The World's First 8K MSLA Resin Printer is HUGE - Phrozen Sonic Mega 8K Review

in this video we're checking out the immense frozen sonic mega 8k it's been over a year since i last showed resin printing on this channel and i've been really excited to jump back into the technology but if you think i'm going to bring a massive resin printer into my studio one that's big enough to print this in one go like this on the print bed then you're insane let's get started [Music] how's it going guys angus here from maker's muse and behind me i have all the incredible prints off the frozen sonic mega 8k but it lives downstairs in the garage where it belongs because although resin 3d printing technology is incredible it's also very messy and i'm not going to risk bringing it up the stairs because i think there could be a very messy accident waiting to happen but let's talk about the machine this machine was provided to me for review by frozen and facilitated by 3d printers online an australian reseller with a huge range of 3d printers and accessories and sean was awesome with my questions as i rediscovered the um joys of resin printing link in the description below the frozen sonic mega 8k as its name may imply is as far as i'm aware the first msla printer on the market with an 8k resolution mono lcd panel specifically 7680 by 4320 pixels which is spread over a printing area of 330 by 185 millimeters giving an effective resolution of 43 micrometers which is crazy detail for such a large screen and also it's worth mentioning it prints up to 400 millimeters high so yeah this machine is immense and comes well packaged with heaps of foam and cardboard supports the tools and print surface are sandwiched in foam and i think a quick start guide could have done with some instructions on how best to remove this i know from similar machines in the past it's best to raise the z-axis to free everything up so you can remove it but i imagine some people would just hack it the foam which may risk damaging that huge and delicate print fat there is a protective cover for it which is good but yeah it's giant frozen has gone with an aluminium tray with what i am told is n-fep which is higher performance than standard fep to help reduce peel forces and prints from detaching from the build plate which will become important later make no mistake you will need a heap of resin to fill this thing up at least one and a half liters and although it seats securely in place for this little lip i really dislike the crappy thumb screws they've used for securing in place they've got so much thread they take ages to secure down in place and you might think yeah look who cares but i was recovering from a print fail and i did forget to put them in place one time and i found myself furiously tightening them down as the print surface was lowering i would just love to see some sort of cammed quick interlock mechanism instead i just think this isn't very elegant about that plate though it's huge flat and perforated a big selling point for this machine is that it comes pre-leveled and calibrated from factory which is good because it does not look fun to do at all with this complex arrangement of bolts very different to a sort of ball and socket joint on some of the smaller resin printers you might encounter however in my case the machine was indeed calibrated and ready to go so i haven't had to change anything and i can't comment on how difficult it actually would be to do so why this sort of build plate well frozen say at this scale the holes assist with the reducing forces on the lcd as the plate moves in vog's review of the sonic mega 8k he makes a great analogy about dumping a cup versus a bucket into a lake and then trying to pull it up and the extra force is involved so definitely go check out his review here as well unfortunately as a compromise the plate is dead flat on top which means the resin not only pulls in the holes but it settles on top to inevitably drip out as you remove prints you can get a lot of it off with the included plastic scraper but never all of it some people may be concerned that resin could cure inside the holes and get stuck i know that uncle jesse and his review encountered that kind of thing with some early foul prints but i have not personally experienced that yet i did however find that the included blunt metal scraper was next to useless and i swapped instantly to a sharp edged one for removing my completed prints from the bed the z-axis design is suitably beefy for such a large bed with dual linear rails and a proper ball screw for higher precision it's a good mechanical design with no perceivable play and the homing switch is optical which should be more repeatable and accurate than a mechanical switch the interface is fairly standard with a color touch screen and usb port for loading in prints as well as an ethernet cable at the back for network functionality but i haven't tested that yet i reckon it's only a matter of time before i walk into the usb stick and just snap it clean off so i might swap it out for a stubby one or adapt a port to be side facing in future wi-fi connectivity also would have been really nice but the files you sent to the machine are pretty chunky and in a world where price is everything i can understand why they left it out now before i run you through all of my prints i need to explicitly mention that this machine only runs t2 box currently all of my prints were done with the version 1.9 beta of chichi box because the 8k screens are kind of new and not really supported with anything else but even if other slices integrate support you won't be able to use them until cheater box releases some kind of sdk because it's their hardware inside the printer and yes in some cases cheater box is a buggy hot mess especially when you run it on a super ultra wide screen but it is workable um i didn't find too many issues using it a lot of the community is concerned of a pressure to upgrade to a pro version for 169 usd a year but i just use the basic version for my testing and it seems to work okay so on to testing i couldn't find a demo file on the included storage media so i reached out to frozen via 3d printers online and they set across a pre-sliced version of this angel model i was expecting for a demo print like a classic chess rook or something but anyway i went ahead and filled the vat with one and a half liters of their own 4k grey resin which is just a name it doesn't mean it's incompatible or anything with different resolution screens and then i hit print and i came back and it failed honestly this is what i'm like most fearful about with resin printing it's pretty frustrating when the prints fail and it's very messy to clean up in this case literally nothing stuck to the plate and it meant the super fun job of draining one and a half liters of resin from a huge tray removing the stock print without damaging