The Maker’s Toolbox: eufyMake UV Printer E1 Review

I hadn’t been so excited to get my hands on a new device in years, but did the eufyMake UV Printer E1 live up to my hopes or leave me disappointed? Read on to learn all about this unique machine and my feelings about it.

If you'd rather see a quick overview than read a written review, you can see my video on my YouTube channel:

Update!

I was getting a ton of questions about this, so I made another video that answers as many of them as possible:

What is this? What is UV printing?

I’ll admit that those were the first questions I had when eufyMake reached out and asked if I wanted to review their new UV printer. I consider myself to be extremely well-versed in everything related to maker technology, but UV printing is a unique process that one normally only sees in professional print shops. This machine, being designed for prosumers and hobbyists, is something entirely new.

The best way to understand UV printing, in my opinion, is to think of it like a cross between 2D inkjet printer and 3D resin printing. The eufyMake UV Printer E1 can print in full color directly onto any kinda hard object with a mostly flat surface, and it can do that while add texture and 3D relief.

That’s possible because the jets are spitting out special ink that cures when exposed to UV light, similar to the resin in an MSLA 3D printer. And, like a 3D printer, it can build up those layers to create 3D effects.

It doesn’t replace 3D printing or anything like that, as the variation between the lowest and highest points needs to be less than 5mm. But that’s in full color and there are a lot of creative possibilities for this technology.

What can you print on? DTO? DTF?

No, I’m not hitting on you. DTF means “direct-to-film” and DTO mean “direct-to-object.”

DTF is when you print onto film, like you might do for a sticker or a vinyl wrap. DTO is when you print onto an object without any kind of intermediary step. Traditionally, DTO has been used by professional print shops to put logos on coffee mugs and artwork onto canvas or metal panels.

You can absolutely do stuff like that with the eufyMake UV Printer E1 (that’s a major selling point, after all), but I think there is so much more potential for people with the creativity and ability to think outside the box.

The possibilities are pretty much endless, because you can print on anything solid that is at least fairly flat. The specs say that it should be flat to within about 2mm, which is quite a lot of wiggle room.

As you’ll see in the testing section of this review, I tried printing on a lot of different things and it always worked.

There is also a rotary attachment, so you can print on cylindrical things like water bottles.

Is this like those handheld inkjet printers?

Several years ago, I purchased a device from TheGodThings (weird choice for a brand name) called the PrinCube. It was, essentially, an inkjet print head in handheld form. The idea was that you could print in full-color onto anything. I got it because I wanted to add logos and labels to 3D-printed things I made.

I believe there were similar devices sold by several other companies. But the point is that it sounds kind of like the eufyMake UV Printer E1, right?

I was worried about that, because the PrinCube sucked. It was a truly awful product. The advertising was a lie and there were few things you could print onto successfully. On most materials, the ink would just smear. My PrinCube has been sitting in a box for half a decade, because I couldn’t bring myself to sell it to and put that frustration on anyone else.

Fortunately, the eufyMake UV Printer E1 is not at all like that, which should be a relief to those who were wondering. While they both spray out ink with a print head, that is pretty much the only similarity. The eufyMake UV Printer E1 cures the sprayed ink immediately, so it doesn’t smear. It is never “wet,” so to speak, because the machine performs a curing pass right after a spraying pass.

Who is eufyMake?

That name might sound a bit familiar to you. “eufyMake” is a rebranding of AnkerMake, which made the M5 and M5C 3D printers. As far as I can tell, those printers have been discontinued.

AnkerMake was an Anker brand, which you probably know for their chargers and batteries. eufy is another Anker brand with a focus on technology for the home. I have one of their robot vacuums, for instance.

I actually reviewed the AnkerMake M5C 3D printer and wasn’t at all impressed with it — something I was vocal about and that a lot of fans found upsetting. My opinion was that the M5C was mediocre for the price and that AnkerMake dramatically overpromised on the capabilities of the AI camera.

But I decided to leave that in the past and to approach the review of the eufyMake UV Printer E1 with an open mind.

