The Photon Mono marks new territory for Anycubic, as one of its initial wave of mono LCD-toting MSLA printers. This LCD tech, which serves as the mask for each layer, sitting between the printer’s UV light source and the wafer-thin layer of resin in the vat, is much more efficient for the process than RGB LCD counterparts. As such, the UV light doesn’t need to be on for long at all, shortening overall layer cure times, and consequently, print time overall.

It’s a bold new world, and most MSLA printers worth looking at these days use this tech. So how does the Photon Mono hold up?

Function

The Photon Mono’s main feature is its monochrome LCD, which, as described above, supercharges its print speed. Standard resins can be processed with cure times as low as ~2 seconds.

As now seems to be the case with all of Anycubic’s resin printers, the company ships the printer with a resin cure time test print, which helps you to hone in on the optimal cure time, giving sharp detail for any resin. Every resin printer should ship with such a test, yet most don’t, so credit to Anycubic.

The Photon Mono throws no curve balls when setting up and using the printer. Releasing it from its tidy foam-wedged bonds leaves you with the printer, power cord (standard laptop-brick style 12v), and Anycubic’s typically generous box of resin handling accessories.

Build plate leveling requires you to remove the resin vat before loosening the four bolts fixing it in place, and lowering it to a sheet of paper covering the LCD. Putting pressure on the plate to ensure its levelness: tighten the bolts, and you’re good to go. Standard MSLA-printer-setup fare.

In practice, Anycubic’s Photon Mono performs to the same decent standard established by the company’s Photon printer back in 2018, but with hardware upgrades beyond simply a monochrome LCD that iron out the kinks and a design change that makes it much more pleasant to use.

The Z-axis motion system sees a jump to a linear rail rather than rods, which in theory should make the printer sturdier and precision through the Z-axis more repeatable. In practice, we see this. Paired with dialed in default lift settings, the result is exceptionally clean prints with little to no noticeable banding or artifacts in the Z.

Print quality using stock profiles and unchallenging resin is, predictably, great. Actually, we’ve managed to render some incredible prints on the Mono with little to no effort on our part. There’s the feeling that the Mono is forgiving, in the way that we liked about the Elegoo Mars, and original Phrozen Sonic Mini.

It seems that decent factory default lift settings come in clutch here. The Mono is no slouch, but it also doesn’t aggressively rip the plate up when changing layer.

Form

Let’s preface this by saying that the Anycubic Photon Mono is a tidy little printer. Its plastic shell sits flush to the desk, and the UV blocking lid hoists up and off for unfettered access to the vat and build plate, something we find way more user friendly on printers this size and a change on the likes of the original Photon and Photon S (and newer Photon Mono SE) which all use an upswinging hinged door.

The decorative ridging around the base of the printer looks neat but is begging for a stray drip of resin to ruin its clean lines and would be irritatingly difficult to clean.

As with all previous Photon printers, the USB port is located on the side, near the rear of the printer, which means you need plenty of free space to its right to be able to use it. We chastised the Elegoo Mars for this back in 2019, and, similarly, pooh-pooh it here. The Photon Mono SE also suffers from this.

New for the Photon Mono is an entirely plastic resin vat, something many would consider a downgrade. They’re often the focal point of criticism against machines that use them, with durability against the concoction of chemicals at play an underlying theme. In the scheme of things, metal trumps out plastic in the made-up-but-effective-for-the-point-we’re-making index of materials and how they feel in relation to the perception of quality, and this carries to the Photon Mono, too, despite it actually being quite fine to use.

In practice, as with the Phrozen Sonic Mini when it shipped with a plastic vat (it doesn’t anymore), it is functional and, after some 100 hours of printing, not caused us any issues. Owners of the printer will far exceed our limited testing, so we can only offer this small indication that, short term, it’s fine.

One thing we’re not so hot on is that the FEP film comes pre-sandwiched in a non-separable tensioning plate. If you need to swap out your FEP on the Mono, you will have to buy special pre-framed FEP from Anycubic – not a sheet of your choosing. We’ve been told that this is to cut down on the amount of effort required to exchange the FEP film. Honestly we don’t see it being worth not being able to use your own sheets, not least for when, further down the road, Anycubic stops producing its framed versions.

So, despite cheaping out on the resin vat, Anycubic has made sure to address another common point of contention with the more budgety of budget resin printers – print plate runoff. Anycubic’s Photon Zero printer, a ~$139 experiment in driving prices way, way down, features a flat-top print plate that resin would pool on after a print has completed. Phrozen’s Sonic Mini, another budget effort, also has this flat-top style of plate. Not so with the Photon Mono though, which features an angled print plate that allows for post-print resin runoff. Nice.

Print preparation for the Anycubic Mono is, at the recommendation of Anycubic, handled by its proprietary Photon Workshop software. It has a lot in common with ChiTuBox, possibly the most prevalent desktop resin print preparation software, so past users of that will have no trouble making the switch.

As a slicer, Photon Workshop is more than equipped to handle support generation, hollowing, model splitting, and other minor manipulations. For features, it’s richer than ChiTuBox, but with that said, we still find the occasional support structures to clip into models and other modes push the program to instability. We’d take fewer features that work better, and more reliably over exotic things such as a face generator – this isn’t a joke, Photon Workshop literally features a head generator (you feed it images and data points, and it will attempt to create a 3D likeness of the face you’ve given it. It’s not very good.

We appreciate the direction that Photon Workshop is heading in, being software covering all possible bases. Still, it’d be better off being masterful of a few functions than distinctly average (or even comically poor) at more tools than the average user will ever need.

We also found the Mono to work well with Lychee (3.1.8) slicer, which is a pretty slick and intuitive alternative.

So, where does this all leave you if you’re $249 out of pocket with this ridged lump of a printer in your possession? We’d be lying if we didn’t say the Mono initially left us cold. Monochrome LCD-enabled print speeds are practically par for the course now, which leaves very little else about the Mono to write home about. It felt a bit “meh” – especially given that the price butts up on the Mars 2 Pro (similar machine, more premium). Having used the Mono for some time now, we trust it more with tricky detail and fragile features. Its stock setup is forgiving. We didn’t encounter any print failures that weren’t a result of us forgetting to top the resin tank up (this despite the tank having fill level indicators… not our proudest moment.)

The Mono has its place – if anything we can say to dissuade people away from the mind-blowingly overpriced Photon S. If the character of a printer matters to you, you may enjoy the likes of the Mars or Sonic Mini series more. But at its heart, the Photon Mono is perfectly pleasant and capable, with few notable deficiencies (though time will tell on that plastic resin vat.)