What’s Great

• Quick and quiet printing
• Fully automatic calibration and setup
• Excellent layer uniformity

There are CoreXY 3D printers that cost less and offer greater material flexibility than the A1 – *cough cough*. This is a fact. We’re sticking with our recommendation of the A1 for for budgets stretching to $500 for now, primarily because of the ease of use and ecosystem Bambu Lab provides with this machine.

The Bambu Lab A1 is a tightly tuned standard-size printer capable of dampening its movements to eliminate the motor noise of printing. The general experience is rich with the mod cons of a 3D printer, even in 2025, and includes a nicely designed removable PEI print bed that snaps into position with ease. There’s a large full-color touchscreen UI to tap away at and follow through the guided setup, and you’re never left guessing what’s happening and where you are.

The A1’s main advantage over similarly-priced systems is its toollessly swappable hot ends. Held in place by a metal cage you can open with one hand. You can drop in a variety of nozzle sizes and toughnesses (all official Bambu Lab products, priced reasonably fairly) making it effortless to scale your printing up or down, from the strength given by chunky layers to high-detail miniatures only possible with a 0.2 mm nozzle.

Lastly, there’s the possibility of adding Bambu Lab’s AMS Lite four-filament system, which enables you to use different colors and materials in the same print. It’s a ~$259 addon (or part of a discounted bundle, $559) that seriously augments the printer’s abilities and your options for printing.

Bambu Lab A1

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What’s Great

• Fully enclosed
• Auxilary and chamber fans for better cooling and filtration
• Fast heating bed and hot end

Elegoo’s first crack at CoreXY is a good one, with the Centauri Carbon offering staggering value for ~$300. You get robust build quality from its steel chassis, decent all-around performance, high headroom for working with difficult materials, and a fully enclosed build that includes a glass door and cover that feel too premium for the price tag.

The Centauri Carbon’s speed and specs put it on equal footing with the likes of the Creality K1C and the Anycubic S1, but it boasts one party trick those machines can’t match: a fast heating print bed. It dramatically shortens the time from hitting “print” to the machine starting to extrude, going from cold to printing temperature in less than a minute.

To Infinity and Beyond

Elegoo Centauri Carbon Review: A Lot of 3D Printer for $300

You get a readout of the chamber temperature, which helpfully indicates when things get too hot and opening the door is needed – yes, unfortunately, you can’t get away with leaving it fully closed off. The printer is smart enough to tell you so when things are too toasty in the chamber.

Automated calibration and the option to manually adjust the Z-offset are welcome, as is the clean UI that, honestly, seems pretty standard across brands on this class of machine.

It hasn’t presented us with 100% perfect prints every single time – few printers do – but our time with the Centauri Carbon has left us with the impression that it’s unusually good value.

Elegoo Centauri Carbon

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What’s Great

• Reliable auto-bed leveling system
• It’s quiet
• Great bang-for-buck ratio – cheap and capable

The Creality Ender 3 V3 SE sets a new baseline for cheap 3D printing, blending a familiar form with the beginner-friendly fully automatic bed leveling and self-offsetting to give effortlessly perfect first layers.

Its standard features run to a 220 x 220 x 250 mm build volume, with a Sprite dual-gear direct extruder feeding filament to a hot end that tops out at 260 °C. In practical terms this means your printing will be limited to lower temp materials like PLA and PETG, which are adequate for many situations. Printing through the full height is served by dual Z-axis motors, ensuring stability throughout.

In our time printing with the Ender 3 V3 SE, we’ve found it to be a little workhorse. While it lacks the flashier features and firmware flexibility of today’s pricier machines, it offers a fuss-free printing experience that’s a clear evolution of yesteryear’s Ender 3 3D printers.

The removable magnetic print bed can be a bit fussy to return to position after a print, and there’s no filament sensor, which is an odd omission these days, even at $179. All in all, a simple yet refined cheap 3D printer.

Creality Ender 3 V3 SE

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What’s Great

• Fully enclosed and can stay closed for all materials
• Massively economic with its footprint
• The most plug-and-play Prusa yet

The Prusa Core One achieves the one thing most enclosed 3D printers can’t: printing low-temperature materials with its enclosure resolutely closed. No jarred doors or propped lids, just 24/7 sealed printing, no matter the material.

It also helps the Core One’s case that it’s Prusa Research’s most complete-feeling system to date. For your $999 (if you fancy the time-honored tradition of building it yourself, otherwise it’s $1,299 for an assembled unit) you get superlative print quality, a hallmark of the brand, as well as active chamber filtration and regulation, which lets the printer moderate its the chamber’s temperature and ensure printing performance.

Core Memory

Prusa Core One Review: Tinkerer's Choice

The build volume exceeds that of the company’s MK4 series of printers, using the same build plates (250 x 220 mm) and stretching the print height to 270 mm, all while reducing the footprint over said printers to a measly 415 x 444 x 555 mm.

