This is not a cheap 3D printer. Itâs a very affordable 3D printer – but unlike filament-based printers, the story doesnât end there. So while the Elegoo Mars is an incredible, high-detail resin printer, you canât just it to any other machine that costs under 300 bucks. So today, weâll look at whether Elegoo are actually managing to democratize printing or if you should just stick to FDM.
For some reason, when Elegoo introduced the Mars for around 280 bucks, the internet just went crazy over it. But itâs not like the Mars did anything really new and there were already machines like it out there. Even in a very similar price bracket, depending on which machine was on sale at what time. My experience has mostly been with FDM so far, filament-based printers, but I did have a Wanhao Duplicator 7 SLA printer for a good while now, and even though it seems to be practically the same machine as the Mars, I never really managed to warm up to the Duplicator 7 for many different reasons. So my take on the Mars is going to be from that perspective, too. And I do actually like the Mars a lot more than the D7.
But letâs start out with the specs, and they, too, are going to sound very familiar. At its core is a 5.4â 1440p smartphone screen that gets you a 12 by 6.8cm print area with a 50” pixel size. The Z-Axis does 15.5cm, which I think is more than enough for the build area – when youâre printing busts and stuff, youâre mostly limited when it comes to how large you can scale them up by the 6.8cm maximum depth.
Now, the resin the Mars is printing with cures through quote-on-quote UV light, but technically, the 405nm wavelength is deep blueish purple and not UV, you definitely wonât get a sunburn from it. So inside the printer, thereâs a large UV LED in the bottom that shines through that LCD screen, the LCD masks all the areas that shouldnât get exposed and cured and than with every layer, the print surface just moves up a bit, lets some fresh resin flow under it and then cures the next layer below the last one. This printer actually prints all your parts upside down, but you can just flip them once theyâre done.
One of the great features of the Mars is that it has a touchscreen interface and a USB port built right in. With the early cheap resin printers youâd basically run the masking LCD directly as a second screen from a computer, which was just horrible. If youâd leave your mouse cursor on the wrong screen, youâd actually get just an extruded mouse cursor column just printed next to your actual part, the computer couldnât go into standby, windows update messages would screw things up, you know, the whole deal. Here, you just save your print file to a USB thumb drive and the printer handles the rest.
So letâs actually have a look at a few prints!
So, what did you see there? The yellow prints were done with Wanhao resin, the clear and grey parts were Elegooâs own resin. And there is a massive difference between the two. I was never happy with the Wanhao D7, possibly because I only ever used the Wanhao resin with it. The prints with Elegoo resin on the Mars are clean, crisp, detailed, have only minimal warp, while the prints with the Wanhao resin warped a lot, supports broke off during the print and actually, I could never get the parts to fully harden and cure, even leaving them out in direct sunlight. These still feel tacky and soft, even after two days of curing. When I did the exact same thing with the parts printed from Elegoo resin, they actually turned pretty brown. What Iâm told is happening here is that the partially cured resin, as it comes directly off the printer, instead of curing to a clear, strong plastic, actually breaks down from the more violent UV rays that are a natural part of sunlight – the same ones that give you a sunburn. Supposedly, once parts are fully cured under the ânormalâ 405nm light, they are much more UV resistant and wonât turn brown as much anymore, which is why Iâm building a curing station with these mains-powered 405nm LEDs.
Overall, the print quality from Elegoo Mars is damn impressive. I donât think Iâve had a print actually fail with this printer yet other than when it was clearly my fault for for example not setting the bed correctly, theyâve all come out looking really great. The only thing that stood out as artifacts are these lines that appear every now and then, I have no idea what they are. But overall, detail is great, reliability is great and resin prints just always look fantastic.
But of course, that comes at a price, not just that you canât really observe the print as itâs happening like with filament printers, but the fact that youâre working with resin.
Resin itself is nasty stuff, first of all, itâs a sticky liquid, that, with this setup, you will inevitably get on your gloves that youâll of course be wearing when using the printer, thatâs why I donât have a ton of footage of actually using the machine, because as soon as I put my gloves on and start working with the printer or the parts, I donât want to go back to the camera with those same gloves and start smearing resin over it. I mean, if you try, youâll barely get any of the stuff on your gloves, but you never know for sure. And why wear gloves in the first place – some people seem to think you donât need them? Because resin is really nasty stuff. Itâs not necessarily âtoxicâ in the classic sense, but it can screw with how your immune system works and give you chemical burns. Which look horrible. You definitely do not want to get this stuff on your skin, definitely not repeatedly, or in your eyes, depending on the resin you should also be wearing a respirator with an organics filter, and thatâs not just me saying that, itâs literally in the material safety datasheet from the manufacturers.
There are a few newer resins that either donât smell⊠as much, or human noses just donât pick it up, the Wanhao stuff smells horribly, the Elegoo resin is a bit less smelly, but compared to printing PLA, itâs still really bad. Iâve actually installed a fresh air ventilation system here in the studio with an ERV so that I could use these resin printers at all. With the fumes just lingering in here, my throat would start aching and my nose would start burning, so really not something youâd want in your living room. There are also âplant basedâ resins now, but as always, just because something is ânaturalâ doesnât really mean anything, the resin is still nasty stuff.
And of course, the prints right out of the printer arenât usable straight away. With a filament printer, you just reach in, pop the print off the bed and thatâs it, with resin printers you at least have to wash off the resin from the surface of your prints, typically you do that with isopropyl alcohol or any other organic solvent. Just like with the âplant basedâ resins, there are now some resins that are water washable, but you still canât do that in the sink like itâs implied, because with both water or IPA, you can absolutely not pour this stuff down the drain once itâs contaminated with resin. This is essentially hazardous waste.
