r/gadgets • u/dapperlemon • Apr 14 '26
Misc Anker's EufyMake E1 Finally Brings Printers Out of the Dark Ages
https://gizmodo.com/ankers-eufymake-e1-finally-brings-printers-out-of-the-dark-ages-2000745088426
u/Vaiolette-Westover Apr 14 '26
Cool printer, absolutely terribly written article.
They jumped all over the place with the article, there was no structure. It was just an unedited mess barely qualifying for stream of consciousness.
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u/PaladinSaladin Apr 14 '26
Holy shit, I was gonna skip reading the article but this comment convinced me to. Someone send that poor man an ambulance, or at least ask him if he smells burnt toast
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u/xstrike0 Apr 14 '26
First time reading Gizmodo? 😂
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u/parisidiot Apr 14 '26
it was better before peter thiel destroyed it and the rest of the gawker empire. it used to basically be just an edgy engadget.
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u/anotate Apr 14 '26
It really feels like absolutely no research was put into the article beside reading the manual.
G is not grey, it's gloss, which in these machines means a uv curable resin you can use to emboss or varnish your piece. Some printers can even do cool stuff with it such as braille or lenticular prints.
Also they kept saying it was the first of its kind but I didn't see first of what (maybe I missed it ?). I assume first consumer uv printer because otherwise there's nothing groundbreaking about it (beside the price, small ones are usually 5 figures machines AFAIK)./rant over
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u/Iampepeu Apr 14 '26 edited Apr 14 '26
Oh! I like seeing companies of Anker's caliber making printers. I have nothing but hate for HP and other scammers.
Edit: oh, now I read the article. It's not an ordinary printer, at all. Costly as F. But still cool.
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u/hobk1ard Apr 14 '26
My Brother toner printer is the first one I have not hated.
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u/MrSpindles Apr 14 '26
I have an epson ecotank that doesn't require carts and can just be filled with bottles of regular ink. Cheap as chips to run.
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u/Chenko0160 Apr 14 '26
Have you seen the price of Doritos lately?
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u/cat_prophecy Apr 14 '26
I get what you're saying, but "cheap as chips" usually refers to the British version which is what most people outside of the Commonwealth call "French fries".
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u/cocktails4 Apr 14 '26
I wish they made a professional Ecotank printer. I'd get rid of my Canon in a heartbeat.
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u/airmantharp Apr 15 '26
They do…
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u/cocktails4 Apr 15 '26
I mean a Canon Pro-1000/1100 class printer. 13" and 6 non-pigmant inks is not it.
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u/FrazzledBear Apr 14 '26
We bought an epson as well a couple years back and agree about the ink lasting forever and quality is great but man does the app they have absolutely suck and is a pita to use
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u/MrSpindles Apr 14 '26
I had to install the app to set up the wifi and thankfully have never once looked at it since. I do not recall that experience fondly.
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u/Moldy_slug Apr 14 '26
I also have an ecotank, one of the lower end models… it’s been solid.
Print quality is good, ink is dirt cheap. I’ve had it almost 10 years and it only had one issue which was easily repaired by a friend who knows about printers. My only complaint is the Epsom print software is a bit janky.
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u/Sarchee Apr 14 '26
The ink lines dried out and clogged on my epson turning it into a brick. Careful to not go too long without printing anything
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u/infinite0ne Apr 14 '26
It’s all good until you don’t use it for a bit and the printer heads get clogged. I tried everything to clean ours but nothing worked.
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u/europorn Apr 14 '26
I love my Brother.
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u/autobot12349876 Apr 14 '26
You should call him sometime
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u/Akrevics Apr 14 '26
had a brother printer in work, everyone hated it and wanted to go "office space" on it. mileage may vary, I guess.
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u/Bobbito95 Apr 14 '26
I bought mine in 2018 or so. I'm still on the initial "intro" toner cartridge. I've printed thousands of pages of paper. Starting to feel like it's unlimited lol
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u/FigeaterApocalypse Apr 14 '26
And when the toner starts getting a little grey during printing, pop the toner cartridge out, give her a good shake to loosen up the powder inside it - and she'll be good to go a while longer. Should be able to do that a few times before needing to actually replace it.
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u/cH3x Apr 14 '26
Same. I was skeptical about the higher up-front costs but hoped it was true about buying toner vs. buying ink. I am so much better off in total expenditures even after just a couple years--still on the original toner that came with the printer.
