We have had the Anycubic Photon printer now for a few weeks and have went through a few bottles of resin testing out its ability. In that time we have had the opportunity to run through some different brands and styles of resin. We wanted to give our opinion on the best and worst resin choices we found so far.
We purchased all test bottles ourselves, and were not provided any bottles free from the companies. These reviews are unsolicite.
BEST- Siraya Tech BLU- https://amzn.to/3d27AUT
This has by far been the best resin we have encountered in our testing. The resin itself has an amazing clear blue tint, which leaves a nice finished look on the model. The accuracy of this resin has been amazing, even when printing small snap together parts it seems to have no problem keeping up with the tolerances. The resin is much thicker than most we have encountered, but we have found no problem getting great results on small and large items.
Unlike mosy resins, we haven’t really noticed much smell. Compared to most of the resins we tried the smell of this resin is very mild and not over powering. The cleaning process did take a little additional time since the resin is thicker, and required a toothbrush at times to completely remove unwanted uncured resin. The curing process was just as expected and did not differ from the other resins we encountered.
We did find that the exposure times on our machine had to be set a little higher with this resin to get a solid build. We had our machine set to an exposure rate of 10, which was a few seconds longer than our next resin choice. This additional time though was well worth the wait and created models that were exquisite. The last thing to note on this particular resin is it’s strengh. The resin when cured is much less brittle than many of the others we tested, and handled our drop and bend test much better.
We give Siraya Tech Blu 4.5 out of 5 Stars
Anycubic Green- https://amzn.to/2LqhdDB
Overall this resin didn’t have bad qualities, but there was one major feature that dropped it to the worst on our list. This resin is a great budget choice for most builders though and shouldn’t be completely dismissed, as it has some great qualities. The resin itself seems to print good on most models, and were were able to get some great little prints using basic settings. We tested it with 8 sec exposure and 10 sec exposure, both of which seemed to yield the same general results. We did find that depending on the support structure you were using in most all models 8 sec was highly sufficient for use.
The resin has a thinner consistency which made made post cleaning of the model rather easy in just a jar of IPA. We did not find that much more than a quick slosh around in the jar was needed. The curing process was the same as with any resin, but sadly we found that the cured models where not quite as strong as many of our other resin options.
The worst part of this resin is it’s very....very strong smell. We found that we needed a much higher ventilation in the room when using this particular resin and even after full clean up of the machine and gear the smell lingered for a good amount of time. The smell by itself is our big deciding factor on what knocked this particular resin down to the bottom of our list.
We give Anycubic Green 3 out of 5 stars
Honorable Mentions-
-Monocure Rapid Clear- easy print, cost efficient, lower smell- https://amzn.to/35nof2A 3 out of 5
-Elegoo Grey- very easy to find, prints nicely and crisp, flat color- https://amzn.to/2H7tNUc 3.5 out of 5
