Elegoo saturn 2 8k инструкция на русском

When printing miniatures on entry-level machines, I am constantly feeling like I cannot really fit all of the models on the build plate that I want. What is worse, I have to split up big miniatures into smaller chunks and glue them together afterwards.

And while glueing resin models together is okay, it is not really what I want to be doing. Especially when the models do not come out perfect and the joints no longer fit very well together.

So, you can imagine how excited I was when my Elegoo Saturn 2 arrived. It is a mid to big-sized 3D printer (depending on your perspective) from Elegoo that launched at the end of 2022.

This is my Elegoo Saturn 2 Review. I have printed for quite a while, but I will try and review it from the perspective of a person just entering the 3D printing hobby anyway. I will go into some of the features I really like and some elements of the printer I am less fond of.

Later I will go through how it was to set up, calibrate and print miniatures on the Saturn 2.

Review Copy Disclosure

What to look for in a good 3D Printer for Miniatures

The Saturn 2 is a resin 3D printer from Elegoo. They mainly produce 3D printers for home use and most of them are very budget friendly. The Saturn 2 is about $500 and the best prices will mostly be found getting it on sale directly from Elegoo. The Saturn line and its little brother the Mars line from Elegoo are pretty bare-bones resin 3D printers for home use. But that does not make them bad, it just means they print great looking models, but without any WIFI, heated vat, auto-levelling or what have you.

The Saturn 2 has a screen resolution of 7680 x 4320 on a 10 inch screen. This gives you a 881 PPI (pixel per inch) and an XY resolution of 28.5. So while the screen is technically 8k, it is the PPI and XY resolution you should look closely at. Printing at 28.5 microns layer height (as is feasible on the Saturn 2) will give you very good detail.

On to form factor: it will be a big difference if you are coming from an entry-level small resin 3D printer. The build volume is 219 x 123 x 250 mm and the little brother Mars 3 is 143 x 89 x 175 mm. Those numbers will likely not mean much to you, so let me explain it another way:

I have printed a ton on smaller machines like the Mars 3. On those machines, I crammed the build plate all I could, but I often found myself unable to squeeze in all of the miniatures I wanted to print in that batch anyway. This has not been the problem on the Saturn 2.

In fact, I sometimes felt bad for leaving half of the build plate empty, but I had already included all miniatures I wanted from a particular Patreon release.

What the added size also means is that you can print bigger miniatures in one go, instead of having to split them up in a ton of parts. Not only is this more convenient, but it can also save some resin because you need to print fewer supports. Unless you have an extremely specific use case, I doubt you need to go larger than the Saturn 2, even though it is mostly closed as “mid-sized”.

This review is based on me using the Saturn 2 for about 1 month, but I will try and update it if my experience changes.

My quick take on the Saturn 2 is this:

There is a ton of competition and a lot of printers that are very similar in size and specs as the Saturn 2. In fact, the Anycubic M3 Premium and the Phrozen Mighty 8k have almost identical specs! The Saturn 2 is not the clear winner of these printers, but it is also not the loser. A lot will come down to how the various printers are priced at the time you need to buy and if you can get a specific printer in a bundle that is available to you.

There are no two ways about it, the Elegoo Saturn 2 is great. It is bare bones in terms of features if you are comparing it to newer prosumer machines. But for the price you pay you get an amazing screen, a reliable frame and a build plate that can hold most of what you need to print for gaming or hobby.

Best Printer for Big Miniatures

Let us start with one of the most important aspect of any 3D printer: the specs of the screen and the light. This is what plays the biggest factor in the quality of the print the resin 3D printer can produce.

The screen is an 8k printer with the following specs:

So in the image above, this will only be true if the screen of the printer are of the same size. Let me explain by comparison:

The 4k screen on the Mars 3 has a PPI of 732 (vs 881 on Saturn 2) and an XY resolution of 35 (vs 28.5 on Saturn 2). So in terms of quality of the print, the Mars 3 and the Saturn 2 will be almost identical in sharpness – so do not be fooled by the 8k marketing here.

In short:

Resolution is only understandable if you know the size of the screen. The printer will only print details as small as the pixel size.

Another example: Jumbotrons might have incredibly high resolution, but each pixel can be almost a foot big. If you printed something on that kind of screen, it would be made of huge chunks of 1 foot pixels.

And speaking of printing in great quality: it is extremely hard to see the difference between say 30 microns and 20 microns – unless you use photography and zoom way in on the model. The naked eye will just have soo much trouble discerning any difference between the 20 micron layer and the 30 micron layer, so printing at lower than about 30 microns is not something I recommend. Remember, 10 microns equals 0.01 difference, which is just so damn small.

Also, the layer height also drastically increases print time, so finding the sweet spot is best way of doing it. I know a lot of people that print almost everything on 50 microns, because they can simply not see the difference in the outcome and it drastically cut down on print time.