It is incredibly space efficient, with recesses in the enclosure giving space for filament and accessories. The company proved at launch that the system is moddable to the extreme, with a wry Bamboo-wrapped version hogging the spotlight at 2024’s Formnext additive manufacturing show.

The Prusa Core One is the complete Prusa experience with an integrated enclosure out of the box. Arguably best of all, owners of the company’s MK4 series machines can upgrade their way to the Core One with the company’s upgrade kits, reusing many of the parts they already have in their possession.

Prusa Core One

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What’s Great

• Fast, with self-calibrating smarts
• High-uniformity prints
• Beginner-friendly experience

The linear rail-touting Bambu Lab A1 Mini is small, with a build volume of just 180 x 180 x 180 mm, but don’t let its size fool you into thinking it’s in any way diminished – it is packed with smarts, including noise-cancelation tech, full self-calibration, over the air updates and self-diagnostics, all for just $219. It’s also fast and, per our testing, consistently delivers impressive quality prints.

The A1 Mini offers, in a word, simplicity and builds upon this with Bambu Lab’s new MakerWorld 3D model repository, which offers one-click printing with the A1 Mini.

Colorf'all

Bambu Lab A1 Mini Review: Not Different, Just Better

We found it’s not quite as polished as the company’s flagship X1C – an understandable concession, given the ~$1,000 that separates them and the difference in intended user. Largely, though, these compromises are few and far between and well worth bearing for the savings and variety of quality-of-life features that come with the machine. A high-quality camera for remote monitoring, a (admittedly finicky) nozzle wiper, and – perhaps most importantly – a hot end that allows for toolless swapping, making it trivial to change nozzle sizes for fast or highly detailed prints.

Its printing capabilities are a little narrower than other Bambu Lab printers (you’re more or less confined to PLA, PETG, and TPU-like filament), but your horizons widen somewhat with the A1 Mini’s compatibility with Bambu Lab’s AMS lite, a four-filament system for multicolor and multi-material printing.

All told the Bambu Lab A1 Mini is the ideal beginner 3D printer and a machine that we have recommended to friends who are getting into the hobby.

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The Best 3D Printers for Beginners

Bambu Lab A1 Mini Learn more

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What’s Great

• Frequent updates & improvements
• Upgradability for multi-material/enclosure
• Scales with your printing

A long time coming and, for some, well worth the wait. Prusa Research’s first foray into larger-scale 3D printing comes in the form of the Original Prusa XL, a 360 x 360 x 360 mm CoreXY style 3D printer with one unique feature you won’t find on any other machine in the space: a toolchanger.

Starting at $1,999 for the base single-toolhead printer, you can configure your way up to five independent toolheads (from $3,499) each a direct drive Nextruder-toting extrusion system capable of printing virtually any desktop-grade material with minimized purging required between material swaps. You can mix and match nozzles, too, resulting in creative solutions for speeding up and adding versatility to your prints.

Closer Look

Toolchanger; Game-changer? Hands-On With the Prusa XL

We’ll admit that the XL is a touch on the smaller side for what we consider “large” – it’s actually about as small as we’d go – but that 360 x 360 mm build area is more than ample for ostentatious full-size helmet prints and other oversized bits you may need to make.

Underpinning this build area is a removable high-quality satin-finish print bed. And beneath that is one of the XL’s other USPs: zonal print bed heating. The entire build area is split between 16 independent heating tiles, meaning the bed will only heat where it needs to. Note that while this sounds like a time-saving measure, it’s more about energy efficiency – having tested it, the printer will still perform a “heat soak” before each print to properly heat up and ensure first layer performance.

The XL’s versatility is its strongest suit: if you upgrade to a multi-toolhead version (Prusa sells it with 2x toolheads from $2,499 and 5x toolheads from $3,499) you gain the chance to mix flexibles, tough, abrasive, and everything in between, in your prints. In large-scale printing, being able to use cheaper filaments for support structures is a pretty radical money-saver.

Other pluses include Wi-Fi connectivity and web-based monitoring, eco-friendlier packaging, generous freebies in the box, and the high likelihood that the machine’s functionality and feature set will grow. Through the course of 2024, Prusa Research activated the XL’s touchscreen, improved speed and volume when printing, and app compatibility.

On top of all that, an optional enclosure boosts the XL’s performance with warp-happy materials and adds air filtration, for safer printing in proximity.

Read More

Best Large 3D Printers 2025: Our Picks in 3 Categories

Original Prusa XL

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What’s Great

• Fast, high-quality printing
• User-friendly and accessible design
• High-power heated chamber

Despite an early wobble that saw Qidi Tech quickly redesign its chamber heater, the revised Plus 4 stands as an impressively complete mid-size 3D printer.

