Review: EufyMake E1 UV Printer

The eufyMake E1 from Anker is fundamentally different from the home printers I usually test. Many people use their traditional laser or ink printers for return labels, work notes, and sometimes full-page photos. While Anker describes the E1 as a “personal” printer, it calls upon special ink and intense UV light to print 3D textures onto a variety of surfaces, like ceramic, metal, or wood. It's not a full-on 3D printer, but it does offers features you won't find in a standard machine for your home office—like the ability to print directly onto a mug.

While the E1's ability to print 3D textures is undoubtedly rad, it's still more than $2,000 just to get started—and that's without the hefty maintenance and upkeep costs. Like a collection of power tools or a big pickup truck, the EufyMake E1 is probably something you'd prefer to find in your helpful neighbor’s garage. If you’re that neighbor, the E1 is easy to get rolling (perhaps after a bit of trial and error for design newbies) and prints onto almost anything in quality indistinguishable or better than store-bought. You probably won't use it to print your return labels, but the machine could help you kick-start a new side hustle.

How It Works

Photograph: Brad Bourque

After a quick setup calibration, the E1 is ready to print, and the process is super straightforward. The different plates and adapters all clip onto the central unit, and you just plop what you'd like printed onto an adhesive mat that sticks to the bed and holds objects in place. While the mats are only a few bucks a piece and are meant to be replaced, it’s worth taping around the edges of your pieces to catch the overspray. Once you situate your item on the sticky bed, the EufyMake app will use the printer's camera to find the top of your item, which I usually verify with my own measurements. From there, you'll line up your design in the EufyMake Studio software with the app-captured photo to ensure the finished print will land where you want.

I’m mostly pleased with the EufyMake Studio software. If you aren’t already comfortable working in Photoshop or other image-editing software, you’ll want to spend a bit of time getting to know how layers and transparency work, as well as brushing up on dots per inch (dpi) and image types, assuming you’re going to print custom items. There’s a bit of trial and error involved in getting factors correct each time you change materials, but the presets for each are a good starting point. If you, like me, do have familiarity with editing software, you'll find the interface intuitive. I haven’t run into any issues selecting and modifying multiple layers, adjusting opacity and print settings, or uploading my own imagery.

Photograph: Brad Bourque

If you’re not working from your own custom images, you can print straight from the shared content section of the app, which is divided into two sections: Projects and Designs. In the Projects tab, other E1 users upload photos of the items they’ve created, including custom keyboard keycaps, photo displays, keychains, and jewelry. It’s easy to grab a design from this tab and customize it with your own photos and graphics. Every time I scroll this tab, I see ways to use the E1 that I'd never considered. The Designs tab has some useful templates, but it's also kind of clogged with random AI-generated junk. For instance, whenever I tried to find a background pattern or text banner here, I'd find renderings of three popular video game characters trapped inside of plastic bags, prominently displayed on the front page. Also, the designs aren’t always practical or customizable.

E1 creations are impressive, given the machine's small footprint at 23 x 10 x 16 inches. You'd never know the mug or coaster you’re holding comes from someone’s basement and not a factory. The printer works best when using clean, punchy graphics. For the sake of testing, I designed a logo for a nonexistent company and printed it on a coaster. Even though the image was just some circles and text on a transparent PNG file, the resulting print, complete with clean borders and raised text, felt like something you'd get from a store, not my own office. The extra layers provide a proper depth and smooth touch that results in polished-feeling products.

Photos came out super detailed and crisp too, thanks to the 1,440 dpi and strong color blending. Although, combining textures and your own photos will require a bit of massaging in the app settings or tinkering with masks.

The Setup

Photograph: Brad Bourque

There are a number of considerations that make using the E1 more complex than a 2D or even 3D printer. To start, you’ll want to situate the machine in a secluded area. While Anker assured me that the E1 is “perfectly safe to walk by while the printer is running,” I was also advised to wear the included blue-light-reduction glasses if actively watching the printing process. To play it safe, you'd probably want to keep kids and pets away from the area while printing.

You’ll also want to run the EufyMake somewhere with plenty of ventilation. While the machine does include a fan and filter, it's best to avoid breathing in much of the stuff that blows off during printing. Items I've printed using the E1 have a distinct “freshly manufactured” smell, and while it typically fades after a day or two, I haven’t found a better solution than simply letting things air out near a fan or window.

Photograph: Brad Bourque

Anker sent along two different accessories with the printer: a DTF laminator and a rotary adapter. The laminator lets you print proper stickers onto transfer sheets, making it easy to affix them to uneven or round surfaces. The rotary adapter is specifically built for anything cylindrical, like mugs, tumblers, or jars. It snapped right in place, was easy to get loaded, and even uses the built-in camera to measure the dimensions and display your workspace in the app.

Each add-on unit is $400, and I think most people will either want one or the other, but not both. The DTF laminator is more versatile, giving you the ability to print onto basically any surface that doesn’t fit right into the printer, but requires you to manually attach your image to its desired endpoint. The rotary printer only prints onto hard, round surfaces, but it’s more straightforward and consistent, so it’s a good pick if you mainly want to print mugs and tumblers.

The Cost

Photograph: Brad Bourque

In addition to a replaceable cleaning cartridge, the E1 uses proprietary ink cartridges in six colors, each of which currently costs $43 and contains 100 milliliters of ink, but they’ll run out at very different rates. For example, a full pattern wrap of an 18-ounce tumbler used 2.48 milliliters of ink, but 2.22 milliliters of that total was from the white cartridge. It’s used as a base coat and layer builder with the default settings, and depending on the color of your object and how thick you want to make the texture, you’ll likely find yourself running out of white much faster than any other color. In that scenario, I could print hundreds of that same tumbler before running out of yellow ink, but less than 50 before running out of white. You can save a ton of ink by printing on materials that are white to start, are already well-suited for the ink, or by clever design work.

But printing cost isn’t the only consideration when it comes to ink. The E1 has a variety of maintenance and upkeep needs that regularly consume ink and slowly fill the cleaning cartridge. For example, if you don’t print for 12 hours, you’ll have to use 0.2 milliliters of each ink to cycle the system, regardless of the size of your next print job, which costs around 50 cents in ink. If you don’t print for one calendar day, the E1 will automatically cycle .33 milliliters from all six inks, which works out to about 86 cents.

To avoid these costs, you can have the system run a maintenance mode and shut down for days or weeks at a time, but when you turn it back on, it will use 1.5 milliliters of ink before it can print again. No matter your choice, the printer costs money to not use. If you aren’t printing every day or two, I think the best path here is to line up a bunch of stuff you want to print, turn the machine on in the morning, spend the day printing, then shut it down and pack it up for a few weeks until you have enough to warrant using it again.

Photograph: Brad Bourque

The biggest barrier here for most folks will be the price of maintenance and upkeep. Considering the ventilation needs and the fact that it likely needs its own bedroom, I just can’t imagine this machine living in a home where it isn’t contributing to the household income. In addition to the hefty initial cost, you’ll need to be readily conscious of how much ink you’re using, your color and material choice, and even how often you print.

I could see this being a solid deal for a local bike or coffee shop that wants to regularly produce small merch runs in-house, an online business that wants to add mugs and tumblers to its site, or someone dropping off those items around town after printing them in their garage. As funny as it is to slap an embarrassing custom sticker on your friend’s water bottle, this printer serves niche uses. I’m sure that by next year, my family will be sick of me gifting them coasters and magnets with their pets on them.

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