this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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3DPrinting

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So I have a small business where we print our down designs. We almost got one of these, but canceled. I can't justify the price for what I can use it for. We were going to get it to print onto containers but printing onto vinyl and using a cutting machine would be cheaper than the UV ink and wouldn't make a noticeable difference for our use. Also printing on to things one at a time is just going to be so slow. I hand paint onto the 3D prints using acrylics and then use a thin layer of UV resin to all an enamel like finish. Its pretty quick to line up a bunch of prints and hand stroke the colors on one at a time with a brush. Its also cheaper because that ink is still a whopping $300 a refill i think. For personal use, it might be warranted. It seems so cool and I really want one, but even with it being so affordable for what it is, I can't justify the price.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

That's cool as hell. My understanding is you have to have extremely high volume before uv makes financial sense. The previously-available commercial uv printers are extremely expensive, so the anker printer is only cheap by comparison. Hopefully we will see some more competition at this level that will continue to bring the price down towards something more affordable!