What is the competition like?

This machine is a big deal because there isn’t any competition. This is the first product of its kind to hit the market.

The vast majority of UV printers are big, professional machines intended for print shops or manufacturing in large quantities. A cursory search shows that they tend to cost at least $20,000.

Everything else I can find that might be more accessible to hobbyists and prosumers is questionable. Some Vevor machines come up in searches, but I don’t see those on the actual Vevor website. Other machines can only print on film. And all of them are the kind of generic, brandless (or white label) designs that savvy shoppers tend to avoid.

More importantly, they all lack the user-friendly features of the eufyMake UV Printer E1. Though I do think those features can be a double-edged sword, so let’s talk about them.

Features

DTO and DTF UV printing technology is not, by itself, particularly groundbreaking. Most of the innovation with the eufyMake UV Printer E1 is in making that technology affordable and user-friendly for the consumer market, while fitting all of that capability into a relatively small package that can reside on a desktop.

With the side panels folded up, the eufyMake UV Printer E1 is approximately the same size as a carry-on suitcase. When you fold the side panels down, it obviously takes up more room. The Standard Flatbed is 330×420mm and the Mini Flatbed is 330×90mm. The latter is a good option if you want to take the machine to someplace like a craft fair, as the Mini Flatbed fits entirely in the machine.

The camera is, arguably, the most important feature for making this printer user-friendly. It lets you see the bed and any objects, so you can place your designs exactly where you want them to go. Without the camera, positioning designs would be really difficult.

That camera works with the smartphone app and desktop software. You can use those to get find designs created by others (look for the ones I made!), prepare your own designs, set up print jobs, and so on.

The software makes very heavy use of AI, which I think will be somewhat controversial. There are AI features to create artwork, which is a whole can of worms with ambiguous copyright ownership. But there are also AI features to help you generate the height maps for adding 3D textures to prints. One, for example, creates artificial brush strokes to make the print look like a real painting. Another helps with the creation of “light painting” prints backlit to glow in a satisfying way.

Ink cartridges and prices

Let’s talk ink. This uses a CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key [black]) color system, plus white and gloss. The white is usually to provide a base on dark surfaces and to build up 3D reliefs. The gloss is to give the prints a nice finish.

All of those inks come in 100ml cartridges. There is also an additional cartridge specifically for cleaning the jets.

In my opinion, these cartridges are likely to be the biggest complaint with the eufyMake UV Printer E1. They should be easier to handle than traditional UV ink bottles and will reduce maintenance, but they are expensive.

eufyMake says that an ink kit will cost $299 and that will include all of the CMYK colors, white, gloss, and the cleaning cartridge. Ignoring the cleaning cartridge, that works out to about $0.50 per milliliter. Bottles of UV ink for professional printers, on the other hand, work out to around $0.08 per milliliter. Therefore, eufyMake ink cartridges are about six times more expensive (though that does include the cleaning cartridge).

This is the same model we saw (and continue to see) in the consumer inkjet printing market and people hate it. I’ll let you decide how much that matters to you.

But hey, this is Hackster and maybe one of our members will come up with a way to refill the cartridges.

First impressions

I was very excited when the package showed up at my door and I started unboxing immediately. Everything was packed very well and the packaging looks nice — slightly more “premium” feeling than is typical.

Unpacking and set up were easy enough, without anything tricky or complicated. You just install the cartridges and flatbed, let the machine calibrate itself, link it in the app, and then start printing. The automatic calibration and priming procedure is fairly slow, but I was probably printing within an hour.

The eufyMake UV Printer E1 feels well-made, with quality materials. It is sturdy and though there is a lot of plastic, it doesn’t feel cheap at all. However, I don’t love the shiny black plastic, because it attracts dust and fingerprints like crazy. Within 24 hours, the top cover (around the ink cartridges) looked downright dirty. That isn’t particularly important, of course, but it is worth mentioning.

Getting my first print started was pretty easy. The software is simple enough to understand and standard flat prints are simple. Just capture a snapshot of the flatbed, choose or upload a design image, position it, select the print settings (you usually want White>CMYK), then start!

