The EufyMake E1 is the latest piece of industrial high-tech to trickle down to the consumer market, with a hefty cost in ink and AI microtransactions. While it could be a new “must have” tool for makers, the current software still needs refinement.
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The EufyMake E1 UV printer is not quite a 3D printer, but it’s close enough to raise interest from the crafty side of 3D printing. Imagine if a 2D photo printer had a baby with a resin 3D printer, and you might get an idea of the possibilities.
Like a paper printer, the E1 needs a surface to print on. Unlike a paper printer, that surface can be nearly anything that fits inside the chamber: paper, wood, metal, acrylic, most plastic, leather, or fabric.
Note: Fabrics require a special flexible ink that I didn’t get to test. It can also print on a special sticker material that will let you apply prints to items too large or odd-shaped to fit into the machine.
Its most exciting feature is the ability to “paint” images on flat surfaces, creating three-dimensional brush strokes, raised lettering, or raised portions of an image. This is rather like 3D printing, where dimensionality comes from stacking up many layers of material. Fortunately, it uses white ink or clear gloss (depending on the method you choose) to build that height, and it only needs a single layer of color. The color layer is mixed from four cartridges – Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. Ink is a bit spendy at $43 each for a non-refillable 100ml cartridge, or $300 for a full kit with cleaning fluid. I’ll get more in-depth on ink costs later in the review.
My biggest beef with EufyMake is the maintenance, which is entirely automated and mysterious. Because you cannot let the printhead or tubes dry out, EufyMake gives you two choices: either use it every day or let it go into maintenance mode. This sounds pleasant until you find out that a deep clean cycle will cost you $7 to $10 in various fluids and burn up 6 to 12 ml of ink. I can’t even give you a hard number because the software does not currently report precise ink levels. More on that later, too.
And yes, they’re very serious about preventing the machine from drying out. I broke the first beta unit sent for testing by “improperly” turning it off. In my defense, the machine lacks a vacation mode or any warning about what will happen if you turn it off for a couple of weeks without running a deep clean first. Hopefully, a vacation mode will be added in a future update. If you’re wondering why this review is being posted after the Kickstarter ended, it took several months to get a replacement machine and continue the review.
The EufyMake is the first printer of its kind for the consumer market, and had a record-breaking Kickstarter, with nearly 18,000 backers pledging over $46 million. Sadly, the E1 was scheduled to ship in July, but due to production issues, it is now shipping out in waves in November through December. This has left some bitter backers complaining on Facebook, so if you’re still on the fence about buying a retail unit, I would give this new machine another six months or so to find its footing.
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