Anycubic Photon M3 Review: A Beginner-Friendly SLA 3D Printer

The packaging on the Photon M3 is very well done. Anycubic squeezed a lot in there, tightly and efficiently. In addition to the printer, the UV filtering cover, and the resin vat, there's a box of accessories, which includes:

• USB Thumb Drive
• AC Adapter
• Plastic scraper
• Metal scraper
• Allen wrenches
• Disposable mask
• Screen protector
• Screen protector helpers
• Bolts
• Gloves
• Resin filters
• Instructions

They've been quite generous! The metal scraper will be very helpful in getting stubborn prints off the bed. I do note, however, that there is no extra FEP in the box. The FEP is the ever-important plastic film on the bottom of the resin vat. I've torn more than a few of these over the years, so not having an extra on hand can be very disappointing if you damage yours while only half-done printing your minis for the next game. This has happened to me and I was, in fact, very disappointed — to the point that I generally keep two spare FEPs on hand at all times.

Holy moly. The setup was quite easy for this printer, except for the screen protector. It took me nearly 20 minutes to get all of the bubbles out using the plastic scraper, and I made the mistake of lifting the film up to help with that for a moment, which promptly allowed a speck of dust to get under there. This was a small nightmare, and thankfully Anycubic included a small packet of "Screen Protector Accessories," one of which was a little sticker I could use to get that wicked dust speck, but this took me quite a while of fiddling and was more than a little frustrating. Not the best beginner experience — but I definitely handled the whole situation like a beginner.

It's very, very important that you get all of those bubbles out of the screen protector. A bubble in a spot that's being printed could prevent the resin from hardening correctly and ruin your entire print! That said, the screen protector is an important and welcome addition; just be sure to take care when installing it.

Our test print looks great! After a little washing and curing in the Anycubic Cure and Wash Plus ($229) that the company provided, here's our test object.

Now, you don't need the Cure and Wash machine. When I started out, I was washing with an ultrasonic jewelry cleaner in a bath of Mean Green household cleaner — at the start of the pandemic, you couldn't buy isopropyl alcohol anywhere, so I found a good alternative and honestly, it works better than IPA. For curing, I used the UV lamp from my gel nail kit because it used the exact same wavelength of light.

Kimberly Leatherman/SlashGear

I will say this, however: the Cure and Wash machine makes the process a whole lot smoother. The rotating cure table takes a lot of effort out of curing your print, where using a nail lamp had me rotating each piece manually every 60 seconds or so.

Kimberly Leatherman/SlashGear

I'm satisfied with the test print, but that just meant it was time for something a lot more challenging.

I used the default settings for the first real test, and the delicate supports intersecting the larger body failed. The half-printed Sphinx butt fell off the structure and plopped in our resin and, over the next 5+ hours, the printer continued on its merry way (as it should), hardening the resin in the pattern of our Sphinx ... on its rear, over and over. The wings look great though?

This was with a 2.5-second exposure time. We can see that our burn-in layer, which is super important for the resin to cling to the build plate, worked fine. As a more experienced 3D printing hobbyist, I know that I should increase my cure time here. I've failed enough prints over the years that I understand what happened and why, but that might not be true for the pure beginner — it would probably mean a trip over to Reddit to ask advice, only to be grumpily directed to some FAQ post that takes you 30 minutes to figure out what it's talking about.

The worst part about the failed print is that we have to drain the vat and oh-so-gently use our plastic scraper to remove the Sphinx's posterior from the FEP. Thankfully the box includes plenty of filter paper, and a cut-up water bottle makes the perfect funnel.

From the beginner's perspective, it might be nicer if Anycubic set the default exposure time a little higher, to 4 seconds or so. The thing about that is, you want your cure time to be as low as possible without failing. A lower cure time means less time for the resin to deform or warp and lose detail in your print, but a failed print is so much more frustrating than an imperfect one, at least as far as miniature printing is concerned.

Now we refill the vat and try again. With the longer cure time, Anycubic is estimating eight hours for my second-attempt.

You can see from this angle that the Anycubic Photon M3 is using a single-rail system — basically one big screw connected to a stepper motor to raise and lower the platform. Our test prints came out fine, but historically the industry has moved to a dual-rail system to provide more stability when printing. Some people in the past have had issues with a single rail printer wobbling, and introducing deformations into the print, but I didn't see any evidence of that in the test print.

It's a thing to look out for in the future, but thankfully it doesn't seem to be a concern at the moment. Undoubtedly, Anycubic went back to a single rail to keep the price of the printer down, which is the more important factor to the beginner buying their very first printer. Cheaper is better, even if you're going to be harder on your first printer than you intend to be as you learn.