A machine from the company that first offered a monochrome LCD matrix and ultra-low cure time in budget polymer printing – that was in the Sonic Mini, and the next move was monochrome printing with higher resolution – that was in the Sonic Mini 4K. God, as they say, loves a trinity, so we now have the Mighty 4K with a 200 × 125 × 220mm working volume and a 4K and 9.3-inch monochrome LCD. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
We also had a chance to try out the big new Phrozen Cure Luna curing machine, and we’ll talk about that below.
Verdict
PLUSES
- Massive 9.3-inch LCD = big objects
- Fast printing with high detail
- Easy to use printing platform
MINUSES
- Setting up the curing pad can be a challenge
- Access to platform leveling screws is obstructed by knobs
- Problems with data transfer
The Phrozen Sonic Mighty 4K is totally up to speed with high resolution polymer printing, and it delivers.
Among printers in its class, the Mighty 4K’s 9.3-inch monochrome LCD sensor with 4K resolution means the largest print area and working volume — 200 × 125 × 220 mm.
However, Phrozen has made some compromises with the Mighty 4K in order to, we assume, keep the price competitive. These compromises, such as downloading jobs only via USB, the inability to remotely monitor the printer, and minor design omissions such as the tub mount or the location of the power switch.
But in general, of course, everything is a matter of taste. If you like its powerful printing platform and its (almost) mini-price, and you consider the inconveniences to be inconsequential, the Phrozen Sonic Mighty 4K is definitely a solid printer. There are better alternatives, but they are more expensive.
The technical side
For a polymer 3D printer to be worthy of being talked about today, it must have a monochrome LCD matrix. This critical component allows the printer to turn on the UV light for just a second to cure the polymer layer and offers the added benefit of longer life when compared to older RGB competitors. (Matrices are essentially consumable and must be replaced at some point).
Another consideration is that an LCD matrix is bound to have high resolution. It is: the Sonic Mighty 4K packs 3840 × 2400 pixels on a 9.3-inch surface. It’s clear from these numbers that the Sonic Mighty 4K’s resolution is pretty decent (the importance of which we’ll talk about below). As a result, the printer generally satisfies all the requirements that can be made in terms of printing technology.
The Big Matrix
The number of pixels by itself says little about print resolution, at least not unless you know the physical area of the sensor on which they sit. And the Sonic Mighty 4K has a 9.3-inch sensor with a print area of 200 × 125 mm — more than similarly sized and specced competitors like the Anycubic Photon Mono X and Elegoo Saturn, also with 4K LCD sensors, but 192 × 120 mm in X and Y.
This increase in printable area comes at the expense of a compromise in pixel size: the Mighty 4K has about 53 microns, while the aforementioned printers have about 50 microns.
In our opinion, this is not significant. Polymer printing in general strives for the highest resolution, but from our experience with a wide variety of printers of this technology, the difference of 3 microns is not noticeable to the naked eye. Only in the coolest versions that require extremely tight tolerances will it matter, but even then, just the environment and print settings will affect those 3 microns just as much.
The large build area of the Mighty 4K combined with the 220mm height of the Z-axis gives a total volume of 5.5 liters. That’s just a feast and comparable to, for example, the Mono X at 5.6 liters. The question of which is better: higher or more spacious remains debatable.
Personally, it seems to us that it’s more often than not not about height. And if you need height, you usually try to tilt the object somehow, to find the best orientation, avoiding potentially unpleasant areas. What we need is more print area than even height.
Reducing costs
How do you increase the sensor so much without driving up the price? By simply reducing the display! Really? And the thing is, the touchscreen display you’re poking at on the front of the machine is the same 2.8-inch little thing we know from the (much smaller) Sonic Mini 4K. On a larger printer like the Sonic Mighty 4K, it “stands out” with its proportions. Bad heredity, can’t be helped.
But when all the machines are already printing to the same standard, it’s the little things that make them different from one another. In practice, however, the Sonic Mighty 4K’s touchscreen is so responsive that it doesn’t cause any complaints at all.
The Sonic Mighty 4K only has USB Type-A, which means you can’t just transfer data from your computer. What’s the big deal? We’re ready for it. We are also ready for the absence of gadgets like Wi-Fi monitoring, which reduced the price. Proven for centuries, running back and forth with a flash drive is useful, no need to sit and stare at the printer!
As for USB itself, the socket is conveniently placed on the side, and, in our opinion, there it belongs. The open ports on the front panel can easily get polymer. But the fact that the power switch is in the back is not convenient.
