Technology is awesome. This week I was having a clear-out and out went my very first resin 3D printer. Bought… Continue reading Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra – the new consumer 3D resin printer of choice for the masses
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Technology is awesome. This week I was having a clear-out and out went my very first resin 3D printer. Bought at a time when I didn’t know if resign printing was going to be too much trouble, the tiny Voxelab Proxima served me well enough until I got bored of its quirks and small build plate size. Even though it is only a couple of years old I realized there was no way I could sell it as literally nobody would want it, such is the speed the technology has moved over the past months.
A little while ago we looked at the Uniformation GKTwo – the poster child of the consumer resin printing community – and what an amazing printer it still is – although it remains expensive and difficult to get hold of, and the GKThree has now been announced. What nobody expected though I don’t think was for Elegoo to take its existing Saturn range and boost its ultra model with a new feature that is a game changer but that is what they have done here with the Saturn 4 Ultra. Let’s see why.
The Saturn 4 Ultra is a nice-looking machine. A smoky grey UV hoof and a metallic-looking plastic faceplate all surround a vertical touchscreen controller built into the front.
The go-faster stripes we saw on the Neptune machines are here on the resin cousins now, with the weird thing is, the machine does go faster – obviously not because of the stripes, but more of that later.
The UV hood thankful tips its hat to the GKTwo and is of the tip-back variety meaning you can get it out of the way with an elbow if you need to, rather than leaving sticky (gloved) resin fingerprints all over it and having to find somewhere to put it down. Worth noting though that when tipped back the hood extends quite a way at the back, meaning don’t expect to put this machine flush against a wall, or you won’t be able to open it.
The touchscreen on the front is in the portrait orientation which actually looks very nice. It’s super responsive and Elegoo has done a great job on the user interface, but man is the text small. My eyes are far from perfect and I have to be really close to the machine to make out any of the information. It’s a small point but maybe form over function here.
With the lid up we can see what we are dealing with. A single lead screw hauls the sizeable build tray up towards the heavens as the layers are printed. The build volume here may be an issue, despite the large size of the printer and the ‘ultra’ moniker. Not so much the 219x113mm size of the build plate, but rather the 220mm build height, which has been reduced by some 30mm from the last generation of the Saturn. How much of an issue this will be depends on your use case, but if you like a big bust (sorry) on your build plate, well, they won’t be quite as big as before.
Speaking of the build plate it is great and comes with a textured pattern that helps models stick and it clamps onto the mechanism rather than messing around tightening large screws. It’s spring loaded so will technically “level” itself by pressing down and the springs allowing it to move slightly. This all just works with minimum fuss.
I did find the large gap between the top of the build surface and the campling mechanism was prone to collecting extra resin which is difficult to get out. You can tip it and let it drip into the vat but you have to hold it, unlike the new GKThree which has a rack to place it on while it drains the excess.
In the grand scheme, this is a small point, but anything Elegoo can do in the future to remove messy resin issues would be appreciated by all.
For the technically minded the screen is a 10-inch 12K mono LCD, and the Saturn 4 Ultra boasts an impressive resolution of 11520×5120 and an XY resolution of 19×24μm so with a good quality resin the detail you can get from a good model here is nothing short of lovely.
But now onto the game changer, the feature that takes all those earlier nitpicks and makes them irrelevant. Totally. Okay, so what is it? If I say, well the vat tilts between layers to reduce the time and force needed to pull the print off the film you might say, is that it? In reality, what happens here is that the printer itself – not the slicer – controls all the lifting taking away a host of variables and settings most people didn’t understand anyway.
As each layer is exposed rather than lifting the build plate and lowering it back into the vat for the next layer – a process that takes around five or six seconds between layers, the vat tilts forward, the print pops off easier and it’s ready to expose the next layer – all in about two seconds. That is a huge reduction in print time with absolutely no loss in quality. It’s an absolute game-changer, and while it introduces another mechanical part that could fail eventually, chances are you will have spilled resin all over the screen long before then.
Until you run a print on a Saturn 4 Ultra you don’t realise just how effective, and indeed cool this actually is. You may have seen videos on YouTube and thought it was a gimmick. It’s not.
One final thing to talk about before we run out of space is the built-in camera that takes gorgeous print time-lapses for you. A really nice touch, if you are in a well lit area at night. There is no light inside the machine like there is on say, Creality’s K1C FDM printer so all the camera can do is record darkness. It’s a bit strange but there are ways around it if you want to jank on your own light source. We probably shouldn’t have to though.
So there you have it. A game-changing consumer resin printer with genuine quality-of-life improvements. Do not underestimate how much of a difference printing around two to three times faster will make to your hobby. The models we printed were perfect and we didn’t get a single print fail in our time using it.
Sure there are a couple of nit-picks but these are far outweighed by the benefits, one of which is much lower price than the GKTwo or GKThree. This is going to sell by the bucketload and you can pre-order it now at Elegoo. Originally it was due out this month but the pre-orders now seem to suggest you will be waiting until next month, so get it ordered now.
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