Those flat prints are pretty fast, too. Not as fast as an inkjet printer, but most small items usually only take a few minutes. It is when you get into 3D textures and reliefs that print times get really long (often several hours).

Speaking of, setting up those textured print jobs is a lot trickier. There are several methods for doing so and most of them rely on AI. There are various AI tools and they work in different ways, but they all attempt to automatically create textures/reliefs and do so with varying success.

If you’re the type of person who wants complete control over everything (I certainly am), you will need to put in more work.

Creating 3D textures

The best way I found to manually create textured prints was to use vector artwork with layers. In eufyMake Studio, you can then set a specific height for each layer.

I did that to print a donut onto a 45 vinyl record — probably my favorite piece among my tests. I wanted the frosting to sit above the donut, and then sprinkles to sit above the frosting.

To achieve that, I started with an overhead image of the donut. Then I stretched/warped that image to make the center hole big enough to go around the label on the record. Next, I used Inkscape to do an “image trace” operation and simplify the image down to vectors (20 colors). Finally, in eufyMake Studio, I set a height for each of those vectors.

It turned out great!

However, that is more of a 2.5D design than a full 3D design. The ideal way to create true 3D textures would be with something like a grayscale height map. Unfortunately, eufyMake Studio doesn’t currently support that. But my contact told me that they will be updating the software soon to allow something along those lines.

In the meantime, we’ll need to rely on the AI features or 2.5D vector artwork. The AI features are hit-or-miss in my experience. They do create 3D textures, but whether that looks how you expect is up to chance.

And trying isn’t free. To use those AI features, you need to use credits. Those credits cost money and you’ll have to keep buying them to keep using the AI features.

For that reason, I believe it is absolutely critical that eufyMake Studio get an update for robust manual texturing tools immediately. They can keep the AI features for people that want them and are okay with paying for them, but the rest of us will demand an alternative.

Testing

In the time since the eufyMake UV Printer E1 showed up at my door, I have been running as many print jobs as I can. I’ve printed on all kinds of things: canvas, wood, ceramic magnets, ceramic coasters, PCBs, sticker film, metal bottles, plastic, 3D-printed plastic, metal, cardboard, and paper.

It worked on everything and I tried all kinds of designs, too. Many of them my own and some of them from the library in the eufyMake Studio software.

For example, I put the Hackster logo, The Maker’s Toolbox banner, and the Serial Hobbyism (my YouTube channel) logo on a bunch of stuff.

I also printed more "artistic" pieces, like this custom Zippo lighter.

And this canvas “painting” of my dog and me, which is a photo that was made to look like an oil painting.

I also printed this dashing fella onto a phone case.

I wanted to test the UV resistance of prints, so I left this sitting outside in the intense Phoenix sun for a week. It held up just fine without any noticeable degradation in that time.

In all of my testing, I only ran into an issue once. That was when I was printing on that Zippo and, for some reason, the white ink just stopped working. I ran it through cleaning cycles and even replaced the white cartridge without luck. Eventually, I power-cycled the printer and told it to go through the ink injection process and that worked — though I'm not sure why or what the problem was.

Stickers and DTF printing

DTF printing for, say, making stickers is a special process. You print onto paper film with a layer adhesive, spraying the ink onto the adhesive. Then you run that through a eufyMake lamination machine, which applies a layer of transparent plastic film onto the top (so the UV ink is between the adhesive and the transparent film).

After that, you can use scissors or the provided paper cutter thingy to trim off the excess. Then, when you’re ready to stick the sticker on something, you just peel off the white paper backing.

Here you can see where I attempted to put a sticker with my Serial Hobbyism logo onto my car. I did a poor job with the application, but you get the idea. It is a bit like vinyl and you want to avoid bubbles.

I think this sticker functionality is a neat bonus, but it isn’t the main appeal of the eufyMake UV Printer E1 for me. You can make nice vinyl stickers with a $300 Cricut machine or even full-color stickers with any old inkjet printer. But the UV printing gives you full-color and, in theory at least, better long-term resistance to fading.