For your ~$800 you get a 305 x 305 x 280 mm fully enclosed build volume with active chamber heating, plus a hot end and heated bed that go hot enough to tackle high temp engineering materials.

You’re also getting the full Klipper experience, with a Qidi Techified UI on the large full-color display to tap and prod at for the basic printer functions.

Left at its defaults, it’s capable of high-speed printing, with Qidi Tech’s skin of OrcaSlicer being a complete enough experience for you to achieve high-quality prints right out of the box.

Thoughtful design touches like the integrated carry handles, Ethernet port for networking,  plus an easily serviceable hot end make it a fine mid-size printing companion suitable for most 3D printing situations and eventualities.

Qidi Tech Plus4

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What’s Great

• Compact, self-contained footprint
• Exceptional print quality
• Self-diagnostic smarts and print improvement algorithms

Arguably Bambu Lab’s most impactful 3D printer, the A1 Mini is an uncompromising little machine. Showing its prowess through things like the motor noise cancellation calibration, which sees the printer measuring its movements, gradually canceling out the vibrations to result in whisper-quiet operation. Even today, over a year after its release, this is still an unusual feature.

Colorf'all

Bambu Lab A1 Mini Review: Not Different, Just Better

You get a 180 x 180 x 180 mm build volume to work with on the A1 Mini, with its lightweight cantilever design seeing a 280°C hot end whip about the build plate as quickly as the company’s bigger, more expensive machines. Your printing is limited to everyday lower-temp materials like PLA and PETG, but this is understandable given it’s an open-frame 3D printer.

The A1 Mini’s printing capabilities can be upgraded with Bambu Lab’s AMS Lite multi-filament feeder device, although we’d argue this blows the printer’s quality as a “small” 3D printer out of the water since it doubles the footprint.

Further capability upgrades can be made using the hot ends Bambu Lab offers for its A-series machines, which are virtually drop-in once you’ve disengaged the cage that keeps them in place.

All in all, it’s a thoroughly capable, quick, and flexible 3D printer that demands very little desktop space.

Bambu Lab A1 Mini Learn more

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What’s Great

• Fabulous design and build quality
• High print speeds
• Simple, slick, user-friendly experience

It’s such a subjective thing, premium. But we’ve done our best to define it. Some will say it’s hardware quality above all else, but we think it’s much more. Excellent hardware quality and quality assurance, plus an overall experience that inspires confidence printing and puts less onus on the end user. That’s premium 3D printing to us, and right now, the Bambu Lab X1 Carbon best exemplifies this.

Bambu Lab’s opening salvo of printers, including the X1 Carbon, is a direct hit to the idea that desktop 3D printing for ~$1,000 or less is a dull space overflowing with aluminum extrusions, the tedium of granular settings and conveniences that end at automatic-bed leveling. At the top of the line, the X1 Carbon is available for $1,149.

The X1 Carbon, in addition to using carbon fiber rods in its CoreXY motion system for supreme lightness, sports an all-metal hot end reaching 300 °C plus an abrasive-resistant nozzle and extruder for confident handling of carbon and glass-filled filaments.

An In-depth Look

Bambu Lab X1 Carbon (AMS) Review: Fresh Thinking, No Tinkerin'

Of greater interest is the onboard lidar, which the X1 Carbon uses to scan the print bed and the first layer of a print. If it detects something fishy, it will alert you directly on your computer or via the Bambu Handy app so you can fix the issue before losing time and filament.

Further slickness comes in solid Wi-Fi connectivity (albeit 2.4 GHz only,) a vibrant and responsive touchscreen display, and thoughtful extras, such as the “filament drying” menu option, which walks you through using the X1 Carbon to dry a selected spool of filament using the printers headed print bed and enclosure.

An optional extra, the AMS (Automatic Material System), adds multi-material capabilities supporting four different filaments. It’s possible to chain several AMS units for sixteen-filament prints.

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The Best Premium 3D Printers

Bambu Lab X1 Carbon Learn more

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What’s Great

• Four-filament printing
• Self-calibrating smarts
• Plug-and-play

Despite its mini size and name, the Bambu Lab A1 Mini is a surprisingly complete 3D printer, giving the full, slick, connected, and productive experience offered by the rest of Bambu Lab’s more premium lineup of 3D printers, in a compact form and slim price tag ($369) to boot. For that reason, we’re drawing attention to it as a low-cost entry point to multicolor printing.

It’s a smart little cookie, with self-calibrations keeping the print quality high and the printer quiet. For multicolor printing, it uses the AMS Lite, which sits next to the printer and feeds filament through an array of guide tubes into a buffer that sits atop the print head. Powered directly by the printer, the AMS Lite is a relatively unintrusive system, though it does expand the footprint of the overall setup. You need desk space for this.

