HeyGears UltraCraft Reflex RS Turbo Review: Resin 3D Printing Made Simpler

The word “ecosystem” is mud to many in the desktop 3D printing space, but it makes a lot of sense in resin 3D printing. Any print failure is a labor-intensive mess to clean up – not to mention expensive – and so rather than having print and material parameters left to you to figure out, or at a generic default that may not be optimal for your print, each print set up in the company’s BluePrint software, available on Windows and Mac, first follows a short setup wizard to determine the specific printer model, optional accessories, the material you are using, and, where available, the desired layer height (usually 0.03 or 0.05 mm).

It is an on-the-rails experience, using the device as HeyGears wants you to rather than simply putting the tool in your hands and letting you figure it out. I’d argue this is the better way for resin printing, but can see how some may feel like it takes the choice and agency out of the hobby of 3D printing. If the satisfaction lies in dialling in settings and understanding your hardware on a deeper level than most, HeyGears’ printers are not for you.

The goal – and one I can get behind here – is to not have to futz with the settings or dial anything in. The end point is the print and the system needs to get out of your way in this.

The Blueprint Studio print preparation software plays a large role in this. It’s main feature is a one-click slice button that can collapse the various stages of preparation (orientation, positioning, support generation et al) into a single dialog; a frictionless click. Ironically, this simplified dialog still gives you a various essential parameter options for each of the stages within the process, so a one-click slice can still end up being many clicks, but the intention of it being a shortcut path with fewer decisions on your part is clear.

For the most part it does the job well, defaulting to a “multi-objective optimal orientation” that aims to strike a balance minimizing the cross section of the model, the print time, and volume of supports required. You can override this and optimize to one at the expense of others, which gives a sensible level of control if you know what you want without drawing you into the weeds with deeper settings changes.

But if that is your thing, Blueprint does also offer you full manual control of the slice. There’s no freemium model with Blueprint – what you see is what you get, with full process controls and a rich selection of model editing tools including model simplification, lattice (internal and surface), text embossing or debossing, hollowing and hole-punching, at your disposal.

The slicing workflow specifically, is solid. The default model support settings are the best we’ve encountered across the space, with all but the densest of supported models pulling away in a single, clean rip that leaves a model-shaped negative in the support structures left on the plate. It’s satisfying.

Outside of the print preparation environment itself, Blueprint gets a little unintuitively clunky. Preparing a model to slice and slicing is a distinct process and area from having the sliced file and sending it to the printer. In this regard, Blueprint acts more as a project management tool, except, besides sending the sliced file (or specific washing or curing instructions), there aren’t any broader job management features. It feels a little half-baked, and as such more of a hindrance. You slice the file, then have to go find that file in the sliced files area of the software before you can send it to the printer.

If you mis-click to slice, there’s no way to back out, and the process runs in the background. In this, and other situations, Blueprint is a bit of a black box. You don’t see what specifically happens or why – things just reappear when they’re done.

This would matter less if you didn’t have to wait an indeterminate amount of time for the sliced file to be ready, too. And if you’re not using the printer on local area network-only (itself a flaky experience in our testing) your sliced file has to be synced to HeyGears’ cloud before it can be sent to the machine. For all the ways they’ve made slicing simple, HeyGears inadvertently puts bumps in the path of just getting prints onto the printer.

There’s a small amount of internal storage on the RS Turbo, shared with the OS, which quickly fills up, so be ready to throw a high-capacity USB drive or microSD card at it if you’d prefer to forget about such things.

With a print complete and the plate in-hand for post-processing, the UltraCraft Wash and UltraCraft Cure stations, which can be purchased in a bundle with the printer, shine. Separately available (or as the RS Turbo Combo bundle), the Wash and Cure stations feel like premium, solidly built pieces of hardware. They’re Wi-Fi enabled, through which you can bind them to your account and remotely send jobs their way.

It’s possible to manually input the wash or cure durations, with control over the speed of a wash cycle, or, say, the length and temperature of a cure (you can bake the models, too). There’s not too much to say about them, besides the convenience they add when, from a sliced file in Blueprint, you can also then send it to each post processing station, with a custom routine specific, we assume (it’s not stated anywhere) to the material and volume of the print.

A particular standout is the wash stations dual bucket system, which includes valves for purging IPA from one bucket to another, meaning you don’t have to go fishing to find cleaned models. Two buckets are provided, though if you were to follow HeyGear’s recommended washing procedure of a rough and then a clean IPA bath to clean models in some resins, four buckets might be a better option.

Across the spread of models we printed, details remained uniformly sharp and planes and surfaces crisply smooth. HeyGears’ claims of a high contract ratio giving cleaner prints is, I think, well founded. However, it’s apparent that this, along with Blueprint’s one-click slicing magic, are not 100% fail-safe against print errors like lines in the layer from the model shifting around during printing (in other words, not being well supported enough for the default peel forces.) For small models, the problem doesn’t show, but on larger prints with large, uniform surfaces, we found it necessary to manually toggle more supports to fix the model in place firmly as it prints.

All of this is to say, if this is your first resin 3D printer, treat the one-click slice as a general purpose tool for simple prints – don’t expect it to be perfect, and brush up on your resin 3D printing theory in order to identify what you need to change for when things don’t work so well.

One thing not included in our test package that we’d expect to close much of that gap, based on how it performed on an earlier Reflex, is the pulsing release module. It’s an optional (~$700) extra that swaps out the printer’s standard resin vat for a heated one that has air channels embedded in the release film. An electric pump forces air beneath the film at layer change, gently separating the part. Besides heating the resin (which almost always helps with print success and is a pretty egregious omission in the base printer as it is) it quickens the layer change in a gentler way, letting the printer work faster and an improvement in quality. We tested one with a previous model of Reflex 3D printer from HeyGears and the gap we see between that and the RS Turbo without the pulsing module is noticeable.

A word on resin 3D printing: Don’t do it unless you know you need to – it involves hazardous liquid chemicals that cannot be disposed of in regular waste streams. If you don’t respect the post-processing process and cleanup, it can be dangerous for you and others.

HeyGears’ machines cost a premium compared the usual suspects of desktop resin 3D printing, but set against the likes of Formlabs, who HeyGears clearly takes a lot of inspiration from, the value proposition is crystal clear. You’re buying into the on-rails almost-closed ecosystem – you can print with third-party resins still – with house materials and no-fuss material presets, plus tightknit connectivity and direct-line support from the company when something goes wrong. Not everyone likes the idea of sacrificing control when they buy physical products – and that will be a hard line in the sand for some folks.

The results we’ve seen have been good – particularly miniatures, an end-use HeyGears clearly positions the printer for – though the printer alone stock state, using Blueprint’s simplified one-click mode is challenged by larger prints that are supposed to show smooth, uniform walls. Tabletop gamers and users printing small, intricately detailed models will, I’m sure, be delighted with the results and how easily they come.

As a package, the effortless support removal and the tools to make transferral between post-processing stations nudge things toward being a cleaner (and therefore safer) experience, which is worthwhile as a one-and-done package together.

I wager you’d have to spend almost the price of the printer again on pulsing release module and its heated vat to get the very best, consistent and virtually failproof results. But even standalone, the convenience through simplification with the Reflex RS Turbo is a compelling reason to get one. If the printer is a means to achieve the print, it’s ideal. If you’re committed to the hobby of printing, then you could save some money and get similar results from other, cheaper machines.

HeyGears UltraCraft Reflex RS Turbo

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