Years ago, long before I joined this outfit, Gizmodo cemented a policy against reviewing printers. The reasons why are obvious. There are so few printers that can claim any features that beat the competition. Not to mention the travesty of proprietary printer ink and software locks that make printing an expensive nightmare. So there’s a reason to pay attention when I say I was utterly obsessed with Anker’s EufyMake E1 UV printer and its ability to print on practically anything and everything.
Anker’s new printer isn’t like any other. It uses a special kind of ink that cures near-instantly with a blast of ultraviolet light. This means that it’s not designed to drop ink on a good ol’ 8.5 x 11-inch loose leaf. It instead prints on practically everything else. It can stencil on canvas, wood, plastic, metal, ceramics, and more. It’s not just flat objects, the UV printer can print on stuff like a cylindrical water bottle. Ironically, when we tried printing on paper, we got some of our worst results from the EufyMake E1.
Anker EufyMake E1 UV Printer
The Anker EufyMake E1 fufills its promise of printing on whatever you want, even if it will take a long time to do any of it.
- Offers beautiful print quality
- Can create a faux-3D embossed effect
- Prints on flat surfaces and mugs
- PC/Mac software is easy to use
- Lining up prints can be finicky
- Setup and printing takes time
- Exorbitant price for extra components
And still, there seems to be a holy mandate, perhaps one of Moses’ apocryphal “15 commandments,” that says no printer shall be without annoyances. There are no on-device menus or buttons. EufyMake’s Mac and PC-based Studio software is clean and usable, though automatic object detection can result in a possible missprint.
The UV printer demands time. It’s not fast enough; you can crank out dozens of customized water bottles like some industrial Etsy maker. To make the most out of this machine, you have to first understand the UV printer’s quirks, of which there are many. What I can say for certain is all the images I printed out for friends and colleagues turned out bright, vibrant, and beautiful—or at least, most of them did.
Price will be your biggest hurdle. The EufyMake E1 was originally a Kickstarter project that ran through 2025. Anker claimed it had shipped out the initial units to all backers. Now, the base UV printer bundle is up for preorder for $2,300 with an expected launch date on May 6. The EufyMake E1 is made for small businesses who expect to become a small-scale DIY studio. Otherwise, you’ll need deep pockets if you hope to become the absolute king of gift giving.
Costs an arm and a leg, even for extra ink
The $2,300 basic bundle comes with the necessary ink cartridges, the mini flatbed, and the larger standard flatbed to print on. If you want other accoutrements, like the rotary attachment to print on mugs and a UV DTF laminating machine, that’s an additional $400 for each. For review, Anker generously provided Gizmodo with the entire lineup of accessories and many, many objects to print on. That includes the $2,900 “Deluxe” bundle with all the extra attachments.
In addition, Anker’s EufyMake brand will try to upsell you bundle after bundle of blank ceramic coasters, mugs, metal sheets, canvases, and many other objects to print on. You don’t have to get everything you want from Anker itself. I went out to my local art supplies store and bought a few dozen flat canvas hardboards for less than $10, and they accepted these prints just as nicely as Anker’s $300 “Basic Bundle Materials Kit.”
And then there’s extra ink to consider. The full CMYKWG kit costs $300. A single cartridge of white UV ink demands an extra $43. If you want many extra capsules of white and gray ink, necessary for creating a 3D effect on these prints, you’ll likely end up spending hundreds of dollars more.
If you get the large package, prepare to spend a fair amount of time unboxing and setting everything up. Each ink cartridge inexplicably has its own packaging with foam inserts and a vacuum seal. By the time I had the EufyMake E1 situated, I ended up with a miniature mountain of waste. I felt like Philip J. Fry from Futurama, unpacking and stamping together the two sides of an Oreo cookie just to end up licking the creamy center and tossing the rest.
The UV printer also creates a strong, cloying smell when it’s in the middle of printing. The exhaust from the EufyMake E1 got so bad in our office we had to crack a window. During a marathon, multi-hour printing session, your room may fill with a smell of burning plastic crossed with cooked fish—that is to say, unpleasant.