Colorf'all

Bambu Lab A1 Mini Review: Not Different, Just Better

Together, the A1 Mini and AMS Lite let you combine up to four different spools of filament in a single print job, be it multiple colors of the same material, or, to a limited degree, different materials, but mind that the A1 Mini printer is only rated for lower-temp materials such as PLA, PETG, PVA, and TPU. Of those, the AMS Lite cannot feed TPU or similar soft materials.

It’s a single-nozzle system, so some material purging is required to keep color transitions clean. Historically, the printer’s default purge behavior has led to criticism of it being wasteful, which it certainly can be when printing small, colorful objects. There are measures to offset this, such as purging into an object’s infill or printing a dedicated purge object alongside your desired print.

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Best Multi/Dual Extruder & Multicolor 3D Printers

Bambu Lab A1 mini + AMS lite Combo

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What’s Great

• Enclosed volume with temperature regulation
• Fast, high-quality printing & effective cooling
• Slick, connected software ecosystem

The Bambu Lab P1S is a comprehensively decent 3D printer for its $629 price tag. But alone, it is not a multicolor or multi-material 3D printer. Combine it with Bambu Lab’s Automatic Material System (AMS), a standalone box that houses four spools of filament, and the P1S can be supercharged to use up to four filament spools in a single print.

Closer Look

Bambu Lab P1S Review: Hot Box

You get a 256 x 256 x 256 mm enclosed build volume and a print system with a direct extruder and hot end that heats to 300 °C. The AMS alone costs ~$310, but you can shave $100 off the total by buying both together for ~$830.

The base AMS lets you print with four filaments, but you can cluster four of them together for prints using 16 (that’s not a typo) filaments in total.

Handily, you don’t even need a split model for multicolor printing here – you can paint colors in the Bambu Studio slicer, configuring colorful prints on the fly from single-piece models.

As a system for printing more than one filament, its strength lies in using materials of the same type. Temperature jumps for different material types will increase the print time. Like with the A1 Mini, the default nozzle purging is excessively wasteful, but there are things you can do to minimize this.

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Best Multi/Dual Extruder & Multicolor 3D Printers

Bambu Lab P1S + AMS Combo

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What’s Great

• Powerful printer management software
• Simplified printing experience
• Print core system simplifies nozzle changes

Dual-nozzle, or “dependent dual extrusion”, is a segment of machine that has largely been abandoned by desktop 3D printer manufacturers. We imagine this is because most consumer needs in dual-extrusion printing these days are served by multi-material style add-ons for single-nozzle 3D printers.

Closer Look

Ultimaker S5 Pro Bundle Review

Pro users set on authentic dependant dual extrusion are left looking to the likes of UltiMaker and Raise3D, who straddle the line for consumer levels of ease of use with pro-grade hardware. Insofar as a simple, productive machine that gets out of the way of you printing dual material prints, the UltiMaker S5 endures as a long-term favorite of ours.

The base UltiMaker S5 3D printer costs $6,950. That’s expensive. But the tech is quite novel, achieving dual extrusion 3D printing using UltiMaker’s swappable “print cores.” These compact hot ends can be quickly swapped in and out of the printer, with each tailored to a particular material and type of printing: from a PVA soluble-support specific core to a larger-bore toughened nozzle that’s best suited to filled, abrasive polymers. Two different print cores can be combined in a job to achieve efficient print strategies.

UltiMaker’s software ecosystem begins with the free and open Cura slicing software, which has a simple UI through which you can select from a long list of materials, find more in the company’s online material library (or create your own), and progresses up the enterprise-centric UltiMaker Platform, which incorporates model management, printer management, online support, software plugins, and educational materials and certifications.

The UltiMaker S5 is all about uptime, which is its strongest proposition when augmented with the Pro bundle (add ~$4,400 to the price tag) which adds a filament loader and air filtration lid (pictured above) for office-friendly downtime-resistant 3D printing.

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UltiMaker S5

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What’s Great

• Premium look and feel interacting with the printer
• Nicely-guided approach to calibration
• Productivity boosting IDEX print modes

There aren’t many independent dual extrusion (IDEX) 3D printers at a consumer-friendly price point. There are even fewer that pass muster. Of the systems we’ve tested, the Snapmaker J1s does. With a smidge of patience, this slick-looking tank of a 3D printer can attain reliable, consistent dual-extruder-pure performance for its $999 price tag.

The J1s excels at calibration, which is the one area you need an IDEX system to perform. Snapmaker’s system sidesteps a fully manual process, automating X- and Y-axis offsetting, and visually guides you through bed tramming on its gorgeous, 5-inch touchscreen display.

Its die-cast frame and stamped metal side panels, lid, and base all feel robust, and the heavy-duty motion system runs on linear rails, which lets the J1s chuck its two printheads around at what the Snapmaker says is up to 350 mm/s print speeds. Your mileage on this will depend on the materials and prints you run.

