in case you missed it I'll say it clearly 12K printers are irrelevant as are any printers with resolutions above 12K and that's not a joke I'm very very serious when I say this and you might be watching and thinking but I just bought a 12K printer does that mean I wasted my money well the potential scenario where you're uncertain is kind of the point of this video well it's one of them anyway and unlike others where I've said this video may upset some people well this time I'm certain yeah I already know for sure that this video will definitely upset some people is it you let's see I'm Ross and this is fa Hammer videos so first off the inspiration behind this video is twofold one is because pretty much every resin printer I've reviewed has a 3 to five minute section of me making the same point and my most frequent followers are getting bored of hearing it and honestly I'm getting bored of saying it but also despite my incessant repetition on some of my most recent videos a few long-term followers have made comments which shows they still don't get it and I'm sorry to say they like the brands are unintentionally feeding the fire and leading more people to believe completely the wrong thing about resin printers so yeah as I was saying 12K printers are irrelevant even more so are 14k printers or 16 or 20 if we ever get there but please let me explain because I strongly suspect you think I'm going to say it's because the quality difference is so small between 8 and 12K that it makes the upgrade redundant well no not at all sorry because 8K printers they're irrelevant too as our 4K and 2K printers so here we go I've done a lot of videos on this channel now and as I write the script I'm about to reach 4 and a half million views which well it's just insane when I think about it so honestly I try not to but to you the viewer thanks so very much for being a part of this journey but with that many views can you guess what my most viewed video is is it my dry brushing for beginners video which has got 100,000 views nope is it my printing minis in fdm video with 150,000 views yeah it's not that either so obviously then it must be my 3D printed boltgun video with almost 250,000 views yeah it's not that at all it's a little short which is no more than an outake from my Saturn 2 video review and it's got over half a million views on its own and regardless of the content of that little short the reason why people clicked it is because it's called 8K 3D printers are irrelevant and since well this is a YouTube channel and the deal is I want views in exchange for the information I share I'm 100% going to use that title again because yeah it gets clicks I am assuming that it's part of the reason you're here right now but the point of that video much like this one was nothing to do with the printers themselves and for those of you amongst my viewership who are wise enough to understand the value of Hyperbole and you accept how YouTube actually works yeah it was no more than a clickbait title but the video then went on to make what I still believe is a very valuable point which is why I'm making a longer video about the exact same topic for the rest of you just like that vid there's the comment section below this video please enter your complaint there I promise I will read it back to everyone else who doesn't want to winge and complain if you fancy a laugh go and check out the comment section on my 8k printers are a relevant short video and yeah it's a good laugh it's amusing I spend a lot of time there just fending off unwise responses let's get on with it so the point of all these whatever K prins being irrelevant is nothing to do with print quality it's a complaint about marketing still with me I am going to share valuable information this video it'll be worth it and it'll inform future buying decisions and it'll help you shut down incorrect information when people try to make the same incorrect point over and over but please don't be rude because you can't blame people for knowing no more than what they've heard from someone else maybe it was from someone they trust and maybe it was said in such a way that it then made sense in that person's way of thinking about how printers work so if you are going to correct people especially online try not to come across as rude and arrogant because then I wouldn't have a job that's what I do on this channel sorry so yeah there is a lot to learn in resin Printing and I actually have some videos coming up soon about how difficult it is for the beginner that will hopefully speed up the process for some people but yeah there's quite a lot to take in I just want to put a stop to this one thing so let's make this point one last time and for my usual viewers please stick around and watch this because your view today tells YouTube to feed this content to other people and then more people will learn from it so here's the point I'm sick of making 8K 12K 14k Etc doesn't actually mean anything useful and for anyone new before you respond to that as so many people did on my short what I mean is it means nothing in terms of a comparable metric between different printers and that's because it does not function fun as a simple quality metric for any individual printer in fact it's an outright stupid value which misleads consumers more than informs anyone you see just today I was in a live