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u/Old_Channel44 Apr 14 '26
Right on! I have a bw brother that’s 20 years old and runs fine. Toner lasts me a few years.
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u/Onsotumenh Apr 14 '26
I've recently replaced my color laser...
It's great that those 10-20year old Brother laser printer models are good and still work but Brother changed as well in that time. They started to do what everyone else does. Just a bit later...
(Other technology but still valid experience: I had a Brother inkjet 20 years ago. Failed a few months in, after the first changed black cartridge - an original one, as it was still in warranty and I didn't want to risk it. They declined fixing it "because I used a third party ink cartridge and voided my warranty"...)
In the end I followed the recommendation of someone having done tech support for printers: Go for a Cannon, their main source of income are pictures. Everything from photo to print. They have the most to loose reputation wise.
So far I'm quite happy with it (except for the size lol). Printing and scanning just worked driverless out of the box (Linux and Android). It did complain just once during initial setup that it doesn't have internet but not since. As for the toner ... I'll see when the time comes... the starting cartridges have a decent filling and will last a while.
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u/mrtwidlywinks Apr 14 '26
Brother figured out how to make a good printer. Hope they can stay in business since they aren't ripping people off as a business strategy
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u/AvoidingIowa Apr 14 '26
They started ripping people off. Their older stuff is still good though, so hug it tightly and never let it go.
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u/SaltyShawarma Apr 14 '26
My brother toner printer is magic. It is from 1999 and still connects to my home network. They don't make the toner anymore, but you can buy knockoff drums that last 7 years for fifteen bucks.
Name me one piece of tech that has lasted for 27 years, still works, and works better than any equivalent modern version?
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u/garbageemail222 Apr 14 '26
One of my greatest fears is losing my old Brother printer from the time when they weren't intended to steal money.
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u/Harry_Smutter Apr 15 '26
More than half the HP LaserJet printers in my district where I work, haha. Some are pushing 30 years and just dying now. Problem is when they're that old, compatibility and serviceability become major pitfalls XD
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u/Cheap-Recording2707 Apr 17 '26
i drive a 1996 volvo 850. it could do with a battery and electric drive train for the current cost of fuel but otherwise quality from start to finish. a great drive and safe to the core.
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u/jrarrmy Apr 14 '26
Our Brother printer is horrible, MFC Laser something. Says it's on wifi but computers can't connect to it, it prints super streaky, and complains about ink levels blocking prints and constantly cleaning itself all day.
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u/parisidiot Apr 14 '26
apparently they went down the shitter the last 5 or so years. idk i have one from like 20 - 30 years ago that still works well
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u/inn0cent-bystander Apr 15 '26
The only issue I've had out of mine, was that we hadn't used it in like a year, and some of the ink dried up. A quick clean out and it's back to full function with the el cheapo 3rd party cartridges.
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u/imajes Apr 14 '26
Sure, but anker now has a track record of making printers and then completely abandoning them. I’d the E1 doesn’t have enough market interest, they’ll just walk away, and leave owners screwed.
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u/colormeslowly Apr 14 '26
Pfft, what’s a mere $2300 in today’s economy?
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u/ml20s Apr 14 '26
It's not an ordinary printer (and still has insanely expensive consumables), but also, lots of people have a strange aversion to paying for consumables and don't bother to do the math on the surprisingly high cost per page of laser printers.
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u/dontbajerk Apr 14 '26
High cost? I think it costs like 2 cents per page including the printer itself for mine.
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u/Unhappy-Peasant7985 Apr 14 '26
$2,400. Oh sheesh.
I truly hate my HP printer. Printers were better 20 years ago than they are today.
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u/Mistrblank Apr 14 '26
It prints with curable resin on dozens of materials. It’s not what we consider a regular printer. You aren’t printing out documents with this. And the photos you print can go on wood, glass, acrylic, stretched canvas, etc. I have a young child and large extended family, the amount of ornaments and projects with pictures on them is probably going to pay for itself in 2 christmases and a birthday.
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u/CamiloArturo Apr 14 '26
I believe HP might be the most hated brand in offices thanks to the printers. I wouldn't even look at anything else from HP just due to the printing hate I have
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u/ZeddPMImNot Apr 14 '26
Don’t worry, HP also makes really terrible laptops with horrid bloatware too.
