EufyMake E1 Review: Easy, Fun, Profitable UV “2.5D” Printer

The eufyMake E1 UV printer brings “print full colour on any material” printing to the desktop, with the added magic trick of 2.5D.

If you sell laser-cut bits at markets or off a WooCommerce shop, you already know the problem. Every other stall has the same engraved slate coaster and the same wooden name sign that you do. Colour can help you stand out, but until recently the machines that print proper full colour straight onto wood, acrylic, metal and slate cost more than a car and took up its own entire spare room.

The E1 is the first UV printer small and affordable enough to sit on a desk next to your laser, and the best use of it, for us at least, is opening up potential new products, personalisations, or taking the things you already cut and giving them colour and texture, so nobody else at the market can catch up with you.

When we were offered by eufyMake to try out the machine we immediately planned for it to add colour and flair to the laser-cut items my wife sells on her WooCommerce store, enhancing rather than replacing the laser. So far we’ve only run test prints on the small bed with non-flexible white ink, but we have been blown away and I think you will be too.

I’ve spent a while with it hands-on, plus done a fair bit of digging into what owners who’ve run these hard for up to a year have to say. So here’s what it actually is, what it costs to run for real, the one recent change that’s annoyed long-term owners, and whether it will earn a corner of your bench.

So what is a UV printer, and what’s this “2.5D” business?

This isn’t the first colour printer we have had, of course, and it is not even the first colour printer intended to enhance products made with lasers/cnc/3d printers (see the xTool M1).

Ultraviolet is what makes the big difference. A UV printer lays down ink that’s closer to liquid resin than to anything in your inkjet, then hits it with a flash of UV light that cures it solid almost instantly. Because each pass cures on the spot, you can stack passes like a 3d printer.

A layer or 3 gives you vivid colour on almost any hard surface. More layers, in the same place, starts building height. Textures that add depth that you can see and run a fingertip over. That stacking is what everyone means by 2.5D. It’s not quite a full 3D print, but it is also not a flat design, but something in between. The E1 can lay down layers up to about 5mm, which is quite a lot!

After setup, the first test print has several options, all with raised textures so that you immediately get that “oh, that’s clever” moment.

eufyMake E1 Specifications and Features

Check out the official store for up to date pricing and specifications:

• Print resolution: 1440 DPI, Piezo InkJet
• 3D / 2.5D texture depth: up to 5mm
• Print bed work area: 330 x 420 mm
• Roll printing: up to 10 m (roll-to-film attachment)
• Compatible materials: 300+ (metal, wood, acrylic, ceramic, stone, glass, canvas, leather, fabric, film)
• Positioning: dual lasers + 8mp snapshot camera auto-position
• Dimensions: 590 (W) x 250 (D) x 407 (H) mm
• Weight: 20 kg (44 lb); 23 kg packaged
• Power: 100-240V 50-60Hz, 66W max
• Self-cleaning: JetClean system (cleaning cartridge)
• Ink (official): CMYK + White, Flexible White, Gloss

There are accessories too, as alluded to above: rotary/roller, laminator, roll-to-film, and more hinted for the future.

eufyMake Pricing right now (offers/coupons/discounts aside)

• Basic bundle: £2,249 (mini + standard beds, ink set, cleaning cart, eetc)
• USA pricing seems to start at $2,499, currently

What it can’t do well, yet

Right now, this machine is not for variable height surfaces or curves. You can get around this by using DTF transfer stickers and of course by using the rotary. I imagine even with the existing tech they could add multiple-point height mapping, but the current setup does get confused if your material is sloped or stepped quite severely.

That said, I did manage to print on some weird shapes successfully, including my ear bud charging case, a pen, and my Raspberry Pi case! You just have to position it well with shims or something to prop up the item with as level as possible area to print on.

Doing what a laser alone can’t

This is the party trick that long-term owners single out as their favourite, and it’s the one that justifies the machine over being a colour alternative to engraving. You’re not restricted to adding flat colour, you can also build height.

You don’t even have to do much work for this, or have 3D design skills, the software does the heavy lifting. All you have to do is tell it how thick the texture should be and that alone can give you impressive results.

