinges yourself and the instructions aren't the clearest but I'm just more wondering why wasn't this done at the factory it does stick a little bit proud of the back of the machine so you will need to keep it slightly away from the wall just so you can lift this up also because this lid is PPC rather than thin plastic it has sharp edges on the back corners and it's heavy it's got no handle either so when you lower it down do it carefully because letting it drop makes one hell of a bang but again yeah those are negatives but you do get an up and over lid which is a plus do you see what I was on about like there's a lot of up and down with this printer power socket placements on the back of the printer and there are two USB ports on the side of the back along Ong with an Ethernet socket all of these are located further to the rear than the power switch and I found it odd that this machine doesn't come with a USB drive or any instructions for that matter but instead it comes with a USB Wi-Fi dongle so you can remotely access the printer's internal memory as a folder on your PC there's also a vent hole on the back but this is covered by the heater it's odd that this even exists as I haven't actually seen any whale 3 Series printer with any kind of extractor or filter in it and that's quite unfortun because the resin they sent me absolutely stinks now I did want to like the resin filling mechanism I liked it on the Ws E I think it's smart because it's so simple instead of an electromechanical pump to slowly feed resin in and out this is just a spring-loaded valve which replaces the caps on resin bottles but only these specific resin bottles there is a frame in the back right corner of the printer body which holds these bottles inverted into the protrusion of the VAP which then feeds the resin in there's no automated way to extract resin but this would still keep the vat topped up during large long prints however the only way to stop the flow is when the resin volume in the vat Rises to meet the lowest point of the bottle cap this is probably fine mid print but were it this fall before subsequent prints it' surely overflow as soon as the build plate enters the full vat I don't want to test this Theory because I don't fancy another resin cleanup but please tell me how I could be wrong here now before I came to start print on mine I thought I had a damaged LCD because only half of it was lighting up it turns out I just needed a firmware update and because of this releveling now I say leveling but this is actually leveled from the factory and that's another good thing all I had to do was adjust the base height of the build plate so this is where we come to the UI leveling is somewhat unintuitive and poorly translated well it's not wrong it's just not right either and for some reason the height settings are in a separate menu from the typical level settings I'm genuinely confused why this couldn't have just been a single screen with a button that says set zero here to level it or as I said set the zero position you need to click reset wait for the bed to slowly go into its current home location then lower it or raise it by 50 Micron increments and when you tap this for some reason it tells you reset tips and then asks you whether you want to confirm or not does this mean reset confirmed start moving to reset the position what anyway it turns out it was the latter but when saving too it says save tips before asking if you want to save tips what what are you going on about I mean I obviously get what it kind of means you can easily work past it but it's just another small Mar on this printer's quality Ledger and please bear in mind this is just the first impression of the UI to now it's worth noting before I go on that the screen is non-capacitive so occasionally you will miss button presses or you'll press a button only for the printer to think you've clicked something else nearby like you can click play to start a print but the printer registers it at pressing somewhere else on the screen so instead of printing the model like you wanted it just closes the menu and then there's a further couple of functions that I find odd after you print a file from the internal memory it deletes the file why for some reason it also wants you to clear the vat after every single print with the highlighted button being confirmed and this often led me to absent-mindedly cure a thin film at the bottom of the vat that I didn't need but yeah I suppose you would get used to this if it was your only printer like I'm negging on it a bit too hard but the UI does feel just odd it's not fully unintuitive but it's also not intuitive functions like the LCD screen if you want to perform it manually and things like the LCD check are under the settings menu even though they're functions not settings they would make more sense being within the printer controls menu but in here you have things like manual control to raise and lower the bed which makes sense but then you have leveling setting which to me should be part of the settings menu due to the word setting and then there's temperature control which again should be a setting but due to how this works it kind of does make sense being in here because it's not a setting I'm sorry to say it's a function so this is where I talk about the heater I stressed it many videos now the importance of heaters in resin printers the gk2 has a heater in the chamber below the screen because uniformation realized that this was better than heating the chamber itself because if you did that it would also heat the cured model and it would heat the model before the resin in the vat the Apex maker X1 has an actual vat heater which is the best implementation of a heater that I've seen yet the whale 3 Ultra 14k has a chamber heater so it's already not the best way to put one in and the way it works here is by going into the printer controls menu and choosing your desired temperature from a range of 20 to 30° C and then you press confirm it will then heat to temperature but as soon as you leave this menu the heating stops so yeah that's right the heater does not function whilst the printer is printing you can preheat the chamber but as soon as you start printing everything begins to cool and considering that having a