As a final note, you’ll need extra space on your table or desk for this absolute hunk of a printer. It’s close to 23 inches wide and weighs in at nearly 44 pounds. You’ll always want a stable place for it to print on. The mechanisms driving the inkjet and moving flatbed may shake the foundations of your favorite end table if you’re not careful.
Everything about the EufyMake E1 takes time
After plugging it in, the rest of the setup depends on the EufyMake app. You need to connect it to the same Wi-Fi network as your phone app, but once that’s done, I suggest you abandon the phone app for all future printing needs. The app offers fewer controls than the Mac or PC version of EufyMake Studio. The snapping features that make lining up images with their printing materials are far less refined on mobile.
The EufyMake E1 demands time. After booting it up, it will take several minutes to inject ink and finish a cleanup process. Every time you intend to print on anything but a mug, you need to take a “snapshot” of the printing surface, which is the only way you can ensure your photos are lined up correctly. Depending on whether you’re using the smaller or larger printing bed, this can take between three and seven minutes. That’s because the UV printer needs to measure both the depth and size of each item with a laser array and an 8-megapixel downward-facing “snapshot camera.”
If you thought the printer setup process was a long wait, printing will take even longer, depending on the size of the canvas or objects. A few coasters may take anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes. A larger fabric canvas measuring 12 x 16 inches can take upwards of 30 minutes to print.
Using the snapshot it takes before a print, the EufyMake Studio software will try to determine the edge of where you can print. For example, if you’re printing on a circular coaster, it will set the boundaries of the print to the circle of that coaster. These automatic boundaries can vary in accuracy. Using Anker’s own coasters on the smaller flatbed, the UV printer underestimated the boundaries of each, leaving a small area of unmarked white on top of each coaster.
The snapshot of the bed is just that, a vague approximation of the location of each object you hope to print on. You’re better off manually resizing and cropping photos so they barely overshoot the limits of each object. Even then, I found there were numerous times I underestimated the size of my print with an irregularly shaped canvas. The EufyMake E1 left an ugly white line along the canvas edge where I failed to eclipse the edge. A physical frame may hide such small blemishes. It’s just one more annoyance that keeps the UV printer from being a one-and-done device.
Surprisingly, the easiest way to print was using the rotary attachment. The EufyMake E1 takes a few scant minutes to scan the object and create a grid-lined layout for you to print on. I could easily craft multiple Gizmodo-themed tumblers and water bottles for some members of the office. The “Gizmodo blue” color of the big “G” in our logo was slightly off in our final print, according to Gizmodo’s managing director, Mylène Poncet. Still, I never had an easier time creating merch than with this UV printer.
Some beautiful prints, despite a few oddities
What will matter more than any usability issues is the final print quality. This is where the EufyMake E1 makes the best case for itself, despite oddities and inconsistencies. I set out to print as many images as I could, both artwork and photos. I begged my colleagues for their family and friends’ photos, and I ended up printing way too many cats they took home as souvenirs.
The EufyMake E1 prints at a max resolution of 1,440 DPI, or dots per inch. That’s relatively large for this size of printer. It means your artwork will come out fairly detailed. However, you’re also limited to a total printing surface area of around 13 x 16.5 inches. Anker representatives told me the company was working on an even larger print bed. My dreams of customizing my PC desktop tower’s side panels will have to wait.
The UV printer accepts only the Anker-made UV ink cartridges with the classic CMYKWG color profile. It allows for printing “millions of colors,” though full color accuracy may be somewhat dubious, depending on what you print. Some images I created from my colleagues’ camera rolls came out utterly striking. One smartphone photo, a picture taken from a skiing trip in the French alps, floored me for how vibrant the reds turned out on the canvas.
There were many other moments the platform came down, and I was left slightly disappointed. I’ve been on an amateur photography kick recently ever since I bought my over-expensive Ricoh GR IIIx. I printed several of my recent photos onto miniature canvas blocks and found the images would brighten white areas too much and muddy some of the darker patches.