It’s also what could elevate your products beyond parity of the laser-engraved crowd at a market or online. A textured, full-colour piece reads way more premium next to a row of identical brown on brown laser engraved coasters, and you can price it accordingly. More than one owner describes UV printing alongside their laser as the step that got them out of making the same commodity table-filler as everyone else.

Ink Panic: How Expensive is it Really?

Here’s the question I have been asked the most. How expensive is the eufyMake to run? How much does the ink cost?

A single 100ml cartridge is £35, and full set of cartridges runs around £244, as I write this.

The set is cyan, magenta, yellow, black, a gloss and white. White matters most, because in order to print on anything that isn’t already white you must lay a white base coat first and print colour on top. So white is the ink you burn through fastest, and texture builds use even more of ink, a lot of it being white. If you are going to keep stock (foreshadowing), then stock more white than anything else.

That total sounds brutal, but it’s only a fair comparison when put against the inkjet on your desk, which is understandable but wrong to compare it to. Per millilitre the E1 lands around 35 to 43p. Epson and Roland UV inks sit in the same 40 to 50p ballpark. One owner who also runs an industrial LogoJet pointed out a full set for that machine is about three times the price of an E1 set.

Cheaper ink exists, but it lives in generic machines, and there’s a real catch to it that we’ll get to. For what it is, the E1’s ink is fairly priced and has the benefit of confidence in the ecosystem and finished product.

In finished prints that’s negligible overhead on small flat work. A little colour square is about a penny of ink, a four-inch piece around 20p. It only climbs when you go big or pile on texture.

So … Can you actually make money with it?

In researching experienced owners who run it as a real business, their conclusion is: high margin, low volume.

A flat keychain costs about 25p of ink plus a 60p blank, call it 85p all in, and could sell for up to £10-£15. You can tile a load on the big bed at once. A textured coin runs more like £1.50 to £2 of ink (texture eats up ink) plus a pound for the blank, and sells for up to £20 for the right customer. A printed tumbler on the rotary, single colour layer, comes in around ~£5-£8 of materials and sells for up to £25.

One owner went from “boring engraved coasters” to 60-plus paying projects in a year on things he simply couldn’t make before: full-colour stickers, textured phone cases, coins, custom keycaps used by hundreds of people.

Custom key caps is funnily enough the first thing I thought about for my own use, and my test macro pad key came out brilliantly. There is a caveat I will come back to but it is absolutely something I will do more of.

I think the take away is keeping your printer busy with regular, flat work is cheap enough for volume, textured work can be a premium “wow factor” piece. Don’t expect to crank hundreds an hour.

Ink Expiry: “The catch”?

All sounds good so far, right?

The one all the Kickstarter unboxing videos didn’t cover is every cartridge has a chip, and a software update made that chip enforce an expiry date. Once the ink is told it has “expired”, the cartridge is locked out and refuses to print, even if it’s still half full.

The reasoning isn’t as mad as it sounds. Expired UV ink changes in viscosity as the pigment settles and a little evaporates. It starts to print badly, and can even damage the print head. EufyMake would rather block that from happening than let a beginner wreck the machine.

Our problem as consumers is the burden of timing and cost. One heavy user found boxes locking out only about seven months after he received them, roughly £240 of dead ink, on cartridges he’d bought as backups day one. He’s asked eufyMake publicly to address the problem and they apparently are working on it.

Two things make this less damning than it first sounds, though. It’s a software change rather than a fundamental flaw, and eufyMake says they are making moves that should address it. So the community advice is until this is sorted, don’t buy more spare ink in advance than you know you will use. Buy it as you need it.

People do refill cartridges before expiry to dodge the lockout, but the cartridges are vacuum-sealed are constantly cleaning themselves, so puncturing one risks air in the lines. There’s an even better reason not to go that route, though.

Third Party Ink (what “Green Guard Gold” means)

I am not a fan of lock-in, but there is a clear benefit to being locked to eufyMake’s ink … you know what you’re breathing.

eufyMake ink is Green Guard Gold certified, and it’s worth knowing what that is, because I originally assumed it was some eco-friendly or fair-trade stamp and it isn’t.

