For a resin 3D printer to be worth writing home about these days, it’s got to have a monochrome LCD at its heart. This crucial component allows the printer to fire its UV lights for as little as a second to cure a layer of resin and has the additional benefit of a longer lifespan than the similar RBG-based LCDs used in older resin printers. (These panels are, essentially, consumable items and will have to be replaced at some point.)

The next consideration is that the LCD should be high resolution. If it weren’t already apparent, the Sonic Mighty 4K packs 3840 x 2400 pixels across its 9.3-inch face. Mathematicizing these numbers together leaves the Sonic Mighty 4K with an acceptably detailed resolution on your prints (we’ll go in-depth on the significance of this below). The result is that the printer generally covers all the bases you could want from a printing technology standpoint.

Large LCD

The number of pixels alone doesn’t really tell you much in terms of print resolution, not without the physical area of the LCD that they inhabit. In the Sonic Mighty 4K’s case, this is a 9.3-inch display, which gives a printable area of 200 x 125 mm – a larger area than similarly sized and specced competition such as the Anycubic Photon Mono X and Elegoo Saturn, which both also pack 4K LCDs, but offer 192 x 120 mm in the X- and Y-axes.

This increase in the printable area comes with a tradeoff off in pixel size, with the Mighty 4K’s checking in at ~53 microns, compared to the aforementioned printers’ ~50 microns.

We’re not so sure that this is really a tangible downgrade. Resin printing is essentially striving for the highest resolution; nevertheless, from our experience using many resin printers of all shapes and sizes, a ~3-micron increase is imperceptible to the naked eye. Only in the strictest of prints demanding the tightest tolerances will this matter, and even there, your environment and print settings will carry as much influence as those 3 microns.

The Mighty 4K’s large build area combines with 220 mm of height in the Z-axis to give an overall build volume of 5.5 liters. For the sake of comparison, that’s just shy of the Mono X at 5.6 liters, which has a taller print volume. Whether extra height on the Z-axis or a larger printable surface is better for large and multiple prints is debatable.

In our experience, it’s rarely the height of prints that is the problem. It’s angling objects to find the optimal orientation that eats into your build volume, blocking an obnoxious area of build plate for the most trivial of prints. We’d take extra printable area over more print height every single time.

Cutting Costs

Well, seeing as the Sonic Mighty 4K features a large screen and is, technologically speaking, up to scratch, and yet costs a pretty penny less than the competition, Phrozen must have made compromises somewhere, surely?

How do you make the internal LCD bigger without skyrocketing the price? Just shrink the display on the outside. No, okay, we know that’s not how it works. But the point stands that the touchscreen display you’ll be jabbing your digits on the front of the machine is the same shrimpy 2.8-inch unit we know from the (much smaller) Sonic Mini 4K. On a big printer such as the Sonic Mighty 4K, its proportions stand out alongside the larger, more user-friendly sizes seen on other machines. A first-world problem.

But when the machines all print to a similar standard, these are the details that separate them. In practice, the Sonic Mighty 4K’s touchscreen is as responsive as you could hope, so no real complaints.

The Sonic Mighty 4K uses a standard USB Type-A connection only, meaning you’ll need to whisk print jobs between your computer and printer using a UBS thumb drive. It’s basic. Expected, even. And again, the lack of anything fancier such as remote monitoring via Wi-Fi helps keep the price down. It’s tried and true, running back and forth with a USB stick, and since resin 3D printing is a hands-on process, it’s not like you won’t be spending a lot of time by the printer’s side.

Speaking of the USB input, the slot is conveniently located on the printer’s side, which we find to be the best spot. Open ports on the front can be at the risk of resin spillage. Unfortunately, Phrozen puts the power switch on the back of the machine, which is inconvenient.

The Vat

Maybe the most prominent cost-saving feature is the use of a composite resin vat. Obviously, plastic is way cheaper than metal, but amongst resin enthusiasts online, a disputed discussion is raging about such vats’ longevity. We’ve seen similar vats before and find them as usable as their metal counterparts. In practice, the difference is immaterial.

Phrozen offers a replaceable aluminum vat for ~$115, and that’s pretty much 115 reasons right there as to why it opted for the plastic vat in the first place. We do like the possibility to “upgrade” but would have preferred if you could choose your vat directly when purchasing the printer. What’s the use of having a spare plastic one if you are getting a metal vat.