There are other uses cases for DTF printing, such as making banners. eufyMake will even have an accessory for printing really long sheets of film. But I didn’t get that accessory and so I wasn’t able to test it.

Rotary printing

The other notable accessory is the rotary printing attachment, which lets you print onto cylindrical things, such as water bottles and mugs. It is well-made and work just fine with official eufyMake “blank” items.

Unfortunately, it is quite limited on what shapes and sizes it can accommodate. The design of the drive wheels and rollers prevents you from inserting anything that isn’t the right shape: a cylinder open on one side, with a wide “mouth” and at least mostly straight sides.

I grabbed a handful of bottles and other cylindrical items from the thrift store to test, but found that none of them fit on the rotary printing attachment. Though, to be fair, I’m sure I could find plenty now that I know what to look for.

I'm also going to look into designing a modification that would allow for more shapes, so follow me if you're interested in that.

All of that said, the rotary printing attachment didn’t have any problems with the items provided by eufyMake.

I do have one final gripe, though: the camera doesn’t work with the rotary printing attachment. So, you have to be very careful with positioning. You can see here how I messed that up when I printed The Maker’s Toolbox banner onto this bottle.

Things I like

Overall, I think the eufyMake UV Printer E1 is really awesome and I plan to get a lot of use out of it. There is just so much potential for creativity and I already have a long list of things I want to make with it. I’m even considering setting up a booth at a craft fair to sell some stuff.

I love that you can print on anything, in full-color. It is like what I wanted from the PrinCube, and it actually works.

And the 3D texture capabilities represent a heaping pile of icing on top. It can make printed artwork look like it was actually painted, as with that picture of my dog and me. And it can add a new creative dimension to a piece, as with the donut I printed onto the record.

The camera is awesome and, after calibration, is pretty darn accurate. I printed some emojis onto pennies and you can see that the positioning is very precise — probably within 0.5mm.

I like that the machine itself is attractive and compact enough to tuck away, and even to bring to the aforementioned craft fair.

And, despite the costs, I even like the cartridges. They’re quick and easy to swap without any kind of mess. Though I'm sure I'll be complaining as soon as I have to buy some more.

Concerns I have

My biggest concerns are related to eufyMake’s potential business decisions.

The expensive ink cartridges are one example. The AI features are another. The UV Printer E1 is awesome, but business might get in the way.

What if, for example, eufyMake goes under? Will we still be able to use our machines? After all, everything has to go through the app or desktop software. There is any way to load a up a file on the machine directly.

And what if services for the AI features go down? Will we not be able to create 3D textures anymore?

Those concerns are speculative, of course, but they aren’t farfetched. We’ve seen that happen time and time again when tech companies fold, leaving owners with bricked devices. That’s bad enough for a $300 Zune, but it would really hurt for a $1,500 machine — especially if you’re relying on it for your income.

Final thoughts

I’m just going to say it: I love the eufyMake UV Printer E1. It is so cool and is easily my favorite thing that I’ve ever reviewed. I've had a ton of fun playing with it so far and I plan to keep experimenting with new ideas.

This will make serious waves in the maker community and I think it will be a big success. Even if I end up being wrong about this particular machine, I think it will kick off a lot of new development in the area of consumer DTO UV printing. The tech simply has too much potential to ignore.

The UV Printer E1’s print quality is fantastic and it can print onto just about anything. And those prints are durable and resistant.

I am concerned about ink cartridge pricing, as well as issues that might arise from business decisions made by eufyMake. But I’m hoping that won’t be a problem or that eufyMake will provide a solution if it does.

If you want a eufyMake UV Printer E1, it will launch on Kickstarter on April 29th. A “standard bundle,” which will include the printer itself and a cartridge bundle, will cost $1,899. Super early birds on Kickstarter will be able to snag a bundle for $1,699.

But until April 28th, you can put down a pre-order deposit of $50 on eufymake.com to secure a standard bundle discounted to $1,499.