I printed this miniature 2 years ago,
on a 2K Printer, in resin.
And this one I just printed now, on a brand new 12k printer:
the Saturn 3 from Elegoo.
And here is a match to help us.
You look at both models on a microscope and the difference is NUTs!
The pixels here are quite big: 50 microns
even so, you need 20 of them to make 1 millimeter.
And here, the pixels are way smaller: 20 microns…
Pixels are still visible, but barely, they kind of fuse together!
I was so impressed,
I had dinner with a friend
and I put both pieces in front of him:
“Man, check the sharpness of this piece!”
He looked closely at both and said:
“You mean this one, right? I see more details!”
“Right here: look at the texture! That one is flat!”
That’s fascinating,
because in the original model, this area is indeed “flat”.
But the “Minecraft” effect of a lower resolution
made this look “more detailed” and “textured”
on places where the model is actually plain.
That’s why I don’t like to compare Resin printers
using RPG characters or Dragons
because the more crusted, rusted, twisted, clothy,
leathered, wrinkled, aged the model is,
the more expectacular they look on any resolution…
So, I want to understand exactly what changes
when we move away from 2k, 4k or even 8k
and start printing on a 12k resin printer.
By the way, big thanks to Elegoo
for sending the Saturn 3 for me to review
The differences between the Saturn 2 and the Saturn 3
are not just the resolution,
I’ll talk about them later in this video.
If I put these 3 rooks together in front of you
and ask you to compare the text here at the top
you wouldn’t need a microscope
and everybody would say the same thing:
this is good,
this is better
and this is even better,
because we are all trained to look for the same patterns
when it comes to letters.
We are not distracted by light or textures,
it is just the shape.
So, for text, more resolution always looks better.
The improvement can be clearly seen even
from the Saturn 2 to the Saturn 3
and if you anti-alias, text gets so perfect!
But the biggest difference can be seen easily,
at naked eye, in all models
specially where there are no details at all:
as I said, pixels are so tiny here
that the transition from one voxel to the next one is shaved out,
and it finally looks pretty much like injection moulded,
so smooth - in the best way, not blurred!
The result is that the surface stop looking frosted or matte
and it now looks shiny, almost polished.
This is very good news for people that paint their miniatures
and even better for people that use castable resins to make jewellery.
If you don’t paint your prints,
this “shiny/polished” surface is quite different
than what people are used about resin…
My wife tells me that this looks like a stone,
and this looks very much like plastic.
To me, this more “reflective” surface
makes the actual details pop-out, I love it.
She doesn’t.
So, to me, resolution is a no-brainer:
the higher the resolution, the better,
unless you make a mistake...
This Deer is the test model that came with the Proxima 2K,
printed at 50 microns.
On the Saturn 3 the pixels are so small… it doesn’t even look 3D Printed.
But I made a mistake: I over-exposed a little bit
and this fine mesh got a bit thicker
so when you see both, side by side, at naked eye,
the mesh that looks thinner, seems more delicate,
and anyone would say:
oh this piece has more “details”.
So you really need to test every resin on a new printer,
because a “thicker” print looks bloated and less sharp.
So, it is inevitable:
you will always print a bunch of exposure tests like this…
…or this…
…and the Cones of Calibration are telling me that
I still need to reduce my exposure time
which nice because you will be printing faster too.
I also printed this famous bust
modelled by David Eastman,
but very tiny, at 15%…
It is sooo tiny, and yet, so perfect!
I took this super-macro photo,
and, if you zoom in A LOT,
you can see the layer lines
Magnified like this, it almost looks like FDM printed,
if you had a 20 microns nozzle.
I printed it again with 0.02 layer height:
and on the microscope it looks even better!
But our eyes are very silly,
because, the black piece looks far crisper and sharper
than the grey one.
So I took the grey one and spray painted black…
Oh no! It was an opaque paint, it looks velvet now,
and on the microscope it is bizarre!
At 30%, this looks like an amazing chess piece.
So, when some people say that
any pixel size that is smaller than 30 microns
you don't actually see it with your eyes anymore
it's kind of true!
But it doesn't mean that you cannot notice the effects
So, surfaces get different
and anti-aliasing get's way more effective
on such small voxel size.
And I will make a bet here:
If we ever manage to have 10 microns or less,
the surface of the resin prints will go pretty much glossy
and that will be amazing for painting and amazing for jewelry.
So, I want more!
The righer the resolution, the better!
I guess I will saparate the comparison between the
Saturn 2 and Saturn 3 on a separate video
that I will put here in just a few days,
So, Subscribe! And thank you so much for watching.