I work at Creative Warehouse and when we heard about the UI printer, we knew we
had to take a look at it. And even though it's a Kickstarter, let's take a look at what this could do.
Oh, it's chunky. And what looks like the
print bed that comes with it. And a nice little quick start guide and
a bed. Unlike FDM printers, UV printers will
spray down an ink and then cure it almost instantly with a UV light. This
one included. This particular model can do a bunch of different colors and print
some depth and texture as well, which is part of why we're excited about it.
Yuthi has been talking about a wide variety of different materials that
they're looking to unveil at one point or another, and I've seen some of the
prints in person, but I'm definitely looking forward to playing around with it myself.
All right. Ah, there's another nice little uh surprise for us inside.
well packed if nothing else. Looks like
we got a bunch of cables, some UV glasses, power cable,
a couple of ceramic test print pieces,
and a charcoal filter, which as it is UV ink is pretty important cuz the VOCC's
can be a little bit nasty. Um claims that with this charcoal filter and the
setup that they have, this should be safe for indoors. We'll take a little
bit of a dive into whether or not I can smell any of the UV inks, but as far as
I've been able to see in the past, seems like they do a pretty good job, at least
when things are closed up. So, we have our quick start guide, which appears to
be attached to a print surface. And
this, I believe, is a tack mat for sticking your parts down to to put them
into the printer. So, we also have a smaller tac mat for the integrated
smaller bed where you can run it fully closed up. And then this would be for
printing some of your printing on some of your bigger pieces that you'd have to
run with the doors open. So it ships with the smaller bed in place. Just a
little lever, take it off for when you can do uh really small things. There are
several other attachments as well. Some for doing direct to a film uh as well as
a rotary attachment for printing onto bottles or other round objects. This is
the ink that you're actually using as well as a cleaning cartridge kit that
fits into it to make sure that things don't get clogged up when you aren't
using it or just through general use.
These are individual cartridges that'll
slide into the unit here. Uh, and these are replaceable. I believe they're
looking at having larger tanks for at least some of them just to make swapping
out less frequent, but that's still in the works. There's three white
cartridges, a gloss cartridge. The white
is for doing backgrounds if you need to make sure that something pops if you're
printing on something transparent or with a different colored backer. And
then the gloss gives a more shiny reflection on the final printed part.
I've seen mixed feedback on the gloss itself as as far as I've seen, the ink
is fairly reflective, but depending on what you're trying to do, could work out
pretty well. And this is your cleaning kit, which also stores used resin. We
have another box to open up. Guess this is going to be your CMYK's.
Ah, there we go. That's more like the colors I was expecting. There's your
CMYK with a cleaning, a white, and a gloss.
I'm guessing this is a replacement kit, then. Now, these are out of their main
boxes. Take a look through the quick start guide. There's a nice little uh
foam piece to take off here. All righty.
That holds the print head in place. All right. Now that the packing foam for
shipping is taken out. Oh, there's a nice little sticker, too.
Oh, I left a smoo.
All right, next step is plug it in. From what I've seen online, the power up for
this does take a bit, which isn't super surprising. Uh, and also the power down
takes quite a while just to make sure that everything's clean and running properly. Power ports on my side.
Is that you?
That was the noise I was actually waiting for. All right, so now it
appears to be on.
Right, now that it sounds like all the configuration and startup is done,
let's get the print ink modules
installed. They do have convenient markings on all of them, so putting them
in the right place should be pretty straightforward. H I do enjoy the smell
of UV ink in the morning.
So, next up is the cleaning solution. So, that should be under this cartridge
here. There are three protective caps.
Take those out. Now that I'm installing this section, it does say to wear gloves
for all of it. As I stated before, most of the inks and stuff in here are not
terribly good for you. So, this has three little protective covers
on it. And we just insert it in.
Nice. It has informed me that I have done the
thing. Oh. And then we have the filter to install.
Ah, yes. There we go.
All right. It's pretty tight fit as I'd hope. Otherwise, it's not going to do a
ton of filtering. Let's get this front cover back on. Close this up. And then
we are moving over to the app.
reminds you every time something's installed. Also, it reminds me about our
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the go-to platform for entrepreneurs and businesses worldwide. We got the app
downloaded. This does require a phone app to be set up. I was planning on
trying to just do it on a desktop app, but that apparently isn't possible. The
initial setup was a little bit of a hassle. Whether that's our network
issues or an issue with the device is hard to say, but we did have a bit of
headaches with having to take out and reconnect some of the cartridges. But
after we got it set up and connected to Ethernet here, it wasn't too bad to get
the rest of it set up. And now we're into the initialization. 25m minute
total time for initialization. Let's go. This will take 20 minutes. So we'll see
you in a bit. Roughly 20 minutes later, the ink is now injected and it's taking
us through the rest of the installation steps. So we have to make sure that the
flatbed and upper white film are installed. That would be this piece
here. Pop this open.
Take this off. Take off the protective film. Oo, satisfying. And slap that
down. Nice little press. And let's install this back in. Check. Status.
Takes about 60 seconds.