Green Guard (properly GREENGUARD, run by UL) is an indoor air quality certification. It doesn’t measure how sustainable a product is, it measures how little it off-gasses into the air of your room and into your lungs. Those volatile organic compounds and other chemicals a product emits while you use it and we have long worried about in the 3d printing community.

“Gold” tier is the stricter one, with tighter emission limits, originally set for sensitive environments like schools and healthcare where people are exposed all day. So a Green Guard Gold ink is certified to keep its chemical emissions below those strict limits, meaning it’s safer to run in a home or a small shop. IE. less risky for us than cheap, mystery ink.

That matters here because the cheap UV inks you’d refill with are often made to a price target, and could be toxic and corrosive uncured, bad to breathe, and capable of eating the printer from the inside out over time.

So eufyMake controlling the ink supply is partly about safety, and also quality-control and hardware-protection decisions, not just about lock-in and margins. Considering the kind of people and environments this machine is aimed at, I think the trade-off between cost and risk is fair.

Printing is slow, by design

Due to the one and only print head doing everything, it is NOT going to break speed records. A simple flat print on a small item is a couple of minutes. A photo with white and colour is more like 5 to 10. A heavily textured piece, all those stacked layers, can run close to an hour.

There are ways to claw time back, though. First off, not every print needs the highest print quality, and white materials do not need any white at all, necessarily. If your item will not be handled, or you are going to spray fix it later, do you need to add a layer of gloss?

The onboard camera and dual lasers measure exactly where your object sits and let you drop the artwork right onto it, lovely for a one-off but slooooow for a batch. Slowness scales with the size of the bed, too. This is one of the reasons up to now I have only used the smaller bed.

For repeated products you can skip the camera entirely using “zero-point alignment”, along with a jig or printed guide, so the machine already knows where everything goes without scanning.

One quirk to be aware of, familiar to laser cutter owners, the camera fish-eyes near the bed edges and can be a couple of millimetres out on the extremes. A jig or grid-system here would also help you print in the right place regardless of what the preview shows.

It’s Not Always Print and Forget

You could be forgiven for thinking it is a one and done process, no cleanup or finishing required. That can be true, if you are creating art that will never be touched and will be protected from the elements. Otherwise you will need to protect or fix the print.

My key custom key cap above immediately scratched away when I went to town on it with my finger nail and screen wipe, but I wasn’t shocked by that in the slightest. Even with items such as tumblers printed on the rotary, people recommend hand-wash only.

Just something to be aware of and to make your own customers aware of if selling printed items.

Smell, humidity and self-cleaning

The smell is definitely a thing, and started catching in my chest and throat, but now I know that it is manageable with the right habits. Print with the door open and you get a strong marker-pen whiff. Keeping the sides closed makes a big difference.

For us, I noticed the smell enough in our kitchen to rig our portable A/C unit as a makeshift vent. Stink got to about “lots of laser cut acrylic” levels before, quite comfortable after.

But it scales with how hard you push it. A hobbyist printing the odd magnet with the door shut will be fine, whereas a heavy user running long production sessions or a group of users in a classroom or makerspace are going to need to take steps. eufyMake suggests a HEPA purifier for rooms smaller than about 13 by 13 feet.

Humidity is a sneaky one. Too dry and static builds up and your prints come out fuzzy, or coated in cat hair (ask me how I know). The sweet spot is apparently around 40%. In a dry winter you may need a humidifier, and a trick from the long-term owners is to wipe the substrate with a tumble-dryer sheet first to kill the static. Rule of thumb is if you can shock yourself on a door handle, your prints are going to be weird.

The self-maintenance has caused some community griping due to it further costing in consumables, but as one of the pains of industrial units is keeping the darned things running, I think it is genius. Leave it plugged in and on Wi-Fi and it runs a tiny flash-clean roughly every 20 minutes, using ~a millilitre of ink a day, to keep the head from drying out. Leave it a week or two, go on holiday, come back, and after a short prime it prints fine. One owner’s line stuck with me: “it’s a Ferrari you pay to garage, sipping a little fuel while parked”. The daily idle cost is real but compared with a busted and gummed up printer is tiny.