chat for my premiere for the Nova 3D Ultra 14k printer and someone made the following comment the human eye can see a maximum of 32k and if you don't already know you're all about to find out why that statement makes no sense and I'm sorry to the person who brought this point up I'm not attacking you direct directly with the point I'm making it's just the most recent and relevant example that I can use because anything K doesn't mean anything on its own let's just go back to 8K as a basic example and more people probably have 8K printers the 8K resolution refers to a device that has approximately 8,000 pixels on the horizontal axis at least in marketing terms anyway and whilst the recognized standard of 8K is four times full h D horizontal resolution of 1920 that gives us 7,680 pixels 8K by the marketing standards could mean anything from 7,501 pixels to 8,500 pixels on the horizontal axis and this 3D printer marketing has been adopted from the display industry where well they use the K designation to differentiate television resolutions in a simple way we all know what a HD TV is we all know what a 4K K TV is we know that 4K TV is better than HD TV because it's a massive and often obvious jump depending on the size of your screen how far you are from it and what content is being played on it but when it comes to resin printers there are two very important differences which is why the K designation just doesn't work one is that printer brands are frequently operating with the generally something K resolution rather than going with the industrywide semi-official standard values with the current claimed 14k printers you only get about 2/3 the amount of pixels you should get on a true 14k resolution in fact the pixel count on these displays is less than what a true 12K would be and they're actually closer to True 12K than any of the 12K printers and the other reason to stop using this is that the output of a printer is not an image displayed on a screen it's a printed model and it's the output thing from any device that you interact with that we need to know the measurable differences of and your prints themselves are not 12K prints that doesn't make sense you see on a TV or monitor the output thing is an image or series of displayed images so in that case resolution works because you get the resolution the pixel density of the thing being output the image being output and in that scenario the difference between HD and 4K is so big and typically visible to the human eye that we can use the K as a clear differentiator I mean it's not like you see any 6K TV sets do you and whilst they exist you don't see many 6K monitors either now when it comes to printers these resolution differences are so small from the earliest 2K printers back when this hobby really started to Boom to the follow-up 4K printers to the 8K printers which have all but peaked in terms of printer output quality and now the 12K and 14k printers neither of which are even close to delivering their namesake brands have now tripped over themselves by concocting so much of this marketing and have done it to such a degree and attempt to appear better than the competitor but it's all become meaningless but the problem is beginners can still be swayed by this and I want to do everything I can to stop consumers being misled and the problem which has been happening for a few years now and the point of that original short video that I made is back when the original Sonic Mega 8K came out I saw so many comments in Facebook groups with people shocked that the quality of that printer was poorer than the mini 8K now yeah they're both 8K printers of course so why is the print quality not the same well once again it's because we're comparing the display resolution from the LCD on the printer rather than using a metric which defines the print quality so for one last time saying a printer is 8k means nothing okay right fine for the naysayers yes it means something but it means very little as mentioned 8K just seemingly means there's somewhere between 751 and 8,500 pixels on the horizontal display axis of a printer's display now if you have a really small printer like the mini 8K with its 7. 1 in screen which has 7,680 pixels on that axis those pixels are tiny so when your model is made it's made of lots of tiny squares those squares in that printer are 22 microns wide and 22 microns deep across the horizontal plane of the build surface now the Sonic Mega 8K is also 8K but because the screen's bigger it has the same number of pixels because 8K doesn't mean pixels per inch it's a fixed value it still means 7,680 pixels wide and it also has the same depth but that's stretched out over a larger area so your pixels are bigger therefore the rendered shapes or the rendered squares on the actual printed model are also bigger which results in less detail that was the whole point of the video but wow again go back and look at the comments on that short just to have some fun if you understand what I'm talking about so as I was saying because we're making 3D objects which also have a height Dimension the rendered layer is determined by your chosen layer height which is typically decided by you in the slice assess in now if we're measuring the output of a printer the printed model as we should be then we aren't measuring pixels we're measuring what is commonly referred