Bathtub for polymer
Perhaps the most notable part for cost savings was the composite plastic polymer tub. Clearly, plastic is much cheaper than metal, but on the internet among polymer printing enthusiasts the debate about the durability of such tubs rages on. We have seen such tubs before and consider them just as usable as their metal counterparts. In practice, the difference is insignificant.
Phrozen also offers an aluminum tub as an option – for about $115, and that’s about 115 reasons why they chose the plastic option by default themselves. We love the upgrade options, but we prefer it when we can make our choice while still buying. Why would we buy the plastic one as well if we had the metal one right away?
But no matter what kind of tub it is, metal or plastic, there is no protection for the FEP film from fragments of polymer flying out of the printer. This is such a small thing, but its absence may have to be regretted! The same goes for the polymer level indicator. It does not affect the result of printing, but it would be a nice and useful feature that could also help the user to save money. Polymers are expensive these days, so use only as much as you need and let the rest gurgle in the bottle. That would be the right thing to do.
The way the tub goes into the print area and locks in place is also noteworthy. I mean, it’s big and flat and filled with polymer – which is a very unstable system, no matter what you say. With the Sonic Mighty 4K, you have to put the tub on two screws and secure each side with a little slippery nut underneath. I remember this is how all the Phrozen printers implemented it, but the bigger they get, the less promising and reliable this method seems to be. No, everything works, but putting the tub in and taking it out of the printer becomes more and more of a delicate operation, and you have to be careful with the nuts as well.
All in all, the overall appearance and build quality of the printer is more than satisfactory. And let’s be honest: If a polymer printer has everything you need, it can do little wrong. The base unit weighs about 8 kg, takes up a decent amount of space, but the volume is not intimidating. The housing is made of plastic and has a large cooling fan on the back, because a lot of heat is generated during operation.
At the top of the printer is a removable cover. Despite the lack of a seal or air filtration unit, the lid turns out to be a pretty good way to deal with the unpleasant smell of burnt polymer.
Printability and ease of use
Setting up and assembling the Phrozen Sonic Mighty 4K is sheer fun. The thing is, it’s already set up and assembled. Interestingly, Phrozen includes a sheet of fine sandpaper in the kit – just in case any parts have dimensional deviations. There’s no indication as to what exactly is involved, but it somehow makes us think of the printing platform.
When it is aligned, they loosen the screws on the printhead, lower it onto a sheet of paper, and then tighten the screws again. But it happens that one side pulls out more easily than the other. We’ve had this happen to several printers. But to align everything perfectly – a non-trivial task, and experienced craftsmen sometimes just resort to sandpaper, at least they used to do so.
Sandpaper is there for some reason, but why, I want to ask indignantly, there are no wire cutters? They are vital for handling printouts, especially if this is your first printer.
After alignment (with or without sanding) it’s time to go to battle. Printing a Sonic Mighty 4K is as easy as it should be on an $800+ polymer 3D printer. It’s pre-configured with the recommended ChiTuBox slicer, so it’s all set up, though you can work with other slicers as well. We’ve been hard at work printing a wide variety of objects on this machine, from tiny to huge – and no problems. No printing artifacts. No glitches whatsoever.
The Mighty 4K is claimed to print at almost 80 mm/h. The reality is that it all depends very much on the slicer settings according to the material. Even though the layer curing time is only 1.5 s (we set the default of 2 s for most of our printouts), factors such as height and lift speed are still important. With such a large surface, there is already a noticeable peeling force on the printed object, so it’s generally undesirable to change the preset settings too much unless you know exactly what you’re doing. Increasing the retraction speed can only ruin everything. The Mighty 4K is very fast, but 80 mm/h sounds too ambitious, to be honest.
When you’re done printing, the print platform is easy to pull out using the available handles. They’re especially handy if the platform is completely full of work results. However, these knobs obscure the leveling screw.
Cure Luna
There is such a horror movie “Jaws”, so there one of the main characters, police chief Brody, after looking at the big sharks, categorically decided that he needed a big boat. And so it is here: to cure what the Sonic Mighty 4K can produce, it clearly requires some kind of large machine. There is such a machine, and it’s called the Phrozen Cure Luna.
There are, of course, many other curing machines, but they work with standard small desktop polymer printers. These are all dinghies compared to the trawler that a printer like the Sonic Mighty 4K needs if you want to make decent use of its impressive build volume.
The printer and curing machine are easy to pair if you buy them separately, but Phrozen, of course, is very aware of the need for an additional machine, so they often add the Phrozen Luna Cure to the kit. A roomy one with dimensions of 220 × 220 × 270 mm.