consistent temperature during your print is the most important aspect it makes this feature entirely pointless this could have been a gk2 contender it could have potentially obliterated it thanks to its price point but the most important comparable feature has not only been poorly implemented but starting a print at 25° to then have it drop to a much lower environment temperature a few hours into your print will ruin the print supports that worked when your res was warm would begin to fail layers would peel due to temperature relative underere exposure so this heater is beyond redundant so yeah there's that but it's not over yet remember this is a 14k printer and does this printer at least print super high quality models thanks to its 14k resolution does it bollocks first up the printer has a cob light source for more even distribution of UB light but as clearly shown in this XP finder test I always print when you balance the exposure this is unable to render details as sharp as most 8K printers but how can that be it's a 14k printer if you're wondering I'm glad you've asked because it's something I've talked about in every single video for the last 6 months and I'll Echo it more here because this resolution claim is more ludicrous in this instance than anything we've seen before since 12K screens introduced us to displays with rectangular pixels things have been a little weird in terms of resolution you see 12K printers aren't even 12K resolution they are on the x-axis but not on the Y AIS with this a TV you wouldn't care what shape the pixels are but when creating a three-dimensional model where some details will always be oriented towards the weaker axis yes it probably matters to you in the case of a 14k printer it's the same thing no I mean it it's the exact same thing the resolution of this screen is 13 320x 51 20 and for those of you who've paid attention in my previous videos yeah that's the exact same 5120 pixels on the Y AIS all the 12K printers have so where's the upgrade yes the x-axis now has a pixel width of 17 microns but the Y AIS is still 24 technically 24.8 if you want to be pedantic what this means is that there's a greater difference between the X and Y AIS pixel size on this printer than there is between the Y AIS on this 14k machine and A Lash gen 8K machine so that's the theory explained what's it like practically well to show it I printed my usual selection of test models facing forward from the front so that you can see them in their highest possible resolution as you look directly at them but then I printed the same plate again with everything facing from the side can you see a difference when we zoom in can you see a difference honestly I'm hoping you see what I see and the answers are resounding no because otherwise my next point doesn't really work so assuming you can't see a difference on the one hand this tells us that the difference in the X and Y AIS pixels are so negligible no matter how you Orient your models you shouldn't worry that one side will be worse than the front but on the other hand this also tells us that the difference in the X and Y pixel sizes are negligible and I know I just said that but in this case what I'm saying is it also means there's no no discernable benefit in the 14k resolution from the Y AIS of the 12K resolution which isn't that much better than the 8K resolution and this should be unsurprising because I've said for the last 6 months that there's no discernable benefit between 8K and 12 either and in some cases 12K is actually worse than 8K which kind of seems the same here so to finish our Echo statements have been making for over a year now we are far beyond the screen resolution playing any significant part in print quality and to me consistency is key which is why consistent temperature Matters by reducing variables in printing it leads to repeatable and expected results but with 14k like 12K before it we no longer have consistency in the size of the pixels rendered on our models is it bad print quality no is it better than 12K yes technically on paper and only in one dimension but is it better than a consistent sharp and equal 8K screen where you can apply things like anti-aliasing evenly across each orientation no it really isn't so to conclude if Nova 3D want to be taken seriously as a contender in this industry then they need to learn that the devil's in the details and sort out all of these really simple yet stupid errors that shouldn't even exist on a serious product in 2024 and that includes the website and I know it's not even a lot of big things aside from the issue of the heater not working mid print it's all tiny minor irritations and I understand that some people would look at this and go me I'll put up with some jankiness for those features where others would see this as a list of reasons not to have faith in the brand where they can't care enough about the little things either way is fine my job is to just show you it it's your decision so maybe this is the one for you maybe this is death by a Thousand Cuts I honestly don't know it's truly up to you and time will tell if this is a successful product overall if these Fe feates scream out to you as something you want I hope I've at least shown you how they work and now you can understand them more than just the flat claims from the product page and please don't take my overall disinterested attitude in this printer as me talking it down because I'm not saying it's bad at all like the whale SE before it it's okay but it could have easily been great so again if you want the features that it actually has definitely go buy it just please don't buy it because you think 14k is automatic Ally better than 12 or even eight I want to say thanks for watching and thanks to our members who make it possible for us to make these videos they get priority comment replies exclusive update videos and their name in the credits if this video was helpful fun or educational then please hit that like button drop a comment and subscribe until next time I ain't afraid of no ghosts F hammer [Music] out [Music]

Channel: FauxHammer

Views: 103,450

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Id: LAa9sIqrEzc

Length: 18min 11sec (1091 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2024