It can be hard to determine this, as new printers will always say they have “improved lenses and light”. And this is no different with the Saturn 2 here.

What that should mean is that the printer is more precise, and the light will have less “bleed” to adjacent pixels and make the details sharper. How to test that? Hard without a lab. And while I would like one, other things are on the todo list first.

If you want to test this out for yourself, you can load up the profile for the printer you are looking at in a slicer (I go with Lychee) and see how much you can put on there.

Elegoo uses a design for their Mars and Saturn line where you have two screws that holds the plate to a ball join. Other companies use a better design, but it is not the worst in the world. On older models, this proved to be a bigger problem. When you took models of the build plate, the plate tended to come lose and you would have to re-level it. On the Mars 3 this was mitigated by getting stronger screws, but another issue persisted:

If you were not super careful in how you tightened the screws, the build plate would tend to get misaligned so the right side was a bit higher than the other. This is still a bit of an issue here and I guess that is why they printed this sticker on the build plate:

But once leveled the build plate of my Saturn 2 have remained surprisingly level for a very long time (but I also apply very little force to it when taking minis off, compared to other people). Very happy about how it has worked out. Even when I had to put some force into removing something off the build plate, it remained looked into position.

Speaking of build plate, this is how it looks:

At some point, people made a lot of fuss about having build plates that were easier to get the print to stick onto. I think by now people have come to realise that it is all in the first/burn in layers and the speed of the printer where this is determined. So yeah, have not experienced failed prints because of the build plate surface at all.

Only thing I am missing here: auto levelling. But this is not really a prosumer machine with that kind of features.

The Elegoo Saturn 2 comes with the standard Rook file on the USB drive sliced at very standard and settings. I have written about this before, but it is a bit weird that this is still what Elegoo is shipping with their printers.

The Rook will test nothing besides bed adhesion to the build plate. It would be much better to send an actual test file helpful for calibrating and dialling in the resin 3D printer. Oh, and they could also talk to creators about shipping actually good-looking miniature stl files on the USB drive.

Besides the rook file, we had the manual and version of ChituBox on the USB. So I did what I have done with all the USB drives from printers: put them in a drawer and never use them. The drive will brick sooner rather than later (and can cause a super nasty failed print for you) and Chitubox is… not what I would use.

I decided to go with a resin mix of 80 % Siraya Tech Fast Grey and 20 % Siraya Tenacious Clear. This was sadly what I had on hand, as my local resin dealer had run dry of the Siraya Navy Grey and Siraya Tenacious Black. The properties of the resin are very close, but images of the prints are a bit worse since the prints are very white (making it hard to see the detail before they are primed or painted in some way). But it makes for great looking miniatures that do not break the instant someone touches them.

So I got the resin ready and loaded up Lychee slicer. I changed some default settings to make sure the printer would operate nice and slow while I dialled in the properties of the resin (dialling in speed comes at a later stage). The most important thing I changed was setting the layer thickness/height to 30 microns instead of 50. The printer can handle this because of the XY resolution and it will give a better print (at the cost of speed). The ambient temps of the print were about 25 celsius.

Next print came out super close to being dimensionally accurate:

After that, I measured the cones. I was lucky and had hit the exposure time pretty well for the first go around. Some sides were perfect, while others were off by 0.01-0.002mm. So I know that I was not overflowing my exposure and losing detail if I went with 2.5 exposure time. I printed a few more cube tests, but it was very hard to hit it perfectly. If they were smaller than they should be, I added 0.1 exposure time to the normal layers. If they were too big, I subtracted 0.1 exposure time. Exposure time for my particular situation, if I wanted to get dimensionally accurate prints with this resin, it was about 2.45 seconds.

Since printing dimensionally accurately is not the most important thing for the things I print, I went on to test some other elements.

It turned out the sweet spot for this test was around 2.5 seconds of exposure. So, this time around calibration went quickly! It will likely not go as great next time I try a new resin.

Tableflip Foundry also has a great test model you should do after the cones. It tests if you can print supports and miniatures well. It came out great!

Below you can find an assortment of miniatures I have printed with the Saturn 2. I am happy to say that I could print 1 liter of resin here without any fails whatsoever. That is a first for me when getting a new resin 3D printer, but I am also using better resin and have gotten better at setting speeds and calibrating to avoid random fails and issues with Resin 3D printing.

Notice that the resin I used is quite grey/white, so I had to do a zenithal highlight or a drybrush to make the details more visible on some of the miniatures.

So on to how this thing looks and a few other design things we have not talked about. The Saturn 2 is massive. An absolute unit! Just picking up the Allen key was like “damn, boi!”.

