HeyGears announced a very different device that offers true, full-colour 3D printing.
The company has been offering a wide range of resin-based 3D printers for several years, mainly focused on the dental market. They’ve been quite successful in that market, but their new G1 series is very different.
Their G1 Series is billed as the “World’s 1st Full-Colour 3D & UV Printer”.
Hold on, what is a “UV Printer”?
Let me explain. It’s a different class of printing device, and is not a 3D printer. The UV printing process goes like this:
- A printhead sweeps across the print surface.
- The printhead has an enormous number of nozzles.
- The nozzles can drop mixes of inks to create almost any colour.
- The nozzles selectively drop photo-curable ink during the sweep.
- A UV light follows the sweep, curing the ink layer.
Typically, UV printers are used to print vibrant, fully textured colour, including gradients, on existing objects, like adding a logo to a plain phone case, for example.
Some UV systems are able to perform multiple passes to get a bit of a 3D texture to the print. These are not 3D printing, as it’s really printing ink, not structural resins.
UV systems are quite interesting, but they are not 3D printers.
However…
HeyGears offers three variants in the G1 series:
- HeyGears G1: essentially a basic UV printer, able to print up to 5mm in colour textures.
- HeyGears G1X: a better UV printer, also 5mm height.
- HeyGears G1X Full-3D: combines UV and 3D resin printing.
It’s that last model, the G1X Full-3D system, that catches my attention. In addition to the 5mm UV capability, this system can print 0.01-0.20 mm layers in resin, just like a normal resin 3D printer.
How does it work? It seems that the G1X Full-3D system uses the same printhead, an i3200 with 1440 x 2400 dpi resolution for both UV ink and 3D resin. This printhead has eight channels for different materials during each print job.
For UV ink, it uses a CMYKWV+Lc+Lm set of ink. These can be combined to provide basically any imaginable colour, and they say the colour fidelity is very good.
For 3D resin, they use a CMYK+W*2+V+S set of materials. This likely means colour resins (CMYK), white, varnish/clear, and support material.
The implication here is that the G1X Full-3D would operate in three different modes:
- Mode 1: 2D UV printing
Print graphics onto an existing flat or fixtured object using UV ink. - Mode 2: 3D texture / relief printing
Build up UV ink/varnish layers on a surface, up to the stated 5 mm texture height. - Mode 3: full-colour 3D printing
Use the resin/material-jetting setup with CMYK + white + varnish/clear + support material to build a 3D object layer by layer.
It is likely that using mode 3, where you’re printing full 3D objects, you would not get quite the colour fidelity of modes 1 and 2: you are using different inks. It also means you likely cannot “3D print an object” and then “UV colour on top of it” in the same job.
The G1X Full-3D is priced at US$3,299, which might sound a lot more expensive than a desktop FFF system, but it is fantastically less than competing systems of similar capability.
Those systems would be Stratasys’ PolyJet systems, along with Mimaki. Both of these options produce near photorealistic objects with their advanced full colour technologies. It remains to be seen how well HeyGears’ technology compares, quality-wise.
Nevertheless, the pricing is so low that this will certainly attract buyers.
As of now, you cannot actually buy a unit, since they haven’t officially launched sales. You can, however, reserve a unit with a US$50 deposit.
I’m very intrigued to see how this technology evolves and how the market reacts.
Via HeyGears