Print quality will also heavily depend on the size of your pictures. You want to upload the largest, highest-quality photos you can to get the best results. However, the EufyMake E1 rejects file sizes of more than 25MB. Whatever file you upload needs to be in the Goldilocks zone of “just right” to claim the best results. I tried printing one of my photos at a relatively small 1,920 x 1,280 resolution on a metal sheet. The grayish picture was of winter woods surrounded by fog. The printer created a strange sepia tone effect on top of my photo that was not there in the original image. You could see the individual pixels and streaks where the UV ink dried, as if the DPI were accentuating every pixel.
That being said, the fact you can print on practically anything makes this UV printer incredibly versatile. One of my colleagues asked me to print an artistic rendition of his two cats, Danforth and Bolton. The result was surprisingly accurate compared to the original image, with clean lines and fine details. If you compare the art to the final print, the details are represented very well. The major difference is the slightly darker tone throughout the piece, especially the reds.
I further tried printing some classic artwork on a few coasters to compare to their real-life counterparts. Diego Velázquez’ “Las Meninas” came out with an overall darker tone than the image found on Wikimedia Commons. Philip IV’s daughter, Margaret Theresa, has a far more tan dress than in the less-than-accurate scanned image (in real life, the dress should appear white). If you compare a scan of Hans Holbein’s “The Ambassadors” to the printed version, you lose a modicum of detail on a small scale, especially in darker areas of the piece.
Although you can print on anything, your choice of underlying layer may dictate how your print comes out. I’ve been working on a Nerdy Gurdy—a homemade medieval instrument that requires users to glue it together and paint everything themselves. I wanted to add a print of some marginalia figures—including snail-riding rabbits—from real-life medieval manuscripts to the lid of the keybox. I told the EufyMake E1 I was printing on wood when it was technically latex paint on top of wood. The resulting image was far too vague and transparent. If you have any doubts, you may get better results if you leave the material choice as “unknown” before printing.
The cool, faux 3D effect demands a ton of ink
The EufyMake E1 goes a step further than just a regular printer. It can also create an embossed, 3D effect by layering ink multiple times. With enough ink, you can create an almost painterly effect, as if multiple layers of oil paint had dried on the surface. The printer can hit a maximum embossed height of 5mm. If you’ve seen some of metal printmaker Displate’s “Textra” designs, the EufyMake E1 offers a similar 3D effect.
Setting up a textured print takes very little time in the EufyMake Studio. You just hit a button, and the app’s AI models will create contours and thicker areas based on the makeup of the image.
We decided to print one of Gizmodo Senior Editor of Consumer Tech Raymond Wong’s photos on one of Anker’s wooden canvases. A flat print usually take 30 minutes. Adding the 3D effect increased the print time to 5.5 hours. The EufyMake E1 first overlays multiple layers of gray and white ink to create the embossed areas before adding additional colors. That meant 40% of the way through the print, we had to exchange new white and gray ink cartridges.
The final 3D effect was incredible, with a beautiful sheen helping designate areas in the background and foreground. Inexplicably, the UV printer added a column of purple over the image that wasn’t apparent in the original photo. While it didn’t ruin the overall tone of the piece, it’s worth being aware that prints may have unwanted artifacts. Adding the 3D effect is extra costly, both in terms of time and money. If you print smaller, 3D art, you may be able to reduce the amount of ink you use. To save money, you may be better off printing these embossed effects on smaller surfaces, like a water bottle or mug.
A printer built for dedicated creators
Inevitably, with a printer of this size that can jet ink on any surface, I was constantly fighting the impulse to print a motley of art pieces to adorn my office walls. What you have to remember is that living artists and many estates of deceased artists still deserve something for their efforts.
It’s a sense of entitlement. The assumption that, because an artwork is online, you don’t have to pay for its use. Consider how many artists sell prints of their work, which outside of commissions could be a major part of their meager revenue. If you decide to get a UV printer, nobody can stop you from printing all the art you’ve always wished. It’s an ethical gray area, but I would still edge toward paying for prints that are available to support creators. If you try to sell prints of unlicensed artwork, you’re running afoul of more than morals.
If you’re printing your own art for sale, the EufyMake E1 makes for a versatile and slightly finicky