sparkmaker lcd screen made in china

Hear us out: now a household item, it"s worth asking yourself why you"d live life on paper when you can have a three-dimensional printer at your fingertips. Interested? Enter the world of 3D printing with the powerful SparkMaker Original SLA 3D Printer Starter Bundle.

Affordable and easy to use, this 3D printer produces smooth models using SLA and UV LCD resins. It might sound very techie and complicated, but it is really just as easy to use as a normal paper printer. This user-friendly 3D printer supports offline printing; to bring your ideas to life, simply insert your SD card with the pre-loaded design into the machine and hit print – it’s that easy. Within seconds, you’ll see your creation start to form. Keep an eye on the LED indicator light to monitor your project’s progress.

The SparkMaker Original SLA 3D Printer prints high-resolution models at 100 XY resolution and up to 20 Z layer thickness. Expect top-quality printings with a 3.9" x 2.2" x 0.5" molding size. SparkMaker uses affordable UV LCD resins in a variety of types. The bundle includes everything you need to get started: along with the printer itself, the bundle comprises two resins – white hard resin (LCD-BW) and fresh hard resin (LCD-BF) – a wrench, power adapter and cable, gauze mask and the handy user manual.

Life is better in 3D. Experience the thrill of printing out your own creation while getting familiar with a tool that is already changing a major industry as we know it. Right now, you can get the SparkMaker Original SLA 3D Printer Starter Bundle for $194.95, down 39% from the original MSRP.

The main selling point of the SparkMaker is its price point. 200 super early bird backers on Kickstarter got one of the 3D printers and a 100g sample resin for just $99. A further 500 got the same package for $129.

The Kickstarter price has since risen to $159. After the campaign, the SparkMaker will retail at $249, which is an exciting prospect considering most desktop SLAs are priced within the thousands.

Total build volume of the SparkMaker 3D printer is 102 mm x 56 mm x 125 mm (L x W x H). With the casing, machine dimensions are just 170 mm x 170 mm x 254 mm (L x W x H), a snug fit for the corner of any desktop.

Though the makers recommend using the 3D printer with specially made SparkMaker colored resins, the machine does have third party compatibility, so it can be tried with any 405nm-410nm UV-light curing materials too.

Development of the SparkMaker 3D printer started in April 2015. At that time, the WOW! team, who are based in Shenzhen, China, were using a digital light source to cure the resin.

The above was four minutes and 30 second exposure with the new lamp and new LCD glass orientation, then 2 minutes and 45 seconds in the developer solution used previously.  Notice how sharp the individual traces and pads are compared to the previous results done with my other UV lamp.  Ignore the dark boarder to the left and top - this was a scrap piece of exposure board, and the protective film had peeled slightly which pre-exposed that edge of the board.

Most 3D printers today use the FFF (Fused Filament Fabrication) process, which is also sometimes referred to by the proprietary FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) name. Those printers work by melting thermoplastic filament, and then extruding the plastic onto the build plate in layers. That process is quick, affordable, and produces relatively strong parts. But the SLA (Stereolithography) printing process generally yields higher quality results. SLA 3D printers used to be expensive, butthe SparkMaker Original is very affordable, and I recently tested one out.

The SparkMaker Original launched on Kickstarter back in 2017, and it’s still one of the most inexpensive SLA3D printerson the market. The SLA printing process works using photopolymer resin that hardens when it’s exposed to UV light. That light can come from lasers or from LEDs that are masked by an LCD screen. The latter method is cheaper, and is what the SparkMaker Original utilizes. The XY resolution is determined by the resolution of that LCD screen — 720p in this case.

On paper, the SparkMaker Original has some respectable specifications: a 98*55*125mm build volume, a 0.1mm XY resolution, a 0.02mm Z layer thickness, and a single layer print time of 8–15 seconds. There are a variety of resin types available depending on your intended applications, and the printer is very compact and desktop-friendly. But to find out if it’s actually any good, I had to test it out for myself.

The first thing I noticed is how small the SparkMaker Original is — the entire machine is roughly the size of a gallon jug. It came packaged securely in styrofoam with everything I needed to get started, including a bottle of standard LCD-BW resin. Best of all, no assembly was required. The only thing that needs to be done before printing is to level the build plate, which is a process that takes less than a minute.

