Review on 🖨️ Enhanced ANYCUBIC Photon Monochrome 3D Printer for Optimal Printing by Scott Channell

As a self-proclaimed Anycubic fan, I was thrilled to get my hands on their latest products, biggest and most advanced machine ever. I ordered the printer through Anycubic the very first day they started accepting early orders. I then waited 2 months for it to arrive in the US (obviously this has nothing to do with the printer you are now considering with great shipping). My printer arrived in a very large box on a FedEx truck. Inside was the typical high quality Anycubic packaging that I've come to expect from anything I've bought from them in the past. I was disappointed almost immediately to find that the very large detachable lid had tears in several places, although the box and packaging looked perfect. I sealed the cover, wanting to get a print, and set about putting it up. Setting up the printer is easy, and leveling the platform is as easy as any printer I've known, except for the old mono price printer, which actually leveled reliably. Harz, my choice, and since I usually choose, a fair apples-to-apples comparison) and proceeded to print the provided Anycubic cube, already cut for you, onto a flash drive. I left and came back a few hours later to find that the print, starting with layer 1, had completely fallen apart and formed a blob in the vat. Annoyed but undeterred, I cleaned up everything and started typing again. A few hours later I found it failed again. I cleaned everything up, leveled the platform and started printing again. This time I just let go of it for a while and then paused only to find that the imprint hadn't stuck to the platform. I sanded my desktop. and this time I tried my well-known model for the fourth time. It was much larger, and while it also failed, it did so in a way that pointed me in the direction of the crooked bed. I found that the aluminum build plate has a cup or crown that is about 0.5mm. All 4 corners of the plate touched the trough, but the center did not result in failures. I leveled the bed on a wide belt sander after doing a few proof and low shots and here is the next print that came out great. Since then I've made about 40 prints in the last 2 weeks and all but a few have turned out great. I really like the large build area and the below-average shift times are nice too. I totally dispute the claim that 2-3x is faster, but I would say 1/3 as fast is reasonable. I base my comparisons on the first generation Photon, from which I have made literally hundreds of prints with an extremely high success rate of over 90 percent. This car is bigger, newer, faster and better on paper than my three-year-old Photon in every way, but when the dust settles it's less than the sum of its parts and that's the only real advantage I have over it my trusty old man Photon. mounting size. At more than three times the size of the first photon, this printer gets more done in less time. Because as with any SLA printer, there is of course no loss in element size, just element height. You can print 40 small parts on this printer in exactly the same time as printing 1 or 2 identical items, and this is where the huge print bed really shines. I absolutely hate the slicer that came with this printer. It's clunky, unintuitive, and freezes frequently. I can't wait for the Chitu Box to support this printer as I hope it will be much more enjoyable overall. When I was using the printer for the past 2 weeks, I encountered another problem. The entire removable UV cover has started to crack or snap as the acrylic is exposed to the fumes from printing and at this rate I really don't know how long it will be before it needs to be replaced entirely. Don't even tell me about the opening lid design, it really is awful. I understand this is becoming the norm with these printers across the board and that it will probably save a hundred bucks, but it still sucks. It's huge, slippery, fragile, and grabbing something like that with dirty gloves will never work well. A swing door would be much better. I should mention that I contacted Anycubic shortly after it arrived for help with the lid and build plate. They quickly agreed to send me a new one; it was about 10 days ago. Since then, Anycubic hasn't responded to my emails nor provided any tracking information, so I'm not really confident I'll ever get them, but I'll update here if they fix it. I don't want to leave You get the impression that this is an inept machine, but it's far from perfect. For almost 1,000 (I paid a lot less by pre-ordering early) you can expect it to work with very little tweaking or modification, which isn't the case for me. In my case at least, this machine required more customization than one would expect. When he types now, he does so with about a 75 percent success rate, and I hope to only increase that number as I refine my workflow and hopefully get a Chitu box working soon. If you need to print larger items this might be for you if you just want to print a few smaller items now and then buy a Photon for 189 or Phrozen for around the same price and save a lot of money and a lot of headaches. As much as I love this thing, after 2 weeks I can only take it and see its potential. I hope that with time I will love it. i really love it Edit: I liked the quality of the prints and the large build plate, but I found another issue that definitely makes this printer subpar. I usually print with supports, but recently I needed to print a flatter part that made sense to print directly onto the build plate to keep post-processing to a minimum. I reduced the number of bottom layers and the exposure to minimize the "elephant foot". I still had a lot of it. I ran the print again and saw that while my first 6 layers were the only ones that should have been slower, after layer 6 the exposure time decreased by a few seconds until layer 26 was reached. Apparently the printer was programmed to do that it slowly transitions from the duration of the first shifts to the normal duration for each shift at an interval of 20 shifts. Therefore, the only way to avoid "elephant feet" is to use supports. Hopefully they update the firmware to make it work like other printers, but for now the only "fix" is to print everything with support. If my review helped you in any way, please let me know by clicking the helpful button below. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask... Thank you!