Self-developed light source

Creality is making a big fuss about the light source it has developed. Whether or not it deserves to remains to be seen, but what we know so far is that it has a 120 W 6-lamp spotlight. Creality claims 90% uniformity with the light and whatever “precision light control” means, but we won’t know if any of this makes a blind bit of difference until we get printing. It could be brilliant; it could be a lot of fuss about nothing. Time will tell.

6-inch 2K monochrome LCD screen

The light source passes through the LCD screen, and in the Halot-One, it is a 6-inch monochrome one. With a 2560 x 1620 pixels resolution, this gives a print granularity of ~50 microns, which is the par score for most of the popular budget resin 3D printers currently on the market. This means some excellent quality prints are possible, but they might not be any better or worse than prints from the competition.

Build Volume

The Halot-One is going to offer us a build volume of 130 x 82 x 160 mm. That’s exactly the same as Creality’s own LD-002H that we recently reviewed, as well as the Elegoo Mars 2 Pro. We like both of those printers a lot, so it’s going to be interesting to see how the usability and quality of the Halot-One differ because, in terms of size and print resolution, there is no difference.

CPU Differences

The larger, more expensive Halot-Sky uses an ARM Cortex-A53, a chip found in many smartphones and even the Nintendo Switch. In the Halot-One, you’ll get an ARM Cortex-M4, though. There are some significant differences between these two, but it’s unlikely the user themselves will see that difference reflected in performance.

The new Halot series printers appear to be running on a Linux operating system, too, though that shouldn’t make any difference for users either.

Wi-Fi Connectivity

Always a feature we love to see on any 3D printer, Wi-Fi connectivity appears in the Halot-One, and that should allow us to remotely get prints going without having to move our lockdown-enlarged rears from PC to printer. In addition, Creality has said that the Wi-Fi allows for “one-click” upgrades to the firmware as well as the ability to use the Creality App and Cloud.

Hopefully, it’ll just make everything just a little bit easier. If you need to get your steps in, though, there’s still a USB port you can use for file transfers.

New Proprietary Slicer

Creality is pushing its new “slicing system” quite a bit on the material for the new Halot-One. Our contact at Creality was kind enough to send us an alpha version of the company’s first resin slicer going by the name of “Creality Box.” We’ve only played around with this slicer casually and haven’t been able to print anything yet, but what we can tell you is that it is a very simple, straightforward, smartly dressed little slicer.

From our limited experience of this slicer so far, we can say that it’s missing one or two key functions we’ve come to love on resin go-to slicers such as ChTuBox or Lychee: a hollowing and punch-hole function would be to first to spring to mind. Creality surely has some work to do before this is ready to work, but, as we’ve said already, we’ve only received an alpha version.

5-inch Color Touchscreen

A nice, big 5-inch color touchscreen is provided to help you tap controls into the Halot-One. The Halot-Sky also has a 5-inch touchscreen, and it seems the only difference here is that the Halot-One’s touchscreen is mounted landscape, while the Sky’s has its portrait. Either way, it should be a responsive, intuitive system that does what you need it to do.

Additional Features

Worth mentioning also is the Halot-One’s “air purification” system, consisting of a fan with an activated charcoal filter, similar to the LD-002H’s setup. This should help filter out some of the pungent, nose hair-wilting fumes of resin 3D printing.