You get a 320 x 200 x 200 mm build area and a textured glass print bed to work with. The two print heads can be upgraded to different nozzle sizes or hardened-nozzle variants that expand the J1s’ compatibility with trickier technical materials that would quickly wear out a standard brass nozzle.

The J1s offers a thoroughly modern printing experience, with vibration compensation and linear advance calibrations addressing extrusion artifacts at speed. Being an IDEX means that the J1s has independent print heads that can operate in several productivity-boosting modes, provided you’re comfortable with the compromise of reducing your print volume per model. Filament wastage is minimized, too.

Spool placement on the back of the printer is annoying and the filament paths aren’t the best, sometimes needing you to intervene. Snapmaker’s Luban slicing software (which the J1s shares with the company’s 3-in-1 CNC and laser engraving-capable machines) does its job but offers fewer options for fine-tuning your print than many other popular slicers today.

Fortunately, Snapmaker recently announced a commitment to develop a new slicing solution based on OrcaSlicer. It’s currently in beta, but we expect it to offer a dramatic improvement for beginners and advanced users alike.

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Snapmaker J1s

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What’s Great

• Massive material flexibility
• Scales with your printing
• Quick, premium printing experience

Prusa Research’s 360 x 360 x 360 mm build-volumed XL does a solid job carving out a useful niche of the multi-material space that few other machines manage. Seen by the company as an expert machine for the material versatility it offers, we’re inclined to agree. The Prusa XL opens up an awful lot of possibilities when decked out in its full five-toolhead configuration. Such versatility comes at a price, though: ~$3,500 for a part-assembled kit you finish building yourself.

Closer Look

Toolchanger; Game-changer? Hands-On With the Prusa XL

Being a toolchanger, it offers the advantage of completely independent print heads – meaning the materials do not share a nozzle and consequently are not at risk of clogging from differing viscosities, fillers, and temperatures. Each print head is capable of up to 290 °C and the heatbed of up to 120 °C, meaning reliable performance with tough filaments like Polycarbonate is also possible. Downtime between extrusions is minimized, too, since each active print head can sit at temperature ready for use.

The toolchange mechanism is quick and performs consistently, and seeing it sashay between materials without the need to withdraw the filament each time, as single-nozzle systems do, is impressive.

The XL’s heatbed is segmented into 16 tiles that can heat individually, depending on where and how much of the plate you are using. The Prusa XL effectively adapts to your printing, be it material or scale, and reduces waste where it can.

An enclosure accessory (sold separately, $649) improves the XL’s stability when printing higher-temperature technical materials, adding in-chamber lighting, humidity detection, and air filtration for a more office-friendly experience.

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Original Prusa XL

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What’s Great

• Three creative tech tools in the footprint of one
• Feels premium
• Decent dual extrusion printing experience

There’s an unquestionable slickness to the machines Snapmaker makes. You get a high-quality fit and finish, backed up with glossy build guides and manuals to inspire your creativity. The Snapmaker Artisan is the latest in the company’s series of multifunctional machines. At ~$3,000, it’s a considerable ask, but between the device’s solidity and versatility with the multitude of creative processes you can tackle, it is quite unique.

Separating the Artisan from its predecessors is the perfected quick-swap mechanism, which makes changing modes a toolless, effortless procedure. The Artisan also benefits from bumps to speed and operating volume that make it faster and quieter than the Snapmaker 2.0.

Read More

Snapmaker Artisan Review: Big Potential

More powerful laser and CNC modules come as standard, giving a slight spec bump on the 2.0, too. And there’s a nifty dual extrusion experience in the UltiMaker-esque print core system, letting you quickly combine different nozzle types in your work.

A massive, tinted enclosure comes as standard with the Artisan, to shield your eyes from the laser, and contain the mess of CNC engraving and cutting. There’s a vent for ducting smoke away from the setup, too, but note the enclosure has no floor – it is not airtight.

Impressively, the Artisan’s 400 x 400 mm print bed can heat up quickly, with user-selectable zones for quicker, more energy-efficient printing of smaller models.

If you expect to need to swap between 3D printing and laser engraving often and really put your machine through its paces, the Artisan is the comfortable choice. While it’s not necessarily better than a dedicated machine for each of the functions it offers, it does a competent enough job of combining the three.

Read More

The Best 3-In-1 3D Printers

Snapmaker Artisan Learn more

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What’s Great

• Massive toy library to print
• Kid-friendly experience
• Snappy on-device UI and app-based control

Critics will point to its premium models and “plus” subscription as a negative, but much like the shows and movies your kids stream on the likes of Disney+ or Netflix, what Toybox offers isn’t so unfamiliar in this day and age. On the plus side, there are no ads, and the curation on offer means that not only is it possible to print everything you see, but it’s nearly impossible to mess up. The Toybox takes the effort of finding or making 3D printable toys, for the most part, out of your hands.

