Mars 5

ACF has it's downsides, namely causing fine vertical lines on smooth surfaces. There was such a backlash against it, Elegoo stopped using ACF on new printers. No Mars 5 or Saturn 4 model uses ACF. nFEP/PFA however is a straight upgrade from FEP, and is cheaper than ACF. And yes, it uses the same ten

For that price I would buy the minis directly to loot studios, each pack is at 139.9USD right now. But personally I would buy the printer if you can afford it, there are cheap ones for the price of two packs and they are great like Elegoo mars 5 ultra which I use and I'm no resin printer expert. Non

I got an Elegoo Mars 5 about a year ago. It really served me well, less than 200€ for the machine and I probably invested another 150€ into periferees. You can spend anything, open end l, into it but to get you started that's all you'll need. Probably spent another 150-250 € on resin, so in total it

the problem is. if your max total budget is only $500 that's really not enough. a "good" printer. can print 1/12 figure heads. ...ie a elegoo mars 5 ultra is a great entry lvl printer. is like $250 ish for the printer. but you can expect to AT LEAST spend that same amt of aux items. wash/cure statio

Anycubics are a larger gamble in terms of QC than Elegoo. A lot of M7s come with concave plates. On top of that, Anycubics can't use per layer wait times, so they have even more trouble with adhesion than other auto-leveling printers, especially with low cure depth resins (light colored/high detail)

I got the mars 5 ultra refurbished off of ebay for about $150. Its from the elegoo store and I've had zero issues with it.

I had similar issues when i first started using my Mars 5 Ultra. I had just come from a FDM printer and was annoyed that things didnt work off the bat. It didn't help that i picked the absolute worst and pickiest resin to print with (Siraya Tech True Blue Cast). I then swapped that out for some eleg

Edit: As u/awyeahmuffins pointed out, oddly enough the Mars 4, 5, and 5 Ultra have FEP listed by Elegoo. Didn't realize FEP was still in use on any consumer machines as PFA is better and cheaper. The Mars 4 Max uses PFA and notably has a larger tank than other Mars machines. In this case, either fil

pretty much exact same. no prior 3D printing exp. bought mars 5 ultra. downloaded the elegoo abs 3 settings. ran the cones of calibration. tiny bit of tweaking. no issues since. maaaybe 2-3 print fails but that was mainly first couple of prints when i was using pre-supported files. and it was just a

I think some of the older FEPs were made of ACF which isn't quite as good for light transmission (i.e. slightly lower quality prints). I'd grab an offical Mars 5U rated FEP from Elegoo.