Big prints with big speed
Tom’s Hardware Verdict
Anycubic’s Photon Mono M7 Max is an extra large resin printer with premium features, speed, and very good resolution, though some of its “high speed” boasts sacrifice detail for quicker print times.
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Pros
- +
Excellent details
- +
High-speed printing
- +
Heated Vat
- +
Factory-leveled build plate
Cons
- –
Expensive
- –
Auto refill system didn’t work on test unit
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Anycubic’s newest Photon Mono M7 Max is a lot like the M7 Pro we’ve reviewed, but with a much bigger build plate and a bit less resolution – not that you’ll miss it. It’s super smart, fast, and has enough pixels to deliver the details you crave. Its large size means you can either print very large models or buckets of gaming miniatures all at once. If you’re into big prints, this is an excellent 3D printer and one of the best resin 3D printers we’ve reviewed.
Printers have been getting so big that I’ve become somewhat blind to their size. My husband recently bought a furniture dolly to move review units into my workshop. The Mono M7 Max is a 52-pound behemoth with a print volume that not only rivals FDM printers but surpasses many of them. With a 300 mm build height and 298 mm width, its X and Z dimensions are bigger than the Prusa CORE One, a Creality Ender 3, or any Bambu machine.
The M7 Max proves an interesting point: you don’t need an insane number of pixels to deliver high quality details. This machine only has a 7K resolution screen with a 46μm pixel accuracy. Compared to its little brother, the Photon Mono M7 Pro, it has half the resolution. But when you do a side-by-side comparison, those extra details are difficult to see with the naked eye.
Anycubic brags on the machine’s 4-second-a-layer total print speed, which I can’t quite square up with its confusing array of slicer settings. Don’t get me wrong, the machine is speedy, but its fastest slicer settings require thin high speed resin and a twice as thick .1 mm layer height. The thin resin softens details and makes me question why anyone would print resin using anything less than top-notch settings. If you’re really concerned with speed, you can get a Core XY FDM printer like the Prusa CORE One.
The M7 Max has a lot of premium features, like a heated vat and sensors to detect failed prints, low resin levels and even tell you when it’s time to change the film on your vat. The auto refill system didn’t work for me, it merely sucked the bottles flat. I didn’t have the patience to fix the issue when it was so easy to dump an entire liter of resin into the massive vat.