Read More

The Best Toy 3D Printers

Buying the printer alone is enough to give you access to thousands of models and some basic in-app model creation from the get-go, but the 10,000+ library can be expanded through purchasable extras and a monthly subscription. There is plenty here to keep inquisitive young minds going.

Toybox’s greatest success is in cutting the clutter of the process of 3D printing and making every toy a tap away from physical reality. The print quality is not good. But having put all of the machines tested for our toy 3D printer guide in front of real, live, fidgety kids, they didn’t care. What mattered was finding a model in the library, and printing it out on the Toybox’s dinky print plate was fast. From our perspective, it was fast enough to keep pace with young kids’ short attention spans, and that’s what counts.

Toybox

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What’s Great

• Self-diagnostic smarts
• Heated vat as standard
• Time- and resin-saving features

With a budget ticking up to $1,000, there are two directions: big, or feature-rich. Previously, the UniFormation GKtwo was our pick for the wealth of neat little design touches that made using the printer a joy.

For $849, the Anycubic Photon Mono M7 Max does enough to pull us away by blending a large-format print volume, 298 x 164 x 300 mm, with the mod-cons of resin 3D printing in 2025. Its value lies in large-volume resin printing with plenty of success (or, rather, failure detection) systems to make it as simple as smaller-scale resin printing.

In testing, we found the system unobstructive (a rarity in large-format desktop resin printers) with the flip-hinge lid offering unrestricted access to the print chamber, and thoughtful inclusions like the integrated hook for hanging the print plate to allow resin runoff, to be genuinely useful.

A heated resin vat conditions your resin, increasing the chance of print success and, for longer, larger prints, an included resin pump can refill the vat mid-print for you. We’re not big fans of the resin pump since bottle changes can get messy – but it’s optional and you can just run the printer without it.

Overall the M7 Max is a refreshingly modern, smart, large-format resin 3d printer with a surprisingly low price tag for its size and feature set.

Anycubic Photon Mono M7 Max

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What’s Great

• Capable of fast, high-res printing
• Heated, tilting vat for fast, successful prints
• Well-implemented Wi-Fi connectivity

Our pick for a $500 budget resin 3D printer goes to the Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra 16K, which sneaks under the line by a penny at $499.99. Going by the name alone you’d be forgiven for thinking it was just a resolution upgrade on the regular Saturn 4 Ultra, but there are a couple of killer distinctions that set the 16K apart.

For starters, the 16K introduces a heated resin vat that can condition your resin up to 30°C. This is essential for removing the environment from the equation of likely print success. Warm resin is happy resin.

And then there’s the better “AI” print monitoring camera that, this time, includes a light for 24/7 viewable time lapses and print monitoring. Sounds minor, but it’s a discernable step up in quality of life for this feature.

The build volume sits at 211 x 118 x 220 mm, shaving a couple of millimeters off the regular Saturn 4 Ultra. It’s a minor difference. Likewise, the jump up from a 12K to 16K LCD means the Saturn 4 Ultra 16K’s voxels, in the X/Y, shrink from 19×24 microns to 14×19 microns. That’s around a 20% improvement, but we’d caveat that 80% of something impossible to discern is still impossible to discern. They’re impressive numbers, but not the main attraction.

A rip-roaring mid-size flagship that offers virtually everything you could want on a modern resin 3D printer.

Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra 16K

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What’s Great

• Bleeding-edge resolution
• Useful Wi-Fi connectivity
• Top all-round performance

Elegoo’s pricing model is pretty wild, with last year’s flagship price tag dropping hard to make room for this year’s printer. It’s a big win for thrifty spenders, as it means that for $300, not much more than our sub-$200 pick, you can pick up a Saturn 3 Ultra, Elegoo’s top-spec model of last year, instead.

The biggest concession you’re making is that the Saturn 3 Ultra is a mid-size printer that would benefit from having a hinged, flip-style lid. It doesn’t have one, though, so you have to live with lifting its hefty grey bucket lid whenever you’re fishing out a print or topping up the resin.

In classic Elegoo fashion, the Saturn 3 Ultra is a workhorse, capable of finely detailed prints across its build area without the need for cajoling or praying to the machine gods. At least, that has been our experience using it in the lab. You get ~219 x 123 x 260 mm of build volume to work with.

There’s a ventilation port on the back of the printer, for those running a hose to a window or extractor. Likewise, you can plug in a replaceable USB-powered air filter, which will quietly run to reduce the smell coming from the resin.

The Saturn 3 Ultra can achieve up to 150 mm/s print speeds thanks to its use of ACF film in the resin vat. Some claim this film isn’t the best and can result in artifacts on your prints. In our experience, nuh-uh. But, if it does, the film is an easily swappable consumable – other films, including newer formulations of ACF, which would maintain the high print speed, are available.