Unfolding the Luna Cure – literally, because the printouts fit on the turntable – is very easy, the unit is practically plug-and-play. No presetting, alignment, etc. The process is this: put the printout on, set the timer, put the lid on top, press Play. And that’s it.
It’s understandable: the Luna Cure is a machine designed exclusively for curing. Most (smaller) alternatives are two-in-one devices, also with a curing function. The Luna Cure does only half the work.
Over time, we’ve come to prefer manual cleaning of printouts rather than risk damaging them on tiny “washing” stations.
Is it worth it?
Technically, all of these touted big polymer 4K printers deliver about the same quality. So evaluating and choosing a polymer 3D printer often comes down to personal taste, simplicity, price, and some other “soft” factors.
Phrozen, of course, tried to lower the price with a small screen (a touch screen, not a matrix) and a plastic tub, as well as some trivia (where are the cutters?). The price is competitive, slightly higher than the price of Anycubic Photon Mono X, or Elegoo Saturn. But the build volume is much larger: 200 × 125 × 220 mm. And we should expect that the price is overpriced yet, based on the novelty factor of the model.
Our experience with the Sonic Mighty 4K has been overwhelmingly positive, from setting it up to getting extremely large objects to print thanks to its huge platform. If we didn’t have other machines to compare, we’d conclude that this printer has it all. Unfortunately for the Mighty 4K, we’ve had others. And here’s where the Mighty 4K lags a little behind, it’s in ease of use. We’re talking about minor details in the design, not even the little things you’d think of in light of the struggle for lower prices: issues in the tub mount and the location of the switch, such nuances can be decisive in choosing one model or the other.
Some things in this case are implemented successfully, but not all. However, if we talk about fast printing of large objects, then this printer is no worse than the others.
Features
With this Sonic Mighty 4K, Phrozen is keeping up with the trend of big-but-budget polymer printers.
With a working volume of 200 × 125 × 220 mm, the Mighty 4K doesn’t just live up to its name (“Mighty”), this volume is more than four times that of its predecessor, the Mini 4K, and with this parameter you can confidently measure up to competitors like the Anycubic Mono X.
This is great news for those who want to 3D print spectacular and authentic figures, detailed models of buildings and in general any models that can now be larger and will look better. And let’s not lie: bigger is better.
Resolution
The Sonic Mighty 4K may not be capable of as much detail as the Sonic Mini 4K. Although both printers have a 4K resolution sensor, the Mighty’s larger size results in slightly grainier printouts: 53 microns in XY instead of 35 for the Mini 4K. We think this is a negligible difference in most cases that you just can’t see, although, yes, it can be critical in certain professional applications.
Phrozen Sonic Mini 4K and Mighty
The potential for fast printing
Phrozen claims that the Mighty 4K can reach speeds of up to 80mm/hour. Pretty impressive, perhaps even enough to wow the little blue Japanese hedgehog (the standard model for testing 3D printers).
Such speeds, up to 2 seconds per layer, are only achievable with a monochrome matrix, which has almost become the industry standard. Combined with a powerful emission source, the Mighty 4K, like its smaller brother, categorically beat out competitors like the Elegoo Saturn.
CHITUBOX Slicer
Included is the ChiTuBox slicer. The powerful software for slicing polymer models has already impressed us with the way it works with the Mini 4K. It has all the tools you could want, the program is easy to use, so if you come across it at the beginning of your 3D printing journey, you won’t find it very difficult and won’t have to fill your head with all kinds of nuances right away – which is nice. The slicer has versions for Windows, macOS and Linux.
Technical Data
Now for the dry facts and figures
GENERAL SPECIFICATIONS
Technology: LCD
Type: polymer
Year of manufacture: 2020
Assembly: full
Manufacturer: Phrozen
Country: Taiwan
3D PRINTING CHARACTERISTICS
Working volume: 200 × 125 × 220 mm
Layer height: 10+ microns
XY resolution: 52 microns (3840 × 2400 pixels)
Z positioning accuracy: 0.01 mm
Printing speed: 80 mm/h
Alignment of work platform: n/a
Display: 2.8 inch, touch screen
Third-party filament: supported
Material: 405nm UV polymer
PROGRAMS
Recommended slicer: ChiTuBox
Operating Systems: Windows / macOS / Linux
File format: STL
Interface: USB
SIZE AND WEIGHT
Frame dimensions: 280 × 280 × 440 mm
Weight: 8 kg
Dimensions in box: n/a
Gross weight: n/a