The Saturn 2 uses the same red cover as the other Elegoo lines, this time with a bit of a sporty curve to it

You have the max fill line and boy can this big of a vat hold a lot of resin.

Because of the massive build plate, I found that even after waiting a long time, a lot of resin was on the build plate and above the build plate. This is not as big an issue on smaller printers, but I think this is just par for the course when it comes to this size of printers.

This printer is very bare bones in ease of use features. It has the “clean tank” feature, which is great to have, but other than that nothing to really help you out. Elegoo is also not doing you any favours with their “test print” and gives you no help with dialling in the printer. I would hope to see this rectified someday.

You have to find other sources of information. While there is a lot of great info out there, there is also a lot of myths and fake news being repeated like gospel. If you want help straight from the manufacturer, Elegoo is not the place. I would look at something like the Prusa resin printer if you are looking for handholding and great support directly from the manufacturer.

As with all my Elegoo products, it was shipped carefully and with a ton of foam. Unlike with FDM printers, resin printers like this come fully assembled.

There are no wires to attach or anything that can go wrong. While I find the amount of foam and wrap to be slightly wasteful, I respect that I got my machine without anything being broken or knocked loose.

The printer prints just as fast as the competition in this space. While we see a lot of innovation with regard to speed on the FDM printers, things are harder with resin.

The resin is liquid and when the bed moves up and down the resin goes in motion. The liquid resin needs to fully settle before a new layer is exposed. If the resin is not settled before exposure begins, you will start to see various artefacts on your print and you will lose details.

So the moving resin is, most of the time, the bottleneck with resin 3D printing speed. TSMC goes a long way in helping with that, but any further innovation is hard for now.

If you have no clue how long printing 3D miniature usually take, here is the time some of my prints took:

Upon arrival, I would put both scrapers, the mask and the USB drive in a drawer and forget about them.

The masks are not nearly enough protection, and by providing them Elegoo is sort of stating that it is. The plastic scrapper is not good enough to use on the build plate and I would never put that thing near the FEP. Some like the metal scrappers, but I do not want to gauge my build plate.

The Elegoo Saturn 2 was released in late 2022. I think it will be quite a while before we see a new Saturn machine, likely first in 2024. Right now we are also running into a bit of a problem with new editions: what are they going to change? While the jump in screen resolution from the Saturn 1 to the Saturn 2 is a big leap, it is unlikely that any massive quality leap will happen from Saturn 2 to Saturn 3. It will most likely be more “prosumer” features we see in the coming years (at least I hope so).

So unless you are looking for a heated vat, auto levelling or some other “nice to have”, the Saturn 2 looks like a super safe buy right now (early 2023).

I really like the Saturn 2. I think the size of build plate and resolution is the best you can currently get for printing miniatures. Yeah, if you are starting out I still would get something a bit smaller. But this is a nice machine that do great prints.

At is all the extra stuff besides the print, the finishing touches that are missing here. The bland UI, the less than stellar onboarding via the information material. The lack of any wifi connection or extra features. It is very bare bones, but as long as the price reflects that it is okay.

Pricey of 3D printers is hard. I have seen the Saturn 2 for as low as $500, but it can quickly fall in price. If you can get this cheaper than the competition, this is my pick for the best 3D printer for loads of miniatures or big models.

Best Printer for Big Miniatures

11/27/2023 08:06 am GMT

Lets take these in a batch here, because it is sorta funny how the specs almost exactly compare to each other. The Anycubic M3 Premium, the Phrozen Sonic Mighty 8k and the Elegoo Saturn 2 all have the same screen size, resolution and PPI. The Mighty 8k have a slightly advantage on XY resolution, but does not have the same height as the other two. The specs of the Saturn 2 and M3 Premium are almost identical.

I really like the Phrozen printers and their resin, but bear in that depending on your location, they can have insane shipping fees and they do not have a warehouse in each relevant continent (so import duties are much more a thing).

Overall I have had a better experience with Elegoo support than Anycubic support, but both are what I would call “not amazing”.

The Phrozen have better UI and wifi support, as well as some extra features. The Anycubic also have wifi support, but it is still not working.

So maybe pricing should be deciding factors, as what you get is almost the same here. I have a table where I constantly update prices of resin 3D printers each time there is a sale.

These are the best prices I have seen for each unit in a respective sale:

Overall, I would pick whatever you can find the cheapest. I would give a slight edge to the Elegoo and Anycubic, since they are never models.

If you really want to go into all of the small details of each printer, our friend Ross from Fauxhammer has the best rundown.

So, this is a bit of a weird one. The Saturn 8k is actually a never machine than the Saturn 2. And why Elegoo would go ahead and mess everything with having more versions of the Saturn, I have no idea.

The Saturn 8k is a bit smaller in height than the Saturn 2. The 8k is, mostly, a bit cheaper. Other than that, they are mostly the same machine.