Modding the eufy: AKA the bit MakerHacks readers will like most

Here’s another area where the E1 wins me over. Out of the box it’s definitely a good printer, but eufyMake has said on the record that they “intentionally left room in the ecosystem for user creativity“. The community are running with that and making it better, and early signs are the company is supporting it rather than locking people out. Looking at you Bambu.

Two types of mod stand out for me already. The first solves the sticky bed mats, which lose their tack and get fouled with ink fairly quickly if you are not diligent, especially with textured prints. They are another recurring consumable cost, of course. One owner makes his own silicone rubber mats with a clever built-in jig system. Third parties now sell similar mats and they proving popular.

The second is an answer to the stink issue, an exhaust duct. A simple 3d print that plugs into the front carbon-filter slot and vents outside. eufyMake is reportedly making an official version.

Both mods take something eufyMake sells you as a consumable and let you opt out of it, while making the machine nicer to live with. For a maker audience that’s the best kind of tool one that works out of the box but rewards you for tinkering.

eufyMake Software and Subscriptions

The free software is actually good, it reminds me a lot of xTool’s suite. It runs on Mac as well as Windows, rarer than it sounds for this class of machine, and you can drive the whole thing from a phone app over Wi-Fi without opening a laptop. My first prints were all done using my iPhone with zero issues.

It’s easy drag-and-drop stuff, the camera alignment is genuinely helpful, and while I do my “design” in Adobe Illustrator or Procreate, there are all the tools built in that you don’t really need to. I particularly enjoy the fact it has background removal and also the ability to selectively remove elements from an image by colour or brush.

Everything seems to be Software as a Service now so what about subscription? Printing itself is free forever. Paid tiers (around £15 and £30 a month) are only if you want more AI credits or cloud storage. Nothing about the software or membership is paywalled.

Of course, that is while the company is in operation. It is a proprietary machine running proprietary ink and proprietary software with cloud elements, so if that combination is what soured you on certain laser brands, you already know how you feel and I don’t need to say more.

Who it’s for, and who it isn’t

Get one if you’re a home or small craft business who has wanted to get into UV printing but couldn’t justify the cost or space required for a big industrial unit, especially if you already run a laser, 3d printer, or CNC business, and want a colourful next step.

Don’t worry if you’re not feeling very technical, it’s truly plug-and-play, sets up easily and quickly, and really can print from your phone.

Skip it if you need big prints or high volume. Even running multiple machines, your output will be batches not manufacture scale.

If proprietary rather than hackable and open source is a dealbreaker, this is not the machine for you either.

Conclusion

As mentioned above, so far I have only used small-bed-and-white features so far, I will definitely report back once I’ve done multi-hour prints, run the rotary, filled the big bed, experimented more with depth maps and textures, the flexible inks, and once my wife’s products are going out to actual customers.

That all said, how do I sum up my experience?

Pros

• Affordability: It is not an impulse purchase but it is significantly cheaper than professional-grade UV printers, making it accessible for small businesses, schools, and maker spaces.
• Quality Build: The machine is extremely well-made, with good attention to detail, design and functionality.
• Wide Material Compatibility: Can print on virtually any flat material, amazing versatility.
• Intuitive, Free Software: Easy to use, even for beginners, with comprehensive tools for creating and customising designs.
• Software hand-holding: The software warns and educates you, and even provides estimates for ink use before starting a project.

Cons

• Smell: The UV ink emits a resin-like odor so operating in a well-ventilated space is highly recommended.
• Consumables Consumption: The cleaning system uses small amounts of ink daily when the printer is idle, which may add up over time, plus the print surfaces, the carbon filter, etc.
• Calibration Limitations: Jigs are going to be a good addition, but at the same time I hope alignment and height mapping will be areas the company iterates on in software because this is a good feature that could be amazing.
• Total Cost of Ownership: Keeping in mind ink and other consumable costs, plus while your machine is powered on it uses supplies even though not printing, plus power consumption (many in the community advise to never turn it off), you need to be fully aware of not just costs per print but long term running costs.

Bottom line for us I think it is a fantastic machine and an exciting addition to our business that I get to enjoy as part of my maker geek hobby too. Look out for follow up tips and projects involving this machine because it is already looking to be a go-to tool.