In July 2025, we were supposed to have received a desktop UV printer. We had ordered it confidently, with the money set aside and a spot reserved in the workshop. We canceled it in January 2026, six months after the date they had given us, without ever having seen it.
This article is not about whether that machine is good or bad. It’s about something we find more useful: what we learned from buying a machine that didn’t even exist yet, and what we do differently now.
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What we wanted to solve
We have been personalizing with laser for years. Since October 2025, the machine supporting the workshop is an xTool P3 80 W, and before that, there were others. The laser does one thing extraordinarily well: marking the material. It burns, melts, or lifts the surface, and the result has a quality that people like to touch.
But the laser has a limit that can’t be negotiated: it doesn’t add color. On wood, it gives you the wood’s toasting. On lacquered metal, the color underneath. On acrylic, the milky white of the scratch. When a client sends us their company logo in four colors, or a photo of their baby, or a watercolor their daughter painted, there’s an awkward conversation we’ve had hundreds of times: I can engrave it for you, but it will come out in a single tone.
UV printing solves exactly that. It deposits colored ink on almost any rigid surface and cures it instantly with ultraviolet light. It’s not a substitute for engraving: it’s the other half of the catalog, the one we had been letting pass for years.
Why we ordered that machine
Until recently, a UV printer with a usable work area cost as much as a car. The leap that changed things was the appearance of desktop machines under three thousand euros, and the EufyMake E1 was the first to become accessible to a workshop like ours.
We ordered it for the usual reasons: it arrived before anyone else, promised exactly what we needed, and the price fit. The announced date was July 2025. With that date, we made plans: what products we would be able to offer, which photos we would have to redo, what could be shown at the autumn fair.
Six months of shifting dates
What came next is familiar to anyone who has entered a presale: the date moves. And when it moves once, it moves again.
A one-time delay is not a reason to cancel anything. Manufacturing is difficult, and we prefer a company that delays a thousand times over one that ships something half-finished. The problem wasn’t the delay: it was that we stopped being able to plan. Every time a new date arrived, we had to decide again whether to move the workshop slot, postpone photos, or tell a client that in a few weeks we could do that for them. Six months like that wears you down more than the wait itself.
In January 2026, we did the math and it was clear: we had six months with money tied up, no machine, no credible date, and no way to sell anything that machine would have allowed us to sell. We canceled.
What we won’t tell you
Here we need to be explicit, because it’s the part almost no one writes about.
There are quite a few complaints circulating in forums and groups from people who did receive that machine: about breakdowns, warranties, part prices, and customer service. We have read them. Some are written with a detail that makes them very believable.
We won’t repeat them here, and we want to explain why. We never got that printer. We can’t verify a single one of those stories, we haven’t talked to their technical service, and we haven’t opened the machine. Also — and this must be said loudly — we are affiliates of xTool, their direct competitor. An article from us amplifying accusations we can’t verify about a rival wouldn’t be journalism: it would be disguised marketing.
What we can tell you is what happened to us. And what happened was a six-month wait and a cancellation.
The four things we look at now
From all this came a short list that we have applied since then to any machine in presale.
1. Are there units working in the hands of third parties? Not brand videos: real people showing real pieces, answering uncomfortable questions, and publishing what goes wrong. Without that, there’s no product: there’s a promise.
2. How much does the consumable part cost? In a printer, the printhead. In a laser, the tube. This is the question most avoided and the one that most determines if the business is profitable. If a brand publishes the lifespan of a part but not its price, that information is deliberately incomplete.
3. Can the configuration be changed afterward? If when buying you choose inks, printheads, or modules and that choice is forever, you’re not buying a machine: you’re buying one specific machine among several, and you better get it right.
4. What does the company say when things go wrong? This is the one that matters most to us and the hardest to measure before buying. A brand that publishes delays, explains the reasons, and gives a new date is treating you like an adult. Silence, on the other hand, always means the same thing.
And then another one appeared
The cancellation coincided with something we had been glimpsing for weeks. In the xTool community — the brand of our laser, the people with whom we already shared a forum — this month they started talking about their own UV printer. For now, there’s no datasheet, price, or sale date; there’s a machine emerging and many people asking questions.
We already know that brand from the inside: we know how their support responds when something breaks, because ours has broken, and we know how they treat people with problems, because we’ve had a few. That guarantees absolutely nothing about a machine that doesn’t exist yet. But after six months waiting for a company we didn’t know at all, it’s a difference that matters.
So we did the only sensible thing: wait and watch. No deposit, no workshop plans, and no date in mind. If this ends up being the right one, we’ll tell you here with the same detail we just gave about the one that fell through.
And if it’s not, we’ll tell you that too.
Update July 28, 2026
Six months have passed since we wrote this, and it’s time to be fair to the three players in the story.
The E1 has improved. Those who have it report two changes that go right to the heart of what we criticized: EufyMake has lowered the ink cost and enabled bidirectional printing, which means speed. There are happy users today. Our cancellation was due to a six-month wait with shifting dates, not a judgment on the machine; that nuance seemed important then and seems even more so now that the product has matured.
The xTool came out, but late. That printer that was “emerging” turned out to be the O1 Omni. We ended up buying a Dual UV Versatile, so the phrase above — “no deposit, no workshop plans” — became history. And with an irony we don’t miss: it was also delayed. The difference from before is that here there is a machine, datasheet, price, and people showing pieces; back then there was none of that. But if someone reminds us that we’re waiting again for a UV printer, they’re absolutely right.
And a third one has appeared. The community is now talking about the Morpho, which is going to Kickstarter with a stereoscopic camera system, and people are already postponing decisions because of it. With the learning from this article in mind: it’s a machine that doesn’t exist yet, funded before being made, exactly the profile that cost us half a year. We’re not saying it will fail. We’re saying we already know what it costs to find out the hard way.
Written by Noemi and Javi, from Picasita. We are affiliates of xTool and our workshop is a demonstration space for the brand; we buy our machines with our own money. More about this blog and our relationship with xTool.
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