Reply To: What printer to choose.

[blinky465 17028xp 0]

@warzan has both Elegoo Mars and AnyCubic Photon so could give you a comparison between the two.

I’ve an AnyCubic Photon (not S) and went for that one for a couple of reasons – firstly, the dual rail thing that the S boasts about doesn’t *really* make that much difference (the z-axis doesn’t have any great pressure on it; it’s not like it’s a CNC carving machine, it just makes the print head go up and down!)

Secondly, the Photon (original) has a mature support community behind it, and the motherboard handles .photon files. This means that you can use third-party software like Chitubox. Many of the Photon S machines can only use .pws files (I believe later models can handle both .photon and .pws but you can’t be sure which type of machine you’re going to receive!)

I’ve printed open-lock compatible terrain pieces on my Photon (I’m currently building a cyberpunk diorama using them) and they look great – far better than the stuff I printed on my FDM machine.

I love my Photon – if I was buying again, I’d be sorely tempted by the Phrozen Mini; it has a mono masking screen and despite the so-called lower resolution – 1920 in the X rather than 2K) apprarently you get crisper prints off it, because the masking is much sharper.

The only trouble is there are no Phrozen Mini’s (at a reasonable price) available to the UK (if you see any, shout up, I’m very tempted!). In the meantime, I can’t recommend the Photon enough!