Lumos

My Lumos shipped securely, with foam-packed protection inside and outside of the machine. This was definitely a pack job that would survive falling off a truck. The laser includes a lens cap, exhaust adapter, and both engraving and cutting beds. Since the machine comes prebuilt setup is straightforward and can be done in just a few minutes. Autofocus and a rear fine-tuning dial make getting started easy, and the cutting bed is a welcome inclusion for anyone planning to use it on wood or acrylic projects. I find it particularly pleasing that the cut bed slots right into the gap left when removing the standard work bed - something that, in the first of many comparisons, the xTool F1 doesn't do. All things considered I think the box comes pretty well stocked with everything you'd need to start using it right away and I wouldn't worry too much about this machine in transit which is what we like to see.

When it comes to build quality, the WeCreat Lumos gives a solid first impression. When using the Lumos you get a nice 116x116mm work area and you'll see top speeds of around 4000mm/s thanks to the scan head in this unit. At 7kg even, or about 15lbs, you'll have no problem hoisting this bad boy up for a trip out and about if that's what you plan on doing with it. The metal chassis is rock solid for its size, and it feels rigid and stable when you’re making adjustments. The fume extraction system also deserves a mention — while it only serves to keep smoke and debris from accumulating in the work area, it works quite well when paired with an external filtration unit or vented exhaust. Base Module Looking at the base module, the interior has a pin array for connecting directly to the laser head, reinforced by internal studs and a mounting screw that keeps the module locked firmly in place. On the right-hand side, you’ll find two accessory ports: a 4-pin auxiliary connector and a 6-pin rotary connector. This side also houses the focus controls, with both a manual focus-by-wire dial, and a one-touch autofocus button for convenience. Around back, the connections are straightforward — a USB-B printer-style port for data, and a standard barrel power jack. On the left-hand side, the design keeps things simple with a single power switch. Laser Module The laser module itself also carries a practical set of ports and features. On the rear, it offers a USB-C port, a barrel jack for power, and a small USB fan connector. These ports exist if you're using the laser module separately from the base. It requires a special shield cone attachment to use effectively and I wasn't sent that, so we won't be talking about it in today's review. Underneath, you’ll find some hardware to assist you while working: bright illumination LEDs, an HD camera for software alignment and preview, the focus guide laser, a protective lens cap, and the 110mm lens. The system may be bright purple, but it seems built well where it counts. I don't have any issues with the placement of the controls and I'm actually pretty fond of the overall setup here.

The Lumos packs two excellent laser modules - a 3W IR laser along side a 10W blue diode module. Generally you'll want to use your IR for marking metals where as the diode is going to do better with organics like leather, wood and opaque acrylics among other things. I'll note both of these laser modules are definitely capable of color marking. The 455nm diode is safer to experiment with as the risk of ablating is far lower than with the IR and produces muted but reliable colors. The IR module produces a much more vibrant palette but can only be used for this purpose when defocused. The rate of ablation when using the autofocus is simply too high and the lack of control over frequency or pulse width make in-focus color marking virtually impossible. The 3W IR source also provides a power edge over comparable 2W models. It may only be a watt difference but it's 50% more power down range which is noticeably more effective for ablation and more serious markings. You won't be doing any deep engraving or cutting with the IR module but it's affect on raw metals is impressive. The Lumos successfully engraved on wood, aluminum, steel, two-ply acrylic, and slate. I'm certain the list of compatible materials doesn't end there. Between the IR and the blue modules you have a massive array of substrates you can target with this machine. Did I mention cutting is a thing? It was able to cut 3mm wood after a bit of tuning with focus and produced desirable results. While this isn't a cutting machine you can certainly get away with it here and there on thinner materials.

