The Anycubic Photon Mono M5S – let’s give it a review.
Hey guys,
There’s a lot to talk about with this new 12K printer, so let’s blast
through the fundamentals and crack on. It’s a very attractive 3D resin printer.
The menu screen is fairly large and clear, and the user interface is easy to use.
It has built in WiFi, so you can access Anycubic Cloud for file transfer, etc, or you can use the
USB port which is located on the righthand side. The power point and switch are at the rear.
The dual linear rails are very robust and look like something off Star Trek,
and the Z Arm sports a knob bigger than anything I’ve seen since my last shower.
The platform is large, sporting Anycubics laser etched sure-grip pattern on it. But there are
no adjustment screws. None at all! The resin tray is metal and large,
with a semi-opaque FEP and clear max level indicators. There’s also very convenient
holes at the sides for improved handling. And it locks in place with easy to lose removable bolts.
Below it is what were here for, a 12K 10.1 inch monochrome screen, the first desktop
12K printer that I’m aware of. This gives us an incredible 19 microns of xy resolution,
beating the former champion Phrozens Sonic Mini 8K and 8KS, with 22 microns.
But hang on… actually it doesn’t. In fact it has 24 microns of X resolution and 19 of Y,
or maybe the other way round… but the point is, where we normally see square pixels,
here we’re seeing rectangular ones. Now I haven’t personally come across this before
and frankly Anycubic are staying pretty tight-lipped about the reasoning behind it,
but I’m not 100% sure it’s fair to call this a 19 micron unit.
The M5S is a midrange printer, capable of producing prints 200mm tall, and beating
Anycubic’s own M3 premium and other market equals that have 29 microns of XY resolution.
So we should see a leap forward in print quality, right? Well, we’ll come back to that.
The M5S boasts a number of very exciting features that many people won’t have seen before.
For instance, it detects resin levels. As you can see in this example,
it successfully detects that there’s no resin in the vat and stops the print.
Not only this, it can calculate and detect if there’s insufficient resin in the tray
to complete a print cycle, though I haven’t tested that feature yet.
It achieves these impressive accomplishments through the adjustment free build plate. This is
clever enough to feel for the weight and suction it expects to detect during a typical print,
and it does this through force detection. Learn about the force.
Now Force Detection is a very exciting concept. I’m lucky enough to be working
with a prototype by Athena that has the potential to change things dramatically.
Right now it’s still a kickstarter and I’m helping iron out a few kinks as I’m a pickier than average
user, but Force Detection has the potential to self-level the plate, detect resin levels,
make intelligent decisions about resin settings, wait times, failure detections, calculate lift
heights, and faster speeds with ordinary resins – and you’ll understand why I say ‘ordinary resins’
in a moment. And if you didn’t quite pick up on that, let me say it more clearly… Force
detection has the potential to work out the ideal resin settings all by itself. I’m very excited by
it and I’ll be reviewing the Athena very soon as frankly it’s a real game changer. Whilst Anycubic
are dipping their toe in the pool of Force Detection, Athena are swimming in the deep end.
But of course this is an M5S review, and the use of Force detection also means that
the M5S levels the built plate automatically. Just put resin in the tray and start printing,
and it will do the rest for you, all by itself. This system also apparently detects print and
plate separation. If that’s true I haven’t seen it, and I’ve had misprints as I’ll cover shortly.
Anycubic have made a big splash saying that this unit prints 3 times faster.
I printed this test print in just 26 minutes which is very impressive. I had a go at printing
Mini Vogman and he typically takes 3 to 4 hours. The M5S did it in just 45 minutes.
Now this is very exciting, but it’s not quite that transparent. For starters,
you need to use Anycubics High Speed resin, which is the least viscous resin I’ve personally seen.
Next, you have to be using the Anycubic FEP, or so they say. Additionally, and most critically,
you need to double the standard layer height to 0.1, so you can expect a loss of details.
And lastly, Anycubic claim you must use Anycubics Photon Workshop.
Whether or not you can use other slicers for this Fast printing, time will tell,
but the guys at Lychee tell me they’re confident they can handle it. In the
meantime, Workshop does come with the settings already in place and they certainly do work.
With these prerequisites, I think their claim of achieving 105mm per hour is certainly believable.