the the film or anything in the process and then resetting in light of this fail i was offered a lot of troubleshooting ideas like was the bottle well shaken or did i change any settings from the defaults but the real answer kind of came down to temperature if you haven't run resin printers you might not be aware but they're actually quite sensitive to temperature and the speed at which the resins polymerize changes if they're warmer or cooler and it just so happens we've been having a fairly few brisk winter nights and days that it was enough and cold enough to make the prince fail but the exact same model worked perfectly in barmy taiwan unfortunately my garage isn't temperature controlled but to improve the success of my next attempt i upped the first layer cure time on their recommendation to 50 seconds which is definitely over baked but you know i just really wanted to be sure and i also pre-heated print surface to 50 degrees c or so using a bed of a large filament 3d printer to give those first layers the best possible chance of curing and i waited and i listened for that satisfying peel sound and we have success however it was at this stage i discovered i only had one liter of isopropyl alcohol left in the midst of a statewide lockdown so cleanup for this print was really bad i didn't do a very good job i didn't have enough solvent to do it but the print succeeded really well and the detail in some areas where i did clean it up properly look really awesome so with known good settings i could proceed to start printing my own models and i started with a make a coin i had honestly forgotten the level of surface finish achievable of resin and for most part this coin that was angled for optimum print quality turned out really really nice however i also tried to print one flat because in the past i've done that to compare the two at different orientations and the one that was printed flat did eventually succumb to those peel forces and that one failed but the one that didn't looks awesome if even if i zoom in with this macro lens you can barely barely see the pixels or the voxels of the lcd the resolution is so high but it makes the 50 micron layer height of the actual layers look like huge steps in comparison so keep in mind this is super zoomed in and the print just is really really good but those peel forces do come back to haunt us with this gayer anderson print i hollowed it out which i actually have a really old tutorial on doing a mesh mixer here and it means there's less material required added supports and also tills the model but even with this angle it was evidently not enough to hold secure the layers at which the legs met up with the body and there is a very evident uh misalignment there the rest of the print however looks absolutely stunning just look at the crispness of these details and at 50 micron layers you have to catch it at just the right angle to see those layers but you can barely feel them with your fingernail this detail carries on through to this incredible necromonga blade from the chronicles of riddick this was sculpted by marco of mystery makers an incredibly talented 3d modeler and i just love this thing so much the sculpt has all of this super delicate detail that the printer had no issues replicating again there's a few areas that needed a bit more support and resulted in a less than perfect finish but considering the complex shape of the blade they're really insignificant this thing is almost paint ready as is but with a tiny bit of sanding and primer it would be easy to remove those few details and the fact i was able to print this at this angle for the optimum print quality and print time because the bed's so huge is just ridiculous i am absolutely in love with this blade you keep what you kill definitely go check out marco's uh patreon and his art station there's links in the in the description below because he is an incredibly talented 3d modeler and sculptor next let's check out some figurines it's no secret that resin printers are crazy popular in the dnd community so i bought a few titans of adventure from titanforge miniatures which come pre-supported and just sent them to the printer and they are spectacular i don't know what slicer produces these long pointy support structures but they just peeled away from the models in such a perfect and satisfying manner and left only minor blemishes after curing despite being only 35 millimeters high or so you can make out hair detail you can make out tassels on the clothing and even fingernails on their tiny little fingers there's extra detail on the weapons they are just awesome awesome tiny sculpts and although the macro lens lets you get really really close they are tiny tiny figurines which means you can fit heaps of them on that massive print bed and then print them all at the same time leading to a huge army of miniatures in five hours or so which is super super cool and i know there's some people out there that are going to be frothing at the idea of printing that many miniatures that quickly miniatures are fun but i wanted to go bigger so i printed these two very different bunnies next this lola bunny model by chaos cortech is perfectly suited to resin but i did some modifications to hollow out the print and attempt to save resin and reduce cross sections but because she's so skinny i really don't think it was really worth it and my first attempt failed when some areas just didn't stick to the print plate and pulled away but again i'm gonna blame my over-reliance on automatic supports in chitty box which do seem quite flimsy the higher they go especially considering how rubbery frozen's resin in this use case seems to be a retake with more supports gave her arms back although they were clearly still moving a little bit as the print was being created and it's a total success except for under the chin where i again should have put some thick custom supports because it just didn't really take ignoring that though she does look quite good just check out those ears this bunny on the other hand is a rapazor it's an open species developed by lordian on twitter and it's gaining quite a bit of traction and popularity i absolutely loved the mashup of animal and robotic features and when i shared this concept with a friend he was inspired enough to 3d model one up in vr which is just crazy to me i started off small and the left gauntlet and tail had the supports detach again probably my fault but the rest looks so good i absolutely love them but we must go bigger i took the sculpt into trusty old mesh mixer to slice it up with hollowed sections for printing and i scaled up just a little bit and they printed pretty well i've cured these prints with the supports on just so i can get an idea of how they look because i wanted to go bigger so i size them unlike everything else i've printed so far i decided to prepare this model in