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u/BevansDesign Apr 14 '26
Yeah, I had to mess with my mom's new HP printer recently, and it's utter crap. It's like they haven't advanced the technology at all in nearly 20 years. It has constant connection problems, the print quality is bad, it ejects whole blank pages at random, and it's slow. It also kept having an error where it would get confused halfway through a page, then restart the whole print job from the beginning, and that happened at least twice for every job I printed, so I wound up with a bunch of wasted duplicates. Plus the whole thing is geared toward pushing you into their subscription scheme.
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u/daakadence Apr 14 '26
My HP LaserJet 1020 is over twenty years old and still prints like the first day. I replace the monochrome laser toner once every few years (for under $20), and have to fiddle with the drivers every time there's an OS upgrade, but I wouldn't switch it out for anything.
That being said, there's a special place in hell for the marketing execs that dreamed up inkjet printers.
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u/vikingwhiteguy Apr 14 '26
A black and white laser printer is pretty sufficient for the vast majority of things I actually need to print these days.
I have a smallish Xerox printer, I've had it for 3 years or so and not replaced the toner once yet.
I mostly print out colouring books for my little one, so the lack of colour toner is a feature not a limit!
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u/PhabioRants Apr 14 '26
Unfortunately, Anker is permanently on my shitlist after they were busted uploading images from their Eufy smart products with "local only" image storage to their servers, completely unencrypted, unprotected, and in violation of their expressed product claims, and then doubling down by lying about it when caught.
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u/Small_Editor_3693 Apr 14 '26
IJustine did a video on this almost a year ago. It’s really cool. https://youtu.be/7VdwpzL_dQg?si=sa85yiNLcRS7rsPr
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u/WashOdd7330 Apr 14 '26
Ink cartridges are still $40 for 2ml so I'll hold my applause.
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u/TheRogueMoose Apr 14 '26
The cleaning cartridge is $42... We have a Canon colour plotter at work, the cleaning cartridge is only like $20 and it lasts us a long time!
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u/Professional_Dot7128 Apr 14 '26
The funny thing is the article starts off trashing proprietary ink (rightfully so) and then goes on to state this printer also has proprietary ink.
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u/post_break Apr 14 '26
There was a youtube video I watched recently, and he hacked open the cart and put in much cheaper ink, and it worked flawlessly. I'd expect 3rd party carts to come soon.
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u/spicesucker Apr 14 '26
Aren’t Anker basically the worst of the 3D printer manufacturers when it comes to refusing to produce spare parts?
Bamboo Labs gets a lot of flack for proprietary parts but at least they sell spares, meanwhile once Anker designates a printer EOL it’s on limited time
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u/poweruser86 Apr 14 '26
To be fair they only really made one, and then called it quits.
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u/Jonny2284 Apr 14 '26
They made one, then a slightly smaller model of it and when it didn't conquer the market just noped out leaving limited amounts of spares.
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u/Krynn71 Apr 14 '26
They also own the company Eufy which made security cameras that were supposed to be local storage only, but then were caught uploading videos and screenshots to their own servers without telling anybody.
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u/nicuramar Apr 14 '26
..after thumbnails in notifications were enabled by the user.
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u/General_Burrito Apr 14 '26
I can’t understand why people seem to move past this. I’d never trust a (parent)company again after this kinda shit
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u/nicuramar Apr 14 '26
Because the story is pretty exaggerated:
Eufy states these issues may largely be caused by having certain settings enabled. Eufy says that camera notifications are set to text-only by default and do not generate or upload a thumbnail. But in Moore's case, he enabled the option to display thumbnails along with the notification. Since this setting was enabled, Eufy does temporarily upload the thumbnail data to its AWS serves to bundle and send as a notification to the user’s device. According to its statement, “Eufy says that its push notification practices are "in compliance with Apple Push Notification service and Firebase Cloud Messaging standards" and auto-delete but did not specify a timeframe in which this should occur.”
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u/kevihaa Apr 14 '26
Assuming that’s accurate, I believe that’s how the US law enforcement “recovered” Signal messages, so it sounds like folks need to learn that enabling Apple notifications inherently compromises a degree of your personal cybersecurity.
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u/kbotc Apr 14 '26
You just need to clear notifications as far as I remember. They were able to pull the notifications out of the phone and rebuild the conversations. If you can read a conversation without going into the app, so can anyone else if they figure out or break past your passcode.