I've thought long and hard about how to approach the performance section of this review now that WeCreat has published the bidirectional scanning update for the Lumos. I'm going to update the performance score accordingly to a 8 but I'm ALSO going to share with you why the original score was a 4, in the hopes that WeCreat along with any and all of their competitors sees this and plans accordingly. This is an issue that affected not only the WeCreat Lumos but still plagues their 20W and 40W Vision lasers, both of which I REALLY enjoyed unboxing and testing. They're built so well and do so many clever things and this one boulder in the road leaves me at an impasse with these reviews. It's a shame. That is to say, the push for unidirectional scanning on the Lumos was a fucking disaster. When the Lumos launched it hailed it's new technology surrounding it's unidirectional scanning a revolutionary breakthrough in speed, beating other lasers in it's class. Whether or not this is true depends on your point of view. It may or may not have been faster than other lasers when comparing unidirectoinal scanning directly, but in what world would that be the reasonable assumption? The campaign dismissed bidirectional scanning and representatives informed me it simply wasn't needed and the Lumos remained competitive in performance without it. It took five minutes with this machine to realize that simply wasn't the case. Its performance was critically limited by the absence of bidirectional scanning. Despite marketing claims, in every head-to-head test we performed with the xTool F1 running bidirectional, the Lumos unidirectional scan was slower - sometimes more than twice as slow. The longer the job, the worse the performance gap. I have struggled to imagine what math would result with a faster run time on a unidirectional scan over a comparable bidirectional scan. We tested again and again and every time we landed on the same result. Competing products, when issued identical settings, are simply far faster at producing equal quality or better work than the Lumos. Today, of course, the situation couldn't be more different. WeCreat ended up doing a complete 180 and news quickly through the laser community. The funny thing is, a firmware update was never published. The only change made was to the WeCreat MakeIt! software which enabled a toggle for uni and bi directional scanning. Weird right? You would think if this machine needed to somehow fundamentally change in order to accommodate this feature request that the firmware would need to be updated to change how the laser functions. Apparently not. Don't take this as fact, but what this says to me is that it was a relatively mild affair to enable bidirectional scanning and we could have had it long ago without much of a fuss. It makes me wonder why we ended up here in the first place. The whole thing is just strange. At any rate the Lumos now performs on par or better with the likes of the F1. Head to head bidirectional scan tests often showed the Lumos matching or beating run times on jobs where previously it had crawled light years behind the competition. We had concerns about the cost of this quick decision to reverse course so suddenly and so we spent quite a long time pressing the Lumos to see if shortcuts were taken to enable this feature. We've found that since the update AND compared to unidirectional scanning results, there was no discernible drop in quality and results have been as clean as we've come to expect from specialty multi-wavelength machines like these. While we're talking quality, detail resolution does lag behind just a bit: small text tests on aluminum showed noticeably sharper results on the F1. In these microscope images you can clearly see the F1 delivers better form to the overall hatch pattern even at fractions of a millimeter. Additionally the F1 provides a contour mark that makes small details infinitely easier to resolve. The Lumos does not execute these contours and leaves you with blobs of hatch that are hard to decipher at these sizes. We're splitting hairs here, literally, but you likely see better accuracy in the F1's shaping of the hatch patterns and this combined with the contour marking really sell the F1 as the precision choice over the Lumos. That's not to say there aren't performance advantages when you go with the Lumos. The major advantage you're sure to enjoy is with metal ablation, where the higher 3W IR output wattage allows faster material ablation. In testing, the Lumos was capable of getting darker marks, faster than other lasers in it's class. While this could be great for someone looking to do primarily metal work, the fact is for the same price you could purchase a much higher wattage dedicated fiber that would blow this machine away with it's substantially improved capabilities. That doesn't mean the Lumos doesn't have a market or can't execute detailed work. On the contrary this laser has the makings of a high performance machine - especially for beginners - and offers a highly mobile and compact platform with a massive set of materials within it's range. It's adaptability is it's strength AND it's weakness and that's fine. Sometimes you have to make compromises to gain flexibility and I'm on board with that.

The included WeCreat MakeIt software is functional, with presets, alignment tools, and material test arrays. Little touches that make it easy to use are present like the camera retaking a photo of the workspace when autofocus is activated. Largely WeCreat MakeIt feels like a stripped down clone of XCS or the newer xTool Studio, so if you're used to using XCS you'd feel pretty comfortable here - minus some of the newer features. If you know me, you know Lightburn compatibility is big for me as far as usability goes. Well, there's good news and bad news. The good news is WeCreat claims this machine is Lightburn compatible! Yay! The bad news is that when I started writing this review the device profile was no where to be found on their website. I made attempts to add the device on my own but struck out. We reached out to WeCreat and they promptly responded by letting us know the device profile would be out within the week. In the meantime they sent us a test profile... with which they recommended we use Lightburn version 1.6 or earlier. Yikes. Since then the device profile has been added to their website and this one is labeled "v1.5". I'm not sure if that's the revision of the profile or the recommended Lightburn version? There aren't any instructions or details about how to use the profile, or it's included macros, or recommendations on how to set up the machine. On top of all of this, with the recent release of Lightburn 2.0 and it's patches I'm concerned a large number of users will have upgraded past whatever version does end up working with this device profile. I hope they get to fixing this up soon. I have a lot of concerns and a lot of questions. Can you really claim your machine is Lightburn compatible when it requires a version of the software that's years old that a large chunk of the userbase has already updated out of? Will it ever work with newer versions of Lightburn? How exactly are you even supposed to use the profile and what do their "version numbers" mean? We don't know. We never got it working. I can't even find a video of someone else on YouTube using this equipment with Lightburn... I suppose if there's a change we can update the review down the road but so far my opinion is that this equipment is NOT passing as Lightburn compatible and I'd need to see some substantial improvements here before agreeing it was. The average user is just NOT going to mess things to this level to find the answers to these questions and I can't say I blame them. It's been frustrating. The lack of what I consider Lightburn compatibility certainly casts a shadow on what otherwise is a solid set of software and workflow features. Luckily WeCreat MakeIt is tolerable even if it's not how I'd prefer to use this machine and I'm looking forward to seeing more in terms of Lightburn support from them down the road.

As of writing the Lumos retails around $1,249.99 for the base unit, competing directly with the xTool F1 which is currently selling for $1269.00. It offers a more powerful IR source, HD camera, autofocus and other luxuries, and you can get a pizza with that and spend what you would spend on a comparable F1 kit. Now that the dramatic performance penalty from forced unidirectional scanning no longer completely undermines its value proposition I find myself excited to recommend it to those in the market for this specific type of laser. For flexible workflows where time and detail matter especially those where there's a clear demand IR performance, the Lumos finally makes sense and deserves your attention. The price is right for the hardware you're getting and so the value proposition is solid and makes sense to me.