Elegoo Saturn 3 Ultra

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What’s Great

• Resin level & print failure smarts
• Useful Wi-Fi connectivity
• Self-leveling

The Elegoo Mars 5 is the latest of Elegoo’s “cheap and cheerful” base Mars model of 3D printer, priced at ~$180. While it won’t print as fast as the pricier Mars 5 Ultra (primarily because it lacks a vat tilting mechanism), it does offer a suite of sensors to help you get through your prints without much hassle.

The Mars 5 features Elegoo’s new style of print plate, which sits on springloaded standoffs – this is, ostensibly, the plate leveling mechanism, allowing you to unbox and start printing without the need for a pre-print level, minus the resin and with the printer in a clean state. This is a key feature for beginners, reducing the frustrations in preparation of a print.

Unusually for a sub-$200 resin 3D printer, the Mars 5 features a full systems self-check, letting you know if the printer is in good operable condition.

Size-wise, you get ~143 x 89 x 150 mm of build volume to work with, which puts the Mars 5 firmly in “small” resin 3D printer territory.

Overheat protection and the option to enhance the printer further with add-ons that plug into the printer’s in-chamber USB port, such as a heater (useful for ensuring the resin is in a good state for printing) or an air filter, to help reduce the smell from the resin, all of which let you customize the setup to your situation.

Overall, the Mars 5 is a compact, smart 3D printer that offers great value for money.

Elegoo Mars 5

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What’s Great

• One-click printing carries through wash and cure post-processing steps, too
• Pulsing release module lets you cut back on supports
• Exceptional print quality for zero effort

Ordinarily, a printer like the HeyGears Ultracraft Reflex RS would be prime under-$1,000 fodder in our buyer’s guide, but that wouldn’t accurately capture how pinpoint perfect the complete ecosystem is for this machine which, bought together, balloons the price up to $2,000+.

Most, if not all, resin 3D printer manufacturers offer peripherals, wash stations, cure boxes, and the like for their printers. HeyGears’ offering goes beyond such blunt tools to tread on the toes of the likes of Formlabs, for a fraction of the price.

It is a walled garden – a touchy subject in 3D printing, true – meaning material compatibility is limited to HeyGears’ short (but soon growing) list of resins, but within that limitation is the elimination of doubt that your print will work.

The software, Blueprint, simplifies print setup and links all of the Reflex RS 3D printer, Wash Station, and Curing Oven, letting you walk a job from printer to each step of post-processing with the stations knowing what the job is and tailoring the wash and cure cycles to the specific print.

The Reflex RS printer offers a pleasant user experience with a hinged lid and simple-to-attach print plate, and the nifty status lighting just looks cool. You get a build volume of 222 x 122 x 230 mm to work with, which puts the Reflex RS squarely in the medium-format size class.

It’s a comprehensive resin printing and post-processing solution, made even better if you throw in the Pulsing Release module and its accompanying heated resin vat. This device sits next to the printer and pumps air through channels in the heated vat to reduce the peel force in your prints. Consequently, you need fewer supports and can achieve shearer overhangs, saving material and time. It’s a thoughtful addon that to our knowledge, no other printer offers.

HeyGears Ultracraft Reflex RS Combo

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What’s Great

• Packed full of fail-safes to save you material and time
• Wi-Fi and app connectivity
• Capable of quick printing

We were big fans of the Anycubic Photon Mono 2 for its low-cost low-frills approach to resin 3D printing. The Anycubic Photon Mono 4 Ultra, $259, is the ultimate glow-up.

Anycubic reserves the odd numbers for its “main” M-series. We don’t know why. Regardless, the Mono 4 Ultra earns its name well and is remarkably feature-packed for its stature and price. It is, in many ways, a mini flagship 3D printer.

Beneath its lightweight bucket lid lies a ~153 x 87 x 165 mm build volume – sufficient for minis, terrain, jewelry, and the gamut of typical resin 3d prints. There’s space for an in-chamber air filter (sold separately), while a 10K 7-inch LCD provides the framework for 17 x 17-micron resolution in the X- and Y- axes.

The Mono 4 Ultra’s UI borrows from the M7 series – an evolution of the one the company introduced with the Mono M5S back in 2023 – and presents a marvelously clean and logical array of controls and options for using the 3D printer.

A guided setup wizard walks you through the first power on of the machine, with self-checks taking over from there. That’s right, this mini Mono knows thyself and can tell you when something is wrong. “Wrong” in this case can mean insufficient resin to complete the job at hand, and prints failing to adhere and sitting stuck in the resin vat (zero force at layer change). It’s a smart cookie and a godsend for saving time and money on wasted resin when things don’t quite work out.

ACF film comes as standard in the resin vat, allowing print speeds (using Anycubic’s high-speed resin – other high-speed resins are available) in the region of 120 mm/h, although as is always the case, your mileage will vary based on the resin you use and printing parameters for the job.