After the build plate is leveled, you can use the free SparkStudio software to slicean STL 3D modeland copy it over to the included SD card. The software is very simple, and comes pre-configured for the SparkMaker Original and a handful of their resin types. The only downside is that you can only have one printable file on the SD card at any given time, as ithasto be called “print.wow” to work.

Once your model is sliced and on the SD card, you can insert it back into the 3D printer. Then follow the proper safety precautions to fill the reservoir with resin — it’s toxic, so be very careful and wear gloves and safety glasses. Strangely, the power switch is on the cord coming from the power supply, and there is no switch on the machine itself. Once it’s on, you just push the dial in to start the print. There is no screen, no way to select specific files, and no way to connect the printer to you computer.

For one last test, I printed the sphere below. This one was printed on “fast” settings. This turned out well, likely because there were no fine details. This model is ideal for the smooth surfaces that the SparkMaker Original seems to want to produce.

But what if quality is less important to you than reliability? Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be a strong point here either. Every other print job I tried completely failed. That was because the LCD window would become covered in a layer of semi-cured resin. In order to get a successful print, I had to completely empty the reservoir and then carefully peel off that layer of resin. That’s a tricky job considering the toxicity of the resin.

Finally, I have some nitpicks about the mechanical design of the machine. The most glaring is that the top of the build plate is completely flat, so resin will pool there. Virtually every other SLA printer has the top of the build plate sloped to avoid that, but it seems SparkMaker was cutting costs here. The protective UV-resistant cover also doesn’t have anything to hold it in place, so a bump can push it into the build plate.

At the end of the day, I can’t recommend the SparkMaker Original with a good conscience. It’s very affordable at just $249 (even less with a coupon), but there are other models on the market at comparable price points with better specifications, additional features, and more favorable reviews.

Like with other resin printing technologies, LCD machines rely on light-activated resins to build 3D objects. They direct the UV light into areas layer by layer to solidify them. The key difference between DUP or LCD-based machines is in the light source they use. As its name states, the main component is an LCD screen, which is used under a resin tank to project patterns onto the material. Using this tool in a 3D printer commonly allows reducing the costs of such a commonly expensive technology as resin curing.

Alternatively, some DUP printers use LEDs as a source of light. They direct it through a screen or a mask, which darkens areas that don’t need to be solidified.

Unlike its bigger brother, the Orange 30, the Longer Orange 10 is a modest machine priced to sell. For less than $300, this SLA printer offers a small 3.8″ x 2.1″ x 5.5″ build volume. This is slightly smaller but comparable to other budget 3D printers like the Sparkmaker or the MP Mini SLA.

The Orange 10 achieves print precision within 20 microns using an 854×489 pixel LCD masking screen. That’s a bit low, but solid metal construction and strong, even curing produce excellent models. Connect via miniSD and interface with the Longer 10 through a responsive 2.8″ touchscreen.

The Orange 10’s low-resolution LCD screen is the most notable issue with this printer. Even the Monoprice SLA Mini, which arguably a worse machine, comes with a 2k LCD screen and more powerful LED array, meaning faster prints. What gives?

Although the Orange 10 falls a bit short in the precision department, it more than makes up for the inconvenience. We like the design, solid construction, and details like the touch screen and user-friendly software. It’s priced to sell and backed by friendly customer service, too. Finally, we appreciate that this printer comes from a successful Kickstarter campaign that has so far delivered on its promises, which can be rare in the tech field.

I"m now 61 minutes in to a print using the settings as in the attached a screenshot (Anti-Aliasing is currently OFF, I may change this in the future). Typically the print would fail just around the layers where the supports beams starts, just after the bottom layers, but now the print has reached the initial parts of the model, and printed around 15 minutes of the model. Something it would never do if it failed.

NOTE: the switch is probably there to protect the SparkMaker FHD from arcing when the round power plug is inserted or removed while the power brick is on. I would recommend that the round power plug is only inserted or removed once the powerbrick has been powered off for at least 60 seconds