Okay, and once youâve washed your parts you still need to fully cure them, because they will at least be somewhat tacky still on the surface and sometimes even still soft all the way through.
And all this combined makes it really hard to properly compare filament printing to resin printing when it comes to cost and effort, because for resin printer especially, the printer itself is just such a small cog in the entire setup. Once you add up accessories and consumables, youâre easily spending another hundred or more bucks on top of the printer itself.
The resin itself is actually, Iâd say, very reasonably priced now, these half-liter, roughly 500g bottles of Elegoo resin are 25⏠and you can get them Prime shipped; and considering youâre not usually printing large, chunky parts completely solid with these resin printers, thatâs actually not too far off from what filaments costs. Itâs still more expensive, but very reasonable for being a less commoditized material I think. On the other hand, Iâve probably spent as much on nitrile gloves as I did on resin.
Speaking of parts that are hollow – the software. And Iâm actually pretty happy with it! What Elegoo are recommending is ChiTuBox – which is a closed-source software thatâs definitely not GDPR-compliant, that you can use for free for non-commercial purposes. Thereâs no option for anything but private use – yet, but down the road it looks like there will be a paid ChiTuBox Pro version with, quote, more features. The good thing is, it comes with a profile for the Mars that works really well out of the box – unlike the Wanhao D7 where I had to manually set up one of three different profiles in their software and none of the ones they suggested was actually âcorrectâ.
In ChiTuBox, you can add supports, automatically or manually, tweak your basic print settings, rotate, scale, align parts, all the stuff youâd expect. You can also hollow out parts like this bust that donât need to be super strong and would just use a ton of material if youâd print it solid. I think thatâs a pretty neat feature, but I still need to figure out the best way to then add holes so the resin thatâs trapped inside the part can actually escape. With the parts that Iâve been printing hollow, the holes were often too closed up after a print and Iâd have to manually peel them open, and even then there would still be uncured resin stuck inside the part forever. Itâs probably best to have three or more holes in opposite corners on a hollow part so that you can properly wash the inside, too.
The hollow feature sometimes struggles a bit with models that have multiple intersecting shells, so with this one, I first combined the bigger shells in Meshmixer and after that, it worked fine. And again, look at that print quality!
Okay, back to the printer: Build quality is very good. Thereâs no Z-wobble, the parts feel solid and even the resin container, the vat is a heavy chunk of milled aluminum.
Elegoo also offer a 4-pack of plastic vats for a very reasonable price, and I think itâs basically a must-have if youâre printing with more than one type or color of resin. Cleaning out the vat just to print with a different resin is really not fun, and in this one that has the clear resin in it right now you can still see some leftovers from the yellow Wanhao stuff even though I cleaned it out as well as I could.
The printer is also quite loud during use – and the only source of noise is that fan that cools the UV LED in the bottom here. Itâs always on and itâs definitely noisier than a quiet filament printer, but maybe a fan swap can solve that. Then again, you probably donât want to be in the same room as the printer anyways because fumes.
And two more things on the topic of the UV LED – because apparently the Mars only uses a simple reflector to âspreadâ the light from the LED over the entire print area, Iâve been told that you can run into issues where the center actually gets exposed more than the edges of the print area, but Iâve not run into that; and supposedly the LCD screen used in here can or will fail at some point due to the near-UV light. Iâve heard anywhere from 1000 hours – which would be after just a few bottles of resin – to tens of thousands of hours. Just something to keep in mind, the screen may be a consumable, but thankfully, the actual screen part itself is only 30 bucks in materials if you can manage to swap it yourself. If not, well⊠too bad.
And of course, the LCD is right under the print surface, so if your Mars is missing that one retention screw like mine did, the aluminum bed will shoot straight down towards the LCD when you level the build plate for the first time.
Itâs a quality control issue that shouldnât happen, so check that your printer has this screw right here installed before you loosen the bed for leveling. But other than that, the leveling mechanism is actually pretty simple and effective.
The actual touchscreen LCD is right up front and makes the printer easy to use, thereâs everything on there that youâll need to run the Mars, you even get small thumbnails of the print youâre about to start, but the USB port is on the back, which, just like the Ultimaker having its spool mounts on the back, is kind of inconvenient.
So is the Elegoo Mars a good 3D printer? Yes. Iâm really happy with it, but then again, it feels like a resin printer itself shouldnât be hard to get right. I know everybody likes car analogies, so just comparing different resin printers is like comparing different car engines – itâs definitely the core part of a fossil-powered car, but thereâs so much more to a vehicle than just the engine. Like, this is a good engine, but thatâs all it is.
So, really, a good system for resin printing should also factor in some way of cleaning the parts, resin handling, which Elegoo actually does comparatively well at with the VAT packs, and it should also include a way to correctly cure parts. That makes it hard to compare a resin âprinting engineâ with a filament printer where you donât really need anything else but the printer itself to produce parts.
But still, if youâre looking for just a resin printer, the Mars is a super solid choice right now. And if youâve been watching my stuff for a while, Iâm very cautious with saying something is âthe bestâ one, because I usually havenât thoroughly tested every single other machine there is, but this is definitely the best one Iâve ever used. Sample size 2.
So thanks for watching, let me know in the comments what your take is on resin printers – too much hassle? Totally worth it? Iâm still undecided. Thanks again to all my Patreons and YouTube members for supporting the channel directly!
Get the products shown:
Elegoo Mars
If it’s out of stock there, try some other countries, like Spain or China
VAT Pack
Resins
UV LEDs mentioned
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