There are tons of different cheap laser engravers on the market, and they are a great way to laser engrave on a budget. Many of them have crazy requirements like 10W of power, but you have to pay attention to what they can actually do. In this review, I take a look at Ortur 10W model of the Ortur Laser Master 3.
First Impression
First, let's address the elephant in the room and then lead to a 10W laser engraver. On the product page, 10W is listed as the laser power. and is the output power of the laser. Rather than the power consumed by the laser, this makes more sense for the price and size of the laser module. You can buy it at the most cost-effective price in the HTPOW online store.
Laser Power and Laser Power Consumption
Such publicity is very sincere, the laser power reaches 10W, then this is a promising laser engraving machine. Assembly is very quick and the software works out of the box. From unpacking to turning on the laser, it takes less than an hour. There are also safety features like the laser turning off automatically after one has been on for a certain period of time, or if it is disconnected from the computer.
Ortur Laser Master 3 Features
But let's take a look at what this laser can do. Can engrave on most organic materials such as wood, plastic, leather, and painted metal. It is also very capable of cutting mainly paper, tissue, acrylic and veneer wood. The main use cases for using laser cutting are engraving and cutting in wood. For that, it fits perfectly. With the recommended software LaserGRBL, contours and images can be engraved. You can import regular jpeg or png images and choose whether you want to vectorize them for sculpting outlines or use grayscale or dithering for more complex sculpting.
Cheap But High Quality Diodes
Complex images are also very fast to sculpt and the results are beautiful. Especially the pictures engraved by the dithering method, the effect is very good, and the details are clear at a glance. When we go to cut things, we start to see the limitations of this cheap laser. It is obvious that the diode used in the laser is of poor quality, because even if it is focused as well as it can be, it will not produce a point, but a line. The visible part of the line is about less than 1 mm long, however, most of the power is concentrated in the center, which means that the line is not necessarily narrower than 1 mm, with a very fine degree of engraving.
Another major problem with the point being a line is that when cutting, in the Y direction, it's very easy and fast because the cut is very narrow. In the X direction, due to the use of a 10W laser engraving machine. Cutting wood is also very easy.
In Conclusion
Overall, this machine is great for engraving on almost any material like wood on a budget. However, it is comparable to true high power diode lasers that can easily cut plywood down to 10mm, and the Ortur Laser Master 3 high power laser leaves more money than other laser engravers.
