Accuracy

With a precision Revopoint says is as fine as 0.3 mm, the Pop should prove to be a pretty accurate 3D scanner. It’s not the most accurate 3D scanner out there, but at the price point of $499, this sort of level of detail isn’t really all that bad. To get finer details, you’ll need to be willing to part with four digits instead of three.

Crucially, Revopoint points out that the quoted accuracy was gained in a lab environment, so actual operation accuracy may not be quite that good.

Scanning Tech

The Pop uses dual-camera infrared binocular structured light to scan its targets.

The light source itself is a class 1 laser, meaning it’s eye-safe, and you won’t have to worry about blinding your friends when you scan their faces. It also means you won’t annoy your pets if you want to scan them, something Revopoint perfectly demonstrates in its marketing material by scanning a plastic duck.

Two infrared sensors here act a bit like human eyes, sitting at opposite ends of the Pop to detect a pattern from the subject’s surface fired at it by a projector. This gives us a huge array of points from the subject, and those points – known as a “point cloud” – can then be turned into a 3D mesh using the software.

There’s also an RGB sensor on the scanner so that it can pick up colors too.

Size and Weight

Obviously, if you’re going to be using a handheld 3D scanner, you don’t want it to be too heavy. At 225 g, the Revopoint Pop shouldn’t make you feel like you’ve been at the gym, and its relatively small size of around 155 x 38 x 26 mm means it’s an easily portable piece of tech too. In marketing material, you can see the commercial models having absolutely no reaction at all to holding the scanner, so it can’t be too tiring. They weren’t even sweating.

What looks to be a really fun aspect of this 3D scanner is that you can run it off your smartphone, meaning you can get out and about scanning to your heart’s content, and its low weight and small size mean you can just pocket it when not in use.

Fixed or Free

You can choose to scan objects with the Revopoint Pop in two ways – fixed or free. If you’re using the fixed mode, you have a limited area between 50 x 50 x 50 mm and 200 x 300 x 300 mm. Revopoint will sell you a turntable to aid with fixed scanning.

Free, meanwhile, has no upper or lower limits on the size of your chosen subject, so you can scan, scan away without a care in the world. Except for…

Unscannable Objects

Yeah, anything highly reflective or transparent is really not going to work with this scanner. Also, anything black is going to be enormously tricky to scan. That’s why Revopoint will supply you with some reusable black gloves that the scanner won’t pick up on, meaning you can hold objects you want to scan without getting your fingers in the results.

Obviously, a scanner of its price class will have some limitations, but it is important to know them up front to make an informed buying decision.

One Cable To Rule Them All

The provided USB 3.0 cable takes care of both data transfer and charging, so you’ll only ever need that to run the Pop. Additionally, it’s held in place with two screws, meaning it shouldn’t ever get knocked out while in use.

Software

Revopoint provides, via a USB stick, the scanning software Handyscan and the post-processing software 3DmodelProcess. Both are free of charge.

Whether the software is any good or not remains to be seen, however. They look as if they give you the tools required to transform a 3D scan to a 3D model, which can then be exported as an STL to your favorite slicer.

Scanning Modes

Which type of scan do you want to run? There are a few different options, five to be precise.

Different modes are designed to scan different things. Feature mode being a general scan-that-thing-for-me-please mode, whereas Marker mode uses markers (best for scanning objects with little to no features). Face mode and Body mode are pretty self-explanatory, and Dark mode is for darker objects. However, the latter objects will be hard to scan anyway.