However, plastic or not, what the vat is missing is protruding bumps on the bottom to protect the FEP sheet from benchtop debris when placing it outside the printer. It’s a small touch, but one you miss once you’ve had a taste of it. The same goes for a resin fill level indicator. This wouldn’t affect a print’s outcome, but it’d be a neat nice-to-have feature that can save you money. Resin is expensive, only using as much as you need for a print and leaving the rest unspoiled in the bottle is a smart move.

The way the vat fixes in place inside the printing area is worth a gripe, too. Large flat vats filled with resin are precarious to wield. Fact. On the Sonic Mighty 4K, you must spear the vat into place onto two threads, fixing each side down with a small, slippery nut. As best we can remember, all Phrozen printers do this, but the larger they get, the less viable it seems to secure the vat in place. It does the job, no doubt, but removing or sliding in the tray can be tricky, and extra caution is needed when handling the nuts.

Altogether, though, the general appearance and build quality of the printer is more than satisfactory. And let’s be honest, if a resin printer has the essentials, there is not much else it can do wrong. The base unit weighs about 8 kg providing a solid footprint without being too much of a tank. The printer’s shell is made from plastic and features a large fan in the rear to help keep things cool during this surprisingly heat-generating printing process.

A removable cover rests in place on top of the printer. Despite the lack of a seal or air filtration unit, the lid seemed to do a decent job trapping the nasty resin smell.

Setting up the Phrozen Sonic Mighty 4K is a piece of cake – it comes fully assembled. Interestingly Phrozen includes a sheet of low grit sandpaper, a deviation from the typical bits and pieces the company ships with its printers. There’s no indication of what exactly the company thinks you should do with it, but our hunch would be for print plate finishing and care.

You level the print plate by loosening the screws on the print head, homing it on a sheet of paper, and tightening the screws again. Oftentimes you will find, though, that the sheet of paper is harder to pull out on one side than the other. We have encountered this over multiple different machines. A perfectly leveled build plate is just hard manufacture, and experienced tinkerers have wielded the sanding paper for a long time as their first official act.

Conversely, Phrozen didn’t include flush cutters with the Sonic Mighty 4K, which is a more egregious thing to leave out, especially if this were your first printer (they’re essential for post-processing your prints.)

Once leveled (with or without sanding), its go time. Printing with the Sonic Mighty 4K is as smooth as you should expect from a $500+ resin 3D printer. A printer preset for its recommended slicer, ChiTuBox (other slicers, such as Lychee, are possible, too), means you can start right away. Over some 10+ days of printing, we rattled off multiple objects ranging from tiny to enormous with no problems. No print artifacts. No failures.

The Mighty 4K is said to come close to printing 80 mm/h. The reality is this will depend heavily on your settings, custom to your material, in the slicer. Even with the layer curing time as low as 1.5 seconds (we settled with the default time of 2 seconds for most of our prints), more factors such as lift height and speed come into play. With such a large print surface, a physical force is exerted on your print (the so-called “peel force”), making it inadvisable to alter these settings too much without knowing what you’re doing. Increasing the retraction speed will only enhance the effect. The Mighty 4K is mighty fast, but 80 mm/h sounds a little far-fetched, to be honest.

When handling the print plate after finishing a print, the handlebars came in handy. They make it relatively easy to handle the messy, resin-covered plate. They do get in the way of the leveling screw on the print plate, though.

Just like Chief Brody in Jaws, one concludes the need for a bigger boat when looking at the absurdly large resin prints you can pull off a printer such as the Sonic Mighty 4K. The main difference here is that the vessel in question is Phrozen’s Luna print curing machine.

While there are plenty of washing & curing machines available, most of them cater to the standard “small” desktop resin printers. Dinghies, compared to the trawler a printer such as the Sonic Mighty 4K needs, should you put that massive build volume to good use.

Find out More

The Best Resin Wash & Cure Stations

You can easily hack a station together, but cashing in on the need, Phrozen has joined the party with its Phrozen Luna Cure, a large curing machine that can conveniently fit prints up to 220 x 220 x 270 mm. The company often bundles the printer with the Luna Cure. You can purchase it separately, so we fired one up to see if it’s any good.

Taking the Luna Cure for a spin – literally, the prints are placed on a turntable – the machine is pretty much plug-and-play. There’s no preflight setup, leveling, or any of that. The process is: insert print, set the timer, place the lid on top, press “play.” That’s all there is to it.

The Luna Cure is a curing-only station, though. Most (smaller) alternatives out there are 2-in-1 units that include a washing function. The Luna Cure only does half of that.