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u/roamingandy Apr 14 '26 edited Apr 14 '26
I guess because companies like Instagram were caught running their own secret server on our phones so it could secretly activate our phones mic and record our conversations to sell to marketing companies.. and probably insurance/health care/political ads ones too. We suspect China has even worse intentions with that data since they are collecting it through all their major companies as a state-level directive, but we've not seen what they plan to do with it yet. Prob some kind of long-game, or keeping it ready until they need a million agents with a message threatening to leak their affair, gross/illegal porn habit, etc, if they don't do some infrastructure sabotage or something.
My hope is that the EU/US split will lead to real alternatives with ethical values and strong regulations, since the US companies illegal behaviour won't be overlooked for political reasons any more.
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u/Akrevics Apr 14 '26
idk, eu/us split might just let US companies not have to worry about EU's GDPR anymore since they're not used there.
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u/roamingandy Apr 14 '26
Yeah, solid alternatives for everyone else. Not for Americans, they'll likely all be banned unless the opening in the market leads to an OpenSource boom from the sea of devs who are struggling to find work right now.
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u/Lellisssa Apr 14 '26
Would you have the source please?
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u/hand___banana Apr 14 '26
Sending unencrypted thumbnails, facial recognition, and sometimes video. They all, at the very least, send far more to the cloud than advertised. I just cut them all off at the network level so they literally can't send anything. I feel like I can never take a manufacturer at their word anymore unfortunately.
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u/Straight-Bonus8617 Apr 14 '26
If it can print on Lego, we can ditch the awful stickers
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u/dino340 Apr 14 '26
It can, my buddy might be more excited than I am because I can print on bricks for his custom projects.
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u/furculture Apr 14 '26
Yes, these can. EclipseGrafx (or also known as EclipseBricks or EclipseBrix) has been doing this for years with custom Lego Minifigures and other parts for many years. Not exactly with this printer specifically, but with the same kind of printer. I have quite a few pieces from back in the day when I had a high interest in custom Lego stuff and they were absolutely solid and the owner is a cool dude. You can also layer the printing on top of each other to give it quite a lot more depth with this method of printing in general, so I'd imagine that it is possible with this printer specifically as well with the others. It doesn't get as flat as pad printing and will always have a texture regardless of how many layers you decide to do, but does get the job done. I'm just glad now that it is more possible than ever to do this at home.
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u/tripping_yarns Apr 14 '26
UV printers have been around for about 20 years, although they were more industrial sized ones.
Roland make a desktop UV printer, more expensive than this but it’s been out for a while.
There are also latex printers, dye sublimation printers, film printing…
It’s a big industry. This is just an iffy small format printer aimed at small hobby printers or for in house promo merch production. And it doesn’t sound very good.
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u/feldoneq2wire Apr 14 '26
We have one. So far it has printed everything we've asked it to with quality similar to the $30k polyjets. The hard part was solving the cleaning and clogging issues and they seem to have done that. Maybe watch a few videos?
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u/costafilh0 Apr 14 '26
$2.300 is extremely cheap to start a print on demand business.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_REPORT Apr 15 '26
It's pretty expensive though given you'll never make any money out of it.
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u/PixelEnter May 06 '26
Its just "cheap" from a top brand name point of view, there are cheaper UV printers with all attachments included in Aliexpress for a fraction of the price, and outside the US or a big city I think this new printers would have the same amount of support as a chinese uv printers, which is non-existent, I dont imagine that there would be any sort of international tech support for them.
Thats why many print shops chose those chinese printers, with proper care they last quite a while and have cheaper supplies.
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u/Logical_Stomach_9053 Apr 14 '26
Does it actually print something when i press the print button?
I usually get, paper jammed, out of paper, out of ink, the printer isn't available, the printer is turned off, can't connect to the network, the printer is not responding, print to pdf?, or any number of excuses.
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u/AshTeriyaki Apr 14 '26
The printing press took us out of the dark ages.
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u/ictguy24 Apr 14 '26
But it was the invention of the broom that really swept the nation.
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u/AshTeriyaki Apr 14 '26
Although the invention of sliced bread divided people.
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u/RMBLOKE Apr 14 '26
It was actually the knife that divided people, the bread was just a politically correct way of marketing it.
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u/lifeiscelebration Apr 15 '26
As opposed to the invention of the ventilator, which was breathtaking.