to as voxal so going back to the example of the Sonic mini 8K each layer of a print is made of voxels which are at minimum approximately 22x 22x 20 microns with the 20 being the layer height now yes you can make the layer height axis smaller but let's just keep them as close to equal as possible for for the sake of Simplicity yeah so we can explain this point so as I said before if you've got a printer with a larger 8K display like the Sonic Mega 8K the horizontal resolution is still 7,680 pixels and they are square pixels on both printers but because of this printer's 15in screen which is over double that of the mini 8K 7 in approximately then the pixels are now 43 microns in size which is also pretty much double so in that case your best VX size from this machine is approximately 43x 43x 40 microns and again that 40 microns comes from the layer height so the point is the output print quality from the Sonic Mega 8K for example can only be half as good despite it also being 8K just like the Sonic mini 8K so in that regard yeah 8K printers are irrelevant because just like 12K 14k or anything K the metric is absolutely irrelevant relevant to anything that the printer outputs without also knowing the screen size of the printer so the K metric is irrelevant in case you haven't quite got the point yet and I'm sorry to be so arrogant with it but I just want to make sure for once we don't have to talk about this ever again let me just give you an analogy it's like someone saying I've got a 2. 8 L engine in my car suggesting that that means that car is more powerful than a car with a 1.
6 L engine now for power output we actually use horsepower per kilogram and that's because we measure and compare the relative output of a thing the car rather than the value of a single component within it the engine size and yes if you want to be pedantic in this example it of course is not the only relative metric when comparing vehicles but it is the most common one that the Layman would quote whilst the efficient AOS would then go into further detail about various aspects to nail down overall performance but even then you won't know the difference until someone actually gets them on the road next to each other and tests them practically in the same environment and circumstances now the same's true of 3D printers but here's where we get to the whole point of the video I want to change this I want to change this marketing crap I want to change the whole face of how resin printers are advertised and that's for the sake of us all and I need your help to do it now I've pretty much screamed for over a year we need to stop looking at k and I also hope we can begin to openly but politely object to Brands and people who continue to publish and talk about this metric now that's step one step two is agreeing a metric that we can use a metric which infers the quality of the things that the printers output rather than just a component inside and something that forces Brands to conform to a comparable standard that we can all use together now whilst I already talked about this and put a poll on my YouTube channel and Facebook group the suggestions that came back were actually quite good and we were limited in that poll because what I want is something that limits the brands from all the they tried with the release of these 12K screens because many of them initially tried telling us the pixel size was 19 microns when in fact the pixel size was only 19 microns on the x-axis because on the Y AIS they were still 24 and they actually tried to get away with that and people like vogan did a good job by calling it out in his video now we could say they should follow what companies like GoPro did with their 5. 3k resolution which actually is 5,320 pixels but the problem is if we did that the 8K printers would all suddenly be called 7. 6k printers and the 12ks they'd probably be called 11.
5k the thing is we already use K for display screens and doing this would become more confusing not less now I can already hear people screaming at this video just use DP but the thing is DPI is dots per inch and we aren't printing with dots now yes we could use PPI or pixels per inch but again we aren printing pixels that refers to the screen components not the output products and again it also doesn't limit the brands from claiming BS numbers on different axes forcing the brands to announce and conform to a unified standard is especially helpful with things like the current wave of 14k printers because they've got the same depth or Y resolution as 12K printers so what do we use well I've already made the argument that the comparable metric needs to be voxal related and I hope you can agree with me on that much and what we need to compare is the largest dimension of a single voxal that a printer can output now as I mentioned I actually asked my community what they thought and to give me some options but as many pointed out there can be issues pixels or dots in a flat area being pixels per inch Mak sense both a flat term and a flat measurement the most obvious term for voxels would be voxels per millimeter cubed but once again this could be manipulated by Brands this is why I want to propose we do something which Compares printers by the largest dimension of a single printable voxel Now by doing that 12K and 14k printers would become 24 Micron and 24.