Over time we’ve come to prefer the control you have when cleaning prints by hand, rather than risking damage in tiny washing stations. From a personal perspective, we don’t mind that the Luna only cures the prints. With that said, we can’t overlook the asking price of $250, which seems pretty steep for what amounts to a rotary table with a UV-light and timer.

Nice to have? Yes. Essential? No.

Technically, these 4K touting large resin printers all print at roughly the same quality. The tech inside is close to identical, and if the printer uses ChiTuBox, likely sourced from the same company.  As such, evaluating and choosing a resin 3D printer often comes down to personal liking, ease of use, price, and a few other soft factors.

Undoubtedly Phrozen tried to keep costs down with the use of a small screen (the touchscreen, not the curing one) and a plastic vat as well as leaving out connectivity options (and, don’t forget about the clippers) to come up with its competitive price of – at the time of writing – $599, which is considerably less than the Anycubic Photon Mono X ($750) but about $100 more than Elegoo Saturn. It houses a substantially larger build volume with 200 x 125 x 220 mm than the latter, though.

Our printing with the Sonic Mighty 4K has been flawless, from setting the printer up to busting out freakishly large prints thanks to its enormous build plate. If we didn’t have other machines to compare it to, we would conclude that this printer has it all. Unfortunately for the Mighty 4K, we do. And it’s the ease of use where the Sonic Mighty 4K falls a little short. Minor design choices – not even the ones you could surmise were to keep the cost down – things such as the vat fixture or power switch location; things you have to nit-pick at, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to pick one over the others.

It does some things right, but not everything hits the mark. For printing big things quickly, though, it’s easily as good as the rest.

Big Print Potential

With the Sonic Mighty 4K, Phrozen does not slouch behind the industry’s recent trend of releasing large-format budget resin printers.

Sporting a build volume of 200 x 125 x 220 mm, it not only lives up to its name but also offers over four times the volume of its predecessor, the Mini 4K, and can take it up with similar-sized competitors such as the Anycubic Mono X.

This is great news for anyone looking to 3D print impressive, imposing tabletop battlefield figurines, detailed buildings, or just about any model that looks better bigger. And let’s be honest bigger is always better.

Resolution

The Sonic Mighty 4K probably can’t match the Sonic Mini 4K for sheer detail. Although both printers offer a 4K resolution screen, due to the larger screen size, the Mighty produces slightly more granular prints at 53 microns XY-resolution – compared to 35 microns on the Mini 4K. An increase that we deem neglectable for most applications, as a difference is hard to spot with the naked eye, but it might crucial for some professional use-cases.

Quick Print Potential

Phrozen claims the Mighty 4K can top out at 80mm/h. A pretty impressive print speed, possibly even enough to impress a small blue Japanese hedgehog.

Speeds like this can be attested to the – what has become the new industry standard – use of a monochrome screen, cutting curing times down manifold to about 2 seconds per layer. In combination with a powerful light source underneath it, the Mighty 4K can match its smaller sibling – and put the burners on the likes of the Elegoo Saturn, which can only manage a maximum of 30mm/h.

ChiTuBox Slicer

Coming as part of the package is the ChiTuBox slicer. A powerful resin slicer that has previously impressed us, working very nicely indeed with the Sonic Mini 4K. It has all the tools you could wish for and is easy to use, meaning that if this is to be your first resin printer, you probably won’t have too much of a hard time learning the slicer ropes, and that can only be a good thing. This slicer also runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

General Specifications

• Technology: LCD
• Type: Resin
• Year: 2020
• Assembly: Fully assembled
• Manufacturer: Phrozen
• Country: Taiwan

3D PRINTING SPECIFICATIONS

• Build Volume: 200 x 125 x 220 mm
• Layer Height: 10+ microns
• XY Resolution: 52 microns (3840 x 2400 pixels)
• Z-axis positioning accuracy: 0.01 mm
• Printing Speed: 80 mm/h
• Bed-Leveling: N/A
• Display: 2.8-inch touchscreen
• Third-Party Materials: Yes
• Materials: 405 nm UV resin

SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

• Recommended Slicer: ChiTuBox
• Operating system: Windows / macOS X / Linux
• File types: STL
• Connectivity: USB

DIMENSIONS AND WEIGHT

• Frame dimensions: 280 x 280 x 440 mm
• Weight: 8 kg
• Boxed size: N/A
• Weight (packed): N/A