$200 Resin Printer Reviewed
[3DPrintFarm] got an early version of the Phrozen Sonic Mini resin printer. If you look at the video below, he was very impressed with its build quality and results. The price is reported to be $200, although we have seen it on some web sites for a bit more. The build quality does look good, although you have to admit, the motion mechanism on a resin printer is pretty simple, since you just need to move up and down.
The printer uses a monochrome LCD which allows it to cure layers very fast (apparently, monochrome panels pass more ultraviolet light through). The panel also has a higher-rated lifetime than color LCDs
The steps to print are pretty simple. An LCD test lets you make sure the LCD panel is working. Leveling or Z axis calibration, is, as always, some amount of work, although it is guided and not very hard compared to a filament printer.
Once complete, you are ready to go, and the video shows a real-time build with each layer taking just a hair over two seconds. Watching items grow out of a vat of liquid always seems like some sort of magic to us and that’s quite fast. The build size isn’t super large — 4.7 inches by 2.6 with a height of about 5 inches. That’s still big enough for a lot of purposes.
We had trouble finding the printer for $200 other than on the company’s web site. Amazon listed the product but showed it unavailable and didn’t list a price. Despite putting the web site in US dollar mode, the shopping cart rang up in Taiwan dollars (TWD) and shipping was around $60 (NT$1,699). The cart informed us that the total in US dollars was about $258. They did offer PayPal as an option to pay.
We can actually get an ELEGOO Mars for a little less that that. Sure the retail price is higher, but there are free shipping options. We’ve seen some other resin printers for as little as $180. We’d love to see how those printers stack up to this one. According to the video, this printer is probably faster than many other printers, if nothing else.
If you want to get into resin printers, make sure you know what you are getting into.
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