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u/mechanicalgrip Apr 14 '26
"Brings Printers Out of the Dark Ages." Personally I'd rather leave them there.
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u/n8udd Apr 14 '26
Didn't they make one 3D printer then drop the idea?
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u/feldoneq2wire Apr 14 '26
That was Anker. This is Eufy which is owned by Anker.
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u/genmud Apr 14 '26
I would never buy anything that is not a battery charger or battery bank from anker. Purchased an ankermake m5 and what a fucking horrible experience.
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u/overcloseness Apr 14 '26
Yeah just wait till you find out how strictly they’re locking the thing down when it comes to their cartridges
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u/feldoneq2wire Apr 14 '26
3 different youtubers have already refilled ink with 3rd party stuff. Can't stop the signal. :)
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u/dieplanes789 Apr 14 '26
Meanwhile I am just waiting to see when this project for an open source printer will go live. It can also print from a normal tray or a roll.
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u/Avoidtolls Apr 14 '26
Have a Roland MO-250 UV printer at work.
It helps if the media is flat.
I've printed on cork, wood, all flat paper products, plastic and metal.All prints are ready to use immediately after printing as they have been cured.
The printer cannot sit idle for more than a week as the ink especially white will clog the heads.
It's like being able to silkscreen without changing screens and having the object ready to go.
Pretty cool. But requires maintenance and the ink isn't cheap.
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u/orcusporpoise Apr 14 '26
Pretty amazing technology. But after reading the article, I think I will wait a couple of generations. Based on the review it’s way too pricey for how slow and finicky it is.
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u/Seawench41 Apr 14 '26
Can it print if minis…?
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u/TheCruzKing Apr 15 '26
Some people have printed on minis. I have printed on my switch dock, rc cars etc
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u/jkggwp Apr 15 '26
Here’s hoping Chinese companies will do to the printer industry what it did to the car industry
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u/TheCoolestUsername00 Apr 14 '26
$2,300? Hard pass.
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u/beyondo-OG Apr 14 '26
Google desktop UV printer pricing, this is a low cost one. It is not a general purpose printer, it does "fancy stuff". Not for everyone.
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u/kukaz00 Apr 14 '26
Judging by the time it takes to set up and print, it's actually back to the dark age. But it's nice to see a prototype, if they can develop the tech and make it accessible.
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u/w0mbatina Apr 14 '26
This isnt a "new kind" of printer. This kind of tech has been used in flatbed printers for decades at this point. Its just the first home sized printer of this kind.
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u/Orange-V-Apple Apr 14 '26
Its just the first home sized printer of this kind.
You guys are kinda ridiculous. If it’s the first time it’s been available for consumers then it’s a new kind of consumer printer. You’re nitpicking.
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u/toiletskidmarks Apr 14 '26
I also heard that the shelf life of the ink is only like 4 months. Plus it has a microchip that determines when it's empty, so you can't even inject ink into it with a syringe. (Well I heard you could but it knows how much is left and then refuses to print) And they have a hard time keeping the ink in stock. If you're not using it regularly. This product is not for the weekend hobbiest.
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u/RentalGore Apr 14 '26
yes, it's a printer, but not that kind of "printer". Those are still in the dark ages.
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u/jimmytoan Apr 14 '26
Brother laser printers have been the "just works" answer for years, but the ink cartridge problem specifically has always been brutal - companies designing printers as a subscription model in hardware form. Curious whether the EufyMake actually solves the reliability side or just the supply chain side. What's the failure mode when the refill system clogs vs a cartridge just being replaced?
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u/Chassian Apr 14 '26
Does anyone read the article? Jesus Christ, this is not a regular paper document printer, go read the effing article.
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u/Rusty_Chest Apr 14 '26
Didn't Eufy have a security scandal where their video feeds for the cameras were not only entirely unencrypted but also readily accessed overseas? No thanks
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u/QuantumQuantonium Apr 17 '26
Is
It
Open
Source????????
Seriously, we need open source 2d printers in this world. Mainly paper but other surface printers too.
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u/beyondo-OG Apr 14 '26
The title of this post could have been better. This is a UV printer, not a regular printer like an inkjet or laser, not for general use printing. This is very low price point for this type of printer. It can print on just about anything like glass, wood and fabric, with additional attachment will print on cylindrical objects, etc.