Cloud functionality is there if you want it, pulling models and slicing in the cloud per Anycubic’s MakerOnline repository, as is printer monitoring and control. You can choose not to use this and simply ferry prints via USB.

Anycubic tells us a LAN mode is coming this year, which is very exciting and would make for a great security improvement over the company’s historically shaky past on this subject.

Anycubic Photon Mono 4 Ultra

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What’s Great

• Capable of fast, high-res printing
• Resin level & print failure smarts
• Well-implemented Wi-Fi connectivity

The Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra is a mid-size resin 3D printer, which is just about where its being “mid” ends. A high-resolution LCD sits atop Elegoo’s new-for-this-generation vat tilt mechanism, which the company says reduces peel force at layer change and overall layer time.

The printer drips quality, from the reassuring tilting lid to the self-checking and print monitoring systems. It’s internet-connected and is, natively and fully operable with all popular third-party slicers, plus Elegoo’s new Satelite slicer, which promises a complete, beginner-friendly experience that features all the tools you need. We’ve not tested Satelite yet, so can’t speak to that aspect, but the workflow using most popular slicers is functionally effortless.

In testing, we found the Saturn 4 Ultra met every task we threw at it with no memorable hiccups. You get a ~218 x 122 x 220 mm build volume, and Elegoo benchmarks the printer as capable of printing up to 150 mm/h. This number will depend on the resin you use and its idiosyncrasies for curing and timing.

At $399, the Saturn 4 Ultra is tremendous value. Elegoo has just launched a slightly higher resolution version, the Saturn 4 Ultra 16K ($499), which ekes out an impossible-to-discern bump in print quality and adds features like a heated resin vat and improved camera setup.

On a complete tangent, there’s a fun unintentional aspect to the Saturn 4 Ultra that fits its space-themed naming, too: the sound the tilt vat makes on booting up the printer. As it performs its self-checks, it’s a dead ringer for the “Wooooh” of air escaping from human Bender (Futurama – season 4, episode 3). You’re welcome.

Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra

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What’s Great

• Self-diagnostic smarts
• Heated vat as standard
• Time- and resin-saving features

Anycubic’s new M7 series of resin 3D printers are a comprehensively decent bunch, making massive strides on the mish-mash of M3 and M5 printers that came before.

Nowhere is this more exemplified than in the M7 Max, which boasts a sweeping 298 x 164 x 300 mm print volume. While it’s not the largest build area in the desktop space (our previous pick, the Phrozen Sonic Mega 8KS, topped it slightly in all directions) the M7 Max offers many features to help ensure the success of the massive prints you’ll be pulling off the print plate. That, and it’s attractively priced at $849.

In addition to the myriad force sensors to detect the presence of enough resin, foreign objects, and successful peel separation from the resin vat (all common across the M7 series), the M7 Max has a heated resin vat to ensure the appropriate printing temperature for the resin – an important catalyst in resin 3D print success.

Helping to speed your prints along is Anycubic’s “Intelligent Release 2.0” algorithm, which adjusts the layer lift height during the print, potentially saving time across the duration of what will, inevitably, be a several-hour job.

In the time we’ve had it running in the All3DP lab, small design touches have endeared this printer to us. For one, a hinged flip lid is, in our view, essential on larger machines like this; particularly if, like us, you run them in an enclosure with air filtration where space may be at a premium. There’s also a hook to hang the build plate post job to let resin drip back into the vat.

As is common across Anycubic’s non-budget 3D printers, cloud operability and connectivity are present, letting you keep tabs on your printer’s status, maintenance schedule, print jobs plus the sundry model-related functions Anycubic offers via its MakerOnline model repository.

The company informs us that a LAN mode is coming soon, which will allow you to use the remote functionality locally, disconnected from the internet. Given recent controversies, this will be a very welcome thing that only improves Anycubic’s hardware in our view.

Anycubic Photon Mono M7 Max

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What’s Great

• Resin level & print failure smarts
• Well-implemented Wi-Fi connectivity
• Self-leveling

It’s usually pretty solid advice for beginner machines to go with something inexpensive and simple. That is very much the case with resin 3D printing.

Many of the arguments we made for the Mars 5 being a great 3D printer under $200 carry over here. For ~$180, you get a resin 3D printer that’s effortless to set up and smart enough to tell you when something isn’t right for the printer or print, such as insufficient resin in the vat, or subsystems falling outside of acceptable performance. The build volume runs to ~143 x 89 x 150 mm, in the same ballpark as our best small resin 3D printer pick, the Anycubic Photon Mono 4 Ultra.

Elegoo set a standard for budget resin 3D printers many years ago and in 2025 it continues to do so. It’s not a revolutionary 3D printer, but it does enough to offer the better ideas of today’s flagship models in a punchy, sub-$200 package that’s uncomplicated to set up and start using.

Elegoo Mars 5

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