Woop! These look great.

I was only looking at the AnyCubic Photon the other day, thinking that while £220 wasn’t a lot for a resin printer, without models to print on it, it’d be an expensive toy just to churn out a few of my own crude cube + cylinder objects from Blender. I’ve just downloaded these brilliant freebies and almost justified getting one to myself. Now if I can just convince my wife…..

@thelynxdefect – it turns out not. I’ve an AnyCubic Photon on order, due to be delivered in the next week, and I’m sleeping in the back room. I really need to find a better source of advice than “random guy off the internet”…. 😉

Fleabay.

You can get them for a few quid cheaper, but it’s not clear whether they come with resin. So I bought from “some guy off ebay” calling himself “anycubic3dcom” – come to think of it, I didn’t check if that’s the official seller or just someone being clever with their name. Either way, I’ll find out in about a week….

I did look at the Elgoo Mars too, and talking to @warzan on Discord, he suggested there’s little between them from a hardware point of view (they’re both just an LCD and a stepper motor with some CNC’d aluminium parts at the end of the day) – so I went with AnyCubic as they have a large(r) support community and their software is, apparently, print-and-play ready. That, and the Mars was about £270 compared to the Photon’s £220 (with resin).

I’ve already signed up with a few designers on Patreon and have about a years’ worth of minis for printing!

@collins – interesting… I’ve joined a few groups and done a bit of Googling but can’t find anything but glowing reviews!

The difference between the photon, Phauxton, and Photon S is largely moot with the latest firmware allowing the same sliced files to run on them, the only problem you might run into is trying to find the correct replacement mainboard if it goes boom, and tbh I think that would be enough of a PITA anyway that it wouldn’t be much worse…

@blinky465

Hollowing is only useful for larger projects like ornaments etc

For the vast majority of the prints we are likely to make it’s not worth the hassle and the additional heft of a solid print actually serves us better.

@warzan – I thought as much. But then found a video of “some dude off Youtube” hollowing out his minis and going to great lengths to connect up the internal voids to aid draining. I really did think “wow, to save half an ounce of resin?”.

I don’t think I’ll bother. At least not until I know what I’m doing!