The Elegoo Mars 5 Ultra is the latest entry to Elegoo’s stable of resin 3D printers, offering a raft of features to help new users ease themselves in to the hobby and experienced users get the most from the hardware. I’d like to thank Elegoo for providing this unit and additional resin for the purposes of this review.
It’s been a little while since I’ve had to set up an Elegoo printer, and I was curious how easy setup would be. I started unboxing it on my dining room table, where I had space to take some pictures and was immediately a little bit taken with how efficiently everything was arranged in the box. This may sound terribly nerdy but I was so impressed I repacked it, moved it all to a larger table, and unpacked it again just to lay it out properly.
So unpacking was easy enough; everything was simple to find, and assembly was a breeze. The locating pins on the vat allowed for quick positioning, and dropping the bolts in place then tightening them down was all that was needed. The Mars 5 Ultra offers auto-levelling via a set of springs inside of the body of the build plate assembly, and all I needed to do was clamp it down with the lever. I really like the move to lever based systems many manufacturers have made, it feels less error prone than winding a huge bolt down and hoping you’ve positioned it just as before. Screwing the wifi antenna in and powering the device on, the printer began happily chirping through its self-test list.
During setup, I was initially a little puzzled by the decision to put all of the physical connections on the right hand side of the chassis. I quickly came to realise that this thoughtful move to consolidate all of these interfaces was an echo of the rest of the excellent design work that has gone in to the Mars 5 Ultra. The smoke grey UV cover with its white detailing ties together nicely with the finish of the chassis. The power and WiFi are easily accessibly from the side of the printer, and moving the USB port to the side keeps the front of the machine clean.
The built plate size of the Mars 5 Ultra is 153.36 (L) x 77.76 (W) x 165 (H) mm³ offering the same total build volume as the previous generation of Ultra. The surface of the build plate provided excellent adhesion during tests, and I’m actually considering lowering the time of my burn in layers just to make popping prints off a little easier. Due to the design of the build plate it can be a little tricky to clean resin from the top of the plate, and I ended up changing how I approached removing prints. Typically I’d dunk the plate and prints in a bucket of IPA then remove them, but for this review I just popped the prints off then gave them their initial wash. Not a huge change but something to keep in mind if you’re used to cleaning the whole plate regularly.
Stepping through the setup menu via the touchscreen was straight forward, with the screen being both accurate and responsive. I was left feeling grateful for both when it came time to type the wifi password in. I’m not a large man, but even I struggled a little bit with the tiny keyboard for password entry, and it’s something you may end up doing more than once (more on that later).
Everything connected and happy, I wanted to approach this as a brand new user. I’d usually sit down and slice some files up for my own testing, but they provide a USB with the classic rook you’re likely already familiar with. Reading through the manual the resin calibration sounded like an interesting function, but it wasn’t completely clear whether the printer would replicate the .goo file across each quadrant or if I needed to craft my own print layout. I’d know in a couple of hours I guess!
Seems like I probably should’ve taken a little longer and done some more reading before jumping straight into this feature, and I later learned I would need to arrange my own build plate specifically. The tank clean function and drip tray made moving on from this stumbling block easy though, and while the drip tray feels a little flimsy it performs admirably. I hadn’t expected the AI camera to pick up on the failure, as the print wasn’t tall enough at that point so nothing too concerning there.
I thought I’d continue approaching this as a new user, and started installing Chitubox Pro using the included license key. I had a stack of printing to get through for friends, plus some of my own to run through for this test so while I won’t be comparing prints against previous generations, I do have plenty of models to showcase. My lack of familiarity with Chitubox definitely slowed me down with the initial print setup, although I eventually managed to get up and running with it. Once I’d sliced the files I had hoped to immediately try the wifi print function but would need to install ChituManager. Having the functions separated, even in the Pro version, struck me as a bit weird and after unsuccessfully upgrading Chitubox I switched back to Lychee Pro.
Reattempting my resin tuning experiment, I grabbed some Chivalric knights with an array of weapons. Perfect models to showcase the various materials with cloth, leather, plate armour and chainmail all being used. I stuck to the default cure times for the Elegoo Standard 2.0 Resin and used recommended tuning times.Â
I’ll admit at this point that the printer did warn me that auto-levelling had failed, but I thought I’d press on for the purposes of the test. The user manual hadn’t mentioned how to manually level the bed, and the suggested resolution for an auto-level failure is draining the tank and filtering the resin. It’s not immediately obvious which way the plate and quadrants relate to each other, but the difference in models was apparent at either end of the test. There was very obvious loss of detail at 2.8 seconds, which wasn’t a huge surprise but was useful to illustrate the feature. While I had a couple of failures at the lower exposure times the supports were still well formed and this is usually what I look for when tuning exposures. There’s no point in having beautifully crisp details if your model is stuck to the bottom of the vat.
The last feature I wanted to test deliberately was the power cut resume. Kicking off a print to then deliberately turn the machine off felt very weird and I was honestly a little hesitant on this one. Once the print had progressed a bit I threw the power at the wall, waited 10 seconds and then turned it back on. The usual happy chirps of a self check, followed by a screen asking me if I wanted to continue the print. The print finished without error after this and it’s honestly a great piece of mind.
Speaking of peace of mind, the printer also boasts an AI camera, and this left me less impressed. They’re clear in the feature description that the model needs to be over a certain height, and it can’t see the full plate. I had a couple of failures that it did capture though, and sadly it didn’t stop the print. I couldn’t be mad though, as this is one of the funnier failures I’ve come back to.
SirayaTech Navy Grey has always been a fussy resin for me, and it’s definitely a resin you want nice and warm before printing. It does however give fantastic detail, and you can really see the Mars 5 Ultra come into its own here with fantastically rendered details. The chainmail is crisp and the texture of the leather is readable at a print height of 30um. Even at 30um, prints are fast, and once you’ve switched the printer over to 150mm/h there’s very few reasons to go back. The tilting vat makes failures even less likely, and I’m yet to see anything come away from the previously mentioned very grippy build plate.
Satisfied that I had the printer running well, with a number of successful prints under my belt, I moved on to testing the High Speed print function. Boasting 150mm/h I’d be able to knock out a standard miniature in less than two hours, and while immediately popping prints off a plate without time to drip clean means you’re making a bigger mess, the option to move this fast with printing is very cool. I’ve had it set for several prints now with absolutely no issues or loss of detail, and I’m sure there’s an STL out there for drip cleaning the build plate.
While the AI camera wasn’t great at catching some of my failures, it did make some pretty neat timelapses. Timelapses for standard tabletop figures felt a little underwhelming due to their length, but printing something a little more monstrous made for a far cooler video.
Remote monitoring via the camera and file transfer, both of prints and timelapses, is really easy via ChituManager and the Mars 5 Ultra is also supported in Lychee Slicer. I did have to remove and re-add my wifi profile once or twice when power cycling wasn’t enough to have it reconnect to the wifi. I’m not sure where the instability comes from, and I haven’t had any issues recently but typing on that tiny keyboard is a little tricky. The intermittent wifi definitely isn’t enough to put me off using it, and sending prints wirelessly still feels exciting.
I went out of my way in this review to approach the printer with as much naivety as possible. With all of this it performed admirably and it was clear to me that where I hit failures they were down to user error. It’s left me incredibly impressed with the feature set and resilience of the printing functions of the Mars 5 Ultra and I think it makes for a great way to enter the hobby, or upgrade an existing setup.
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