The 5 W IR module for the P3 arrived the first week of January 2026. We wrote this a few months later, with information we didn’t have in January: we ended up buying a galvo fiber laser because the module fell short for us.
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With that, you already have the conclusion. What follows is the detail, because "it fell short for us" doesn’t mean it’s a bad product: it means it does one specific thing, with specific compromises, and you need to know what those are before paying for it.
What it is and what it solves
The P3 is a CO₂ laser. CO₂ is wonderful with organic materials—wood, leather, acrylic, cardboard—and does not mark bare metal. For that, another wavelength is needed, and that’s where the IR module comes in: it’s a 1064 nm, 5 W infrared laser that mounts on the machine itself.
The promise is attractive: a single machine that engraves wood y metal, without buying a second machine. It’s a real promise. The question is at what price, and the price is not just the accessory cost.
What it does do
Let’s be fair before the list of drawbacks: if you need to engrave metal, it works. It marks steel, does its job, and the result is a real engraving, not a simulation.
And there is one use case where we think it’s clearly a good purchase: if you plan to engrave medium-sized metal surfaces and that work is part of your catalog, but not all of it, the IR module solves the problem without opening another investment line.
The first thing we did: characterize it.
Before putting it into production, we did what we do with any new tool: a complete power versus speed matrix on a piece of stainless steel, at 100 lines per centimeter. One hundred combinations on a single piece.
It's worth taking a moment to look at it because it tells the whole story of the module. The tones range from light gray to gold, bronze, violet, and blue: that is tempered oxide, the color layer that appears on steel depending on the temperature it reaches. You're not removing material; you're coloring the surface with heat.
That is exactly the difference between marking and engraving, and it explains two things at once: why the result is so beautiful when you get the combination right, and why it’s so sensitive. If the distance to the material changes a little, the temperature changes, and with it the color. We’ll come back to this in a moment, because it’s the origin of our serious problem.
If you buy the module, do this matrix on the first day. It’s half an hour of machine time and saves you weeks of trial and error.
The four compromises
Here’s what you don’t read in the product sheet and what would have made us think twice.
1. It’s slow
Engraving with the IR module is slow. Not a little: enough that a medium order of metal pieces occupies the machine for a time you hadn’t budgeted. Five watts is what it is, and infrared works by accumulation.
2. You lose the rotary
This is the one that hurt us the most. With the IR module installed, you cannot use the rotary.
And think about the irony: the metal objects most people want to engrave — thermoses, bottles, glasses — are precisely cylindrical. That is, exactly the ones that need a rotary. The module gives you the ability to mark metal and simultaneously takes away the most common way to present it. For us, who constantly use the RA3 with steel thermoses and bottles, this was a direct clash with our real workflow.
3. You lose half of the engraving surface
The available work area practically drops to half.
One of the big selling points of the P3 is its huge bed. Installing the IR module gives up half of that argument. If you bought this machine precisely for its size, the accessory goes against your reason for buying it.
4. The power is nothing special
Five watts in infrared is enough for marking, not for working fast or for deep engravings. The engraving power is not very high, and that limits both the speed and the type of finish you can aim for.
The problem that really broke our process
All of the above are known limitations one can accept. This one is not:
The results were not repeatable because the distance to the material wasn't measured correctly with stainless steel.
The machine's height measurement system has issues with reflective metal surfaces. And if the distance isn't measured correctly, the focus isn't right; if the focus isn't right, the engraving turns out different every time.
This is where you pay what we saw in the matrix: since marking on steel is color by temperature, a slightly different focus doesn’t give you "the same a little worse," it gives you a different tone. With the same power and speed combination. That’s why a focus variation that would be unnoticeable on wood changes the piece on stainless steel.
In a hobby workshop that’s a nuisance. In production, it’s disqualifying. We can’t deliver twenty pieces of an order where five came out lighter than the rest. Repeatability is not a luxury: it’s the difference between being able to sell it or not.
A hidden cost: the purifier counts the hours the same
A detail you only discover when you have the invoice for the second set of filters in hand.
If you work with the AP2 Max, keep in mind that filter life is counted by operating hours, without distinguishing which module is working. One hundred hours of IR module engraving metal —which barely generates smoke— uses as much filter life as one hundred hours cutting acrylic, which produces plenty.
That is: the slow engraving of the IR not only occupies your machine longer, but also consumes filters even when it doesn’t dirty anything. When you calculate if the module is worth it, include this in the equation.
So, when is it worth it?
Our recommendation, with all the nuances we have learned:
Here we cannot avoid being critical, because it’s honest: it served us for some low-volume jobs, and it fulfilled that part. But our experience is clear: it is not designed for large volumes or big orders. If your plan is to produce metal in series, this is not the way.
That said, there is a scenario where we find it very interesting, and we want to make it as clear as the criticism: if what you want is to give the P3 the ability to handle metal on medium surfaces —let's think about something around 40 × 40 cm—, or if you don’t want to invest in a fiber laser plus a large coverage lens, the IR module is a very reasonable way to achieve it. For what it costs, it opens a door that would otherwise require an entire other machine.
It's worth it if metal is an occasional part of your work, the pieces are flat or medium surface, you don't need rotary for them, speed is not critical, and you are not going to repeat the same engraving dozens of times expecting identical results. In that scenario, the IR module saves you from buying and placing a second machine, and it is a sensible purchase.
It’s not worth it if metal is a line of business, you work with cylindrical items, you need strict repeatability, or the volume is high. What you need there is another tool, and the sooner you accept that, the less money you lose along the way.
When it’s time for a fiber galvo
That’s what we ended up doing, so we’re telling it straight.
A fiber galvo is a different kind of machine concept: instead of moving a head along a gantry, it moves the beam with motorized mirrors at an unmatched speed. For metal engraving, it’s orders of magnitude faster and, above all, consistent.
The signs that you’ve reached that point are quite clear, and they were the ones we had:
- Metal engraving stops being an extra and starts becoming recurring orders.
- You’re turning down work because of machine time.
- You care more about repeatability than the finish of a single piece.
- The P3 is busy doing what it does best — wood, cutting, volume — and metal blocks it.
That last point is the important one and the one we took longest to see: the problem wasn’t just that the IR was limited, it was that it occupied the good machine. Every hour spent on the IR module is an hour the P3 isn’t cutting wood, which is where it really shines.
What we would do if we went back to January
We don’t regret buying it, and this is not a courtesy statement: it was the IR module that showed us how much metal we really needed to make. Without that test, we would have bought the fiber blindly or never bought it at all.
Seen this way, it worked as what it really is: a cheap way to validate if metal has a place in your business before investing in a dedicated machine. If you buy it with that expectation — to explore, not to produce — it’s a very reasonable purchase.
If you buy it thinking it turns the P3 into two machines, you’re going to be disappointed. The P3 with the IR module is not a P3 plus a metal engraver: it’s a P3 with half the bed, no rotary, and slower, which also marks metal.
And let’s be clear, because it’s easy for this critique to spill over where it shouldn’t: none of this is against the P3. The machine is excellent at what it does — cutting and engraving organic material in volume — and it remains so with or without this module. The IR is a niche accessory for a specific need; the fact that it fell short for us says more about how much metal we ended up needing than about the quality of the piece.
Knowing that, the decision is easy to make. And that is the entire purpose of this article.
Written by Noemi and Javi, from Picasita. We are affiliates of xTool and our workshop is a brand demonstration space; we bought our P3 on the day it was released. More about this blog and our relationship with xTool.
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