I just received the delivery of Uniformation GKtwo yesterday. This was from their Black Friday campaign, I suppose they were shifting quite many units since I only got mine now.

I haven’t even opened the boxes yet, but will surely report here how it compares to my previous printers (Anycubic Photon and Elegoo Saturn S).  The main reason I went for it is the heated resin vat. My garage stays well below 20°C in the winter, which has meant I’ve not done any resin printing for few months now. The Uniformation printer also has quite many ”quality of life” improvements, I’m hoping for a bit more hassle free printing. AND it doesn’t have that ”bucket lid”, which I’m not a fan either.

Generally speaking I’ve been happy with the resin printers as machines. I had some hardware issues with the Photon (had to replace the USB port), none with the Elegoo. As long as your file prep, settings and ambient temperature is right these things do their job. I’ve had massive streaks of successful prints with the Saturn without any vat cleaning or plate levelling in between.

The area where resin printing still has loads to improve is the software. Slicers have improved tremendously in four years since I’ve been in the hobby (remember doing supports in Chitubox 4 years ago? And then it constantly crashing. Jesus!) but there’s still massive way to go for a truly smooth workflow. I dream of the day when I can pick the files I want to print from  Myminifactory library, tell which printer and resin I’m using and it will send the sliced file to me. Or better yet the printer straight!

Regarding FDM, I stayed away from them pretty much due to the same sentiment Blinky described, the machines being super finicky and then the results being kind of “meh”. Until I bought Prusa Mk4 last summer. Best printer (inkjet, laser, 2d, 3d, resin, FDM) I’ve ever had. I literally took it out of the box, ran the setup and have been printing ever since without issues. Wiping the build plate clean between prints and changing filament literally has been the only maintenance I’ve done. What I hear for people, Bambuu also gets to same level of ease and performance. With FDM the file prep is just a breeze compared to resin. I just slap the STL to Prusa slicer, pick the infill and slice.

Cool thing about FDM is that you can also print useful non-wargaming objects. It’s been the first time my wife thinks my printing hobby has made any sense 😀