prusa slicer with supports and only slicing chichi box because i just didn't really have the most confidence in the rigidity of supports i was getting out of chichi box considering how some parts seem to be moving during the print and these supports out of pressure slicer gave you these really strong linked towers which really do help keep these huge cross sections from breaking free mid print because as we scale parts up they're cross sections and therefore the peel forces really start to mount up and this was the biggest and longest print run i did and for the most part it worked really really well until i started to run out of gray resin this is like two liters of resin i've burned through doing these test prints so i was forced to pour some of the frozen 4k beige in and when you do this you run the risk of some parts failing and one of the legs did fail right at the foot where again those those peel forces were just a bit too high but i really can't blame the printer in this circumstance i should have just meeted my resin a little bit better these parts are absolutely huge and do need a little bit of finishing where they are supported but i cannot wait to assemble them and paint him up and it wouldn't be a makey's muse review without throwing some sort of torture test at the printer this is my lattice torture test specifically the snowflake lattice with a tiny tiny contact area for it to adhere to the bed it's barely possible on fdm printers but actually lattices are actually quite easy for resin printers but in this case it's just got that really small contact point for it to continually having to overcome those uh peel forces and you can see in some small areas if you look really closely where the legs are um the the struts are a little bit rubbery because they're not super rigid when they're not fully cured and they're sort of misaligned tiny amounts as it's formed but the print completed with no failed struts or anything like that which is really really impressive it looks perfect it's not deformed or warped in any perceivable way and it can print bigger than this absolutely but even just to wash and cure prints like this you're already starting to look at some serious gear large amounts of of solvents like ipa or methylated spirits and a very large uv cure chamber or in the case of this print i just put it out in the aussie sun and it did a pretty good job but it's not all sunshine and lollipops in the world of massive msla 3d printing so let's talk about what i like and don't like about the frozen sonic mega 8k to begin with i love the fact that with this 8k panel you can fill it with ultra detailed models and get incredible results however frozen can't cheat physics and they can't ignore the physical limitations of msla that they're very much nudging against for this machine the peel forces involved with large solid cross-sections are immense and as the models get taller they need more and more supports to keep them from detaching or the prints failing and if they do the cleanup is huge like you need a fair bit of space for resin printers anyway to handle post-processing clean up and maintenance but i put into perspective this is the bed from the original elegu mars against the bed on the sonic mega 8k for washing the prints i filled this tub up with four liters of methylated spirits because i can't easily get ice ipa right now but it works fine for cleaning the prints but it's not even enough solvent for a full height print on the mega 8k and then there's the speed or should i say lack of although the plate is perforated to assist in reducing drag as it moves up and down the vat the default settings lift speed is so painfully slow and even though the unit is fitted with a mono screen with a three second or so cure time you're looking at print times spanning several days for larger models that's not really something frozen can escape it's just the limitations of those much larger cross sections that need to be peeled free each time the layer is reset and that's totally fine if you're in a slow and steady camp just let it run in the corner and then come back to a print a few days later but in some use cases where time is money you may benefit instead from several smaller units that run much faster like the photon mono x that works with cure times as low as one and a half seconds i reckon as well at this scale the ambient temperature starts to play quite a significant role on the print reliability and a heated vat upgrade like the one recently announced from people could be a decent way forward i honestly don't see many people printing the full 400 millimeter height available very often just because of how long it will take and the supports required will be crazy but if you're printing heaps of smaller models then the increased area you have to work with here will greatly speed up efficiency over a singular smaller machine you just won't use any of that extra height as for the price frozen has this thing listed at 1500 usd which is insane quite frankly considering the size and build quality however you do need to keep in mind that price does not include shipping or duty and it's a very big unit to ship indeed once you factor all that in it will probably come out a lot more closer to the 2 500 of the pio poly phenom l which has much the same print volume but a lower resolution lcd if you want to pick up the frozen sonic mega 8k there's links in description below and if you're in australia specifically then i can send you over to the 3d printers online store because the guys over there were fantastic along with frozen and helping me troubleshoot and work through my evaluation of the printer and they've actually been kind enough to provide a five percent discount code i don't get a kickback or anything from that but i'd like to pass it on to you guys if you want to pick up one of these machines because it does help quite a bit and in that case if you're in australia you get a local reseller which is really good for warranty and support for something as large as this machine um and as always on makers news this review has been my own thoughts and opinions no money has changed hands i do get to hold on to the machine for as long as i want and i'll do some uh projects uh in future with it but there's not been no pre-approval or anything like that given and i just i keep waving this around but just i've always wanted the blade from chronicles of riddick and i am so happy to finally have one so i probably should stop like threatening you with it but anyway if you enjoyed this video and make sure you consider subscribing it's my aim to empower your creativity with technology i love and i look forward to seeing you again very shortly catch later guys bye

Channel: Maker's Muse

Views: 2,696,042

Keywords: 3d, printing

Id: p6wljI-6EzI

Length: 20min 56sec (1256 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021