When it’s first turned on, the M5S runs through a number of checks… all of which are
pretty pointless in my opinion. Of course these things work. If they don’t we’ll soon find out.
To me this is just pointless decoration to make us think something clever is going on,
but maybe I’m just being cynical. The M5S also apparently
monitors the printing process. I quote: “Real-time intelligent monitoring throughout the
printing process provides dynamic reminders for common bottoming-out printing failures, greatly
reducing waste of resin and time. It also smartly analyzes failure reasons and provides effective
suggestions to ensure printing efficiency and protection for every creative idea.”
If any of that is true, I can’t say. There’s certainly no obvious evidence
of anything special happening when I use it. Anycubic have further revamped their Photon
Workshop. One feature, for instance, is model repair. Pretty much every time I open a print
file, Workshop tells me it needs repairing, even though other softwares don’t seem to think so.
If you read the user manual that comes with this printer, it makes all kinds of claims about an
Intelligent Mode that analyses a models shape to determine exposure times. However, I don’t seem
to be intelligent enough to find this intelligent mode, or maybe it’s not on my version of Workshop.
So now, as it’s a printer, let’s have a look how it prints.
I’ve already demonstrated that Fast print with the High Speed resin does work,
even though with an increased layer height we can expect a loss of quality.
I’ve also had requests to test the behaviour of the resin. So…
This is uncured and it’s fairly flexible I suppose.
This is well-cured, and that’s fairly brittle. For a more standard resin I opted for Anycubic
Craftsman Grey DLP. I came up with these settings after my usual dial in process,
but I need to say that when I checked my guesstimations with the Cone of Calibration
print, it failed 2 out of 3 times, even though the settings were actually good.
In the same way the AmeraLabs Town test print failed, until I put it on a large raft.
Now these failures, none of which were actually detected by the printer,
each had a very small footprint on this large plate. That shouldn’t matter and normally
doesn’t, but I can’t help but wonder if the self-levelling system has something to do with it.
As for the print itself, it’s, well, okay. Not the best I’ve seen, but better than average I suppose.
I still had this 45mm mini by Archvillain Games
left over from my Phrozen Mini 8KS review, so that seemed a good choice.
That’s okay. Certainly, there’s evidence of armour texture there.
For something larger, again I turned to Archvillain Games. Once more, an impressive print.
Now this 12K resin printer was certainly printing well, but personally I wasn’t wowed. When we
first moved from 4K to 8K, the Phrozen Mini 8K really wowed me with this print by Wicked 3D.
So I decided to print it on the M5S. This has no Antialiasing.
This has full antialiasing. There’s no two ways about it, it’s a good printer
and these are fairly closely matched prints, but I’d still give the edge to the Mini 8K.
But there I was using Phrozen’s Aqua 4K resin,
and I don’t have any of that to test. So maybe resin is the answer.
Either way, I’m not seeing a massive leap forward from 8K to 12. Frankly, it’s a bit of a let down.
So what are my thoughts on the Anycubic Photon Mono M5S?
Well, I am impressed. The self-levelling plate is something
many will welcome, and it certainly does appear to work very well, though I do question if this large
plate can handle very small prints comfortably. The intelligence behind Force Detection is
impressive, and certainly the lack of resin was easy enough for the printer to detect.
It’s very well made with quality construction, though it does lack the
air filtration we’ve seen on the M3 Premium. But it’s new and it’s highly innovative,
and that’s what you’re buying here. Anycubic have bravely stepped forward with features that you
just know other brands are quickly going to copy. And of course it does print well.
It doesn’t represent a massive leap forward as I hoped that 12K would,
and I feel in real terms this rectangular pixeled printer performs more like 24 microns than 19,
though I’ve only used two types of resin and made only a limited number of prints with it.
I don’t think it’s a match for Phrozens Mini 8K or 8KS, or even my personal favorite the Anycubic D2,
though it is close. But those of course are small printers,
and I feel this mid-ranger is a smidgen better than the M3 Premium or similar 29 micron printers.
And of course it’s fast – very fast under the right circumstances,
and I can see folks taking full advantage of that speed.
So in short guys, this 12K printer is not quite what I was expecting,
but it still marks a turning point, and I congratulate Anycubic on leading the way.
So that’s it for this video guys. I hope you enjoyed it. Take care and thanks for watching.