ELEGOO Mars 5 Ultra Review: Is the 9K Resin Printer Worth It?
The ELEGOO Mars 5 Ultra is a resin printer built around a 9K mono-LCD that nails fine detail no FDM machine can touch at this price, and it does it fast thanks to a new screen and a beefier UV module. Get it if you print miniatures, jewelry molds, or prototypes that need a glass-smooth finish and you don't mind wrestling with resin and IPA. Skip it if you don't have a balcony, garage, or at least an open window — the fumes here are no joke.
Resin printers are one of those things people either fall in love with or hate the second they spill their first bottle on the carpet. There's no middle ground. And the Mars 5 Ultra doesn't change that calculus — it just does the thing MSLA printing exists for, slightly better than its predecessor.
ELEGOO built its whole reputation on resin printers, long before it started pushing into FDM with its CoreXY machines. The Mars line is their bread-and-butter — the "first resin printer" for thousands of people who then either get hooked for life or flip the machine on the secondhand market six months later. The Ultra is another iteration, and to its credit, it feels like a genuine upgrade rather than a cosmetic refresh tacked onto a bigger number in the name.
What actually changed — and why it matters
The headline spec is the 9K mono-LCD. That's the number that decides how crisp your fine details come out: fabric texture on a miniature, facial features on a figurine, engraving on a jewelry piece. Earlier Mars generations weren't bad, but zoom into the really small elements and you'd catch a hint of "pixel edges." Here that's basically gone — smooth curves stay smooth even under the magnifying glass mini-painters love to torture themselves with.
The second number is print speed: up to 150 mm/hr on the Z axis. Sounds dry on paper, but in practice it means a model that used to take an hour and a half now comes off the plate in 40-50 minutes. For a hobbyist printing one figure after work in the evening, that's a real difference — you actually get to see the result before bed instead of waiting until morning.
There's a set of smart features too — resin level and temperature monitoring, auto bed leveling, app connectivity. None of it is revolutionary, but it's exactly the kind of small thing that saves you from the classic resin-printing horror story: waking up at 2am to find the vat bone-dry and half your print in the trash.
The reality of printing: not all pretty pictures
Here's where the honest part starts. The Mars 5 Ultra genuinely prints beautifully, but resin printing as a process is not "press a button and walk away." After every print, the part needs an isopropyl alcohol wash, then drying, then often a second UV cure to fully polymerize. Counted honestly, that post-processing eats more time than the actual print. And yes, the smell is always there — even the pricier "low-odor" resins have a smell, and cheap no-name resin can clear a room in ten minutes flat. Without ventilation, or at least a window and a fan, this isn't really an option.
Second thing: the FEP film vat and the LCD screen itself are consumables you'll be replacing. The film punctures if anything sharp drops into the resin, and the LCD dims over time from UV exposure. This isn't a one-and-done purchase — it's a machine with ongoing running costs, like a printer that eats cartridges, except here it's resin at $25-35 a liter instead of ink.
Build volume on the Mars 5 Ultra, like most printers in this class, is sized for small-to-medium parts — tabletop miniatures, jewelry molds, model kit details, dental blanks. A full-size cosplay helmet or a drone shell won't fit in one piece; you'll be splitting the model and gluing sections together. If you need large functional parts, this isn't the right printer class at all — look at FDM instead.
How it stacks up against the obvious rivals
In this price bracket, the Mars 5 Ultra mainly competes with the Anycubic Photon Mono and ELEGOO's own bigger sibling, the Saturn. The Saturn trades a higher price for a larger build plate; the Mars stays compact and affordable for people printing mostly small stuff. The Photon Mono has traditionally been a strong value pick, but the 9K screen gives the Mars 5 Ultra the edge exactly where it counts — detail, which is the whole reason anyone chooses resin over FDM in the first place.
For the full picture — unit price, shipping, and import duty rolled into one number for your country — check the landed cost on dede.sh before you decide; it's usually a meaningfully bigger number than the sticker price alone.
Who should buy it, and who shouldn't
Get it if: you're into miniatures, tabletop gaming figures, jewelry, or dental/small prototypes where detail matters more than size; you have somewhere to ventilate and a spot for an IPA bucket; you're prepared for extra time spent on post-processing, not just printing.
Skip it if: you live in an apartment with no ventilation and don't want to deal with the smell; you need large, single-piece parts; you want a hobby with minimal mess, no chemicals, alcohol, or disposable gloves — go FDM instead, it's far less messy.
FAQ
שאלות נפוצות
If your models are simple geometric shapes without fine features, the difference between a 9K screen and older matrices is barely visible to the naked eye. The premium pays off specifically for miniatures, faces on figurines, and jewelry — anywhere every pixel counts.
For your first experience in 3D printing, FDM is simpler and cleaner — no IPA, no smell, no gloves. Go resin once you already know for sure you need high detail on small objects, rather than just wanting to print "something, anything."
No. This is a printer built for small-to-medium models. For large single-piece parts, look at an entirely different class of machine, one with a bigger build volume even if that means sacrificing some detail.
Start with standard resin rather than fast-cure or engineering resin — it's more forgiving of exposure settings and smells less. Save the fast-cure and specialty resins for after you've gotten used to the wash-and-cure routine.