Setting up any printer like this is generally not a quick endeavor. So, this
isn't anything that I wouldn't necessarily expect. Now, it's doing a
test print. It says it'll take about 2 minutes. And to not interrupt this
process, as far as I can tell, I believe it's just doing a nice a test layout to
make sure none of the nozzles are clogged and everything's functioning as expected. We'll take it out, take a look
at it, and then we can actually get to the real prints. Print looks done. Let's
open it up and take a little look on the screen. It gives you examples of what
good successful prints are and what cleaning required results are. Based off
what I can see here, looks like all of the nozzles look good. It is now
calibrating the camera, which will take a further 10 minutes. So, I'll see you
in about 10 minutes. Initialization's ready to go after a
little bit of a mistake on my part. Let's get this paper off and we can
start printing. There's the calibration for the printer for the camera. Pop this
off and see where I accidentally took the paper off the first time. Pro tip,
leave it on until it tells you to take it off. Learning from my mistakes.
Taking a look through the app, it takes you through your first textured 3D
print. So, I have chosen a nice little dragon. Plop mag down.
Give it a little juzj. Close it up.
Snapshot takes about 1 to 3 minutes. Please do not move the print bed or the
material. Also, do not close this page or the lock screen. They really like to
remind you to not let your phone go to sleep. Looks like it's scanning the
object that's placed down. I saw some like laser lines on it. And now I think
it's doing the optical camera alignment.
So, that's nice and aligned. And
I'll just hit start.
And it's going. Looks like we're about 50% of the way done now. And I'm
starting to see the colorations come through. It's looking pretty awesome.
It's a bit difficult to capture because of the super reflective covers on it.
And since it is a UV light, we do want to keep it closed up, at least for now.
But I'm looking forward to seeing this done. Print just finished up. 13 minutes
on the timer. That sounds about right. Let's take a little look. Oh, that's
really on there. Oh, that is a gorgeous
freaking print. And there's fair number
fair bit of texture to it, too. One thing that I noticed pretty quickly, I
did not align it perfectly. You can see some of the bleed off on the edge on the
uh print bed. So, with that misalignment, there was some that printed onto the bed. This is a
consumable piece. this cover. So, this can come off. We don't know what the
pricing of this is, but as far as I've heard, it's supposed to be relatively
cost effective. And if I had aligned this a little bit better on this
particular piece, it wouldn't have been an issue. That said, this print turned
out ridiculously good. For 13 minutes,
this is super cool. And it is dry to the touch completely fine. It's a little bit
tacky, but I think that's just the nature of the finished material and
nothing that I wouldn't expect. You can see some of the layer lines on it, too.
Now that I've gotten this first print done, I'm going to take this back to CW,
run through a bunch more test prints, and then we'll have some more stuff to
show you right now. Back at it. Now, we have a bunch of prints to look at. I did
a wide variety of different materials, different shapes, different sizes. Even
busted out the rotary axis, which I was quite impressed with. It worked really
well, and the setup was simple. We'll do a quick little look at that. also even
printed a screwdriver on a screwdriver because, you know, that's fun. Print
sizes and print times vary wildly depending on what you're going to do.
Anything from something like this, which takes about an hour and a half, down to
a flat small piece that takes 3 minutes. And the cost and amount of ink consumed
will also vary wildly depending on if you're doing large areas, small areas,
and texture. Texture definitely consumes
quite a bit, but the biggest print that we did in the most consumption was this,
which is a flat piece, but it's just a very large area. So, your mileage will
vary quite a bit depending on exactly what you're trying to do. But, as far as
I've seen, it's extremely capable in essentially every area that I've tried
to use it. Definitely looking forward to showing these prints and parts to the
other Creative Warehouse team members to start ideulating what we can use it for
for our workflows. Looking a little more closely at some of the prints, the phone
case with our Trust Me Bro Guarantee sticker came out really well. When I set
this to high detail, the granularity was definitely a lot better. I noticed on
some of the other prints there was a bit of graininess on some of them, but this
one came out super well. If you want to add textures to your parts, you can
either import your own or you can use their built-in machine learning or AI
tool to generate a texture map, which uses some of their tokens that you get a
certain amount of every month. I used their AI generator for this Lionus face,
and I was impressed with how well and how much detail it was able to get on
his face, both within like his mouth being sunk in and his hair texturing
really coming out. One instance of the texture not working quite as well as you
might hope is with transparent objects and for some metallics. So this
transparent screwdriver that I did, it definitely didn't capture the depths
correctly, which I don't blame it. Capturing transparent and metallic
objects in general is quite difficult for systems like this. And this would be
a good application for being able to import your own texture map would work
quite well. But it still made it look really nice. So I printed these on the
sticker paper. Let's see how well it peels off. Also, I may not have done
this perfectly correctly to be fair.
Actually came off. Came off pretty well. Little bit of
extra material, but I imagine that's fairly easy to get off. I'm sure that
this could be done better than I did. It all right, that was that was pretty
easy. Overall, I'm very impressed with the usability, how simple, and how just
plugandplay this printer is. It is still a Kickstarter/preorder,
so be careful. If you do decide to pre-order, the printer itself is about
$2,500 US, and you can get multiple
add-ons that could bring it up to 3,800. Each ink cartridge is 43 US per. And if
you get the bundle pack with all of the ink cartridges and the cleaning pack,
it's about 300 USD. I'm really excited to see what we can make use of this in
our workflows and I look forward to seeing how well UI supports it and I
look forward to you like commenting and subscribing to ShortCircuit. If you
like this video, check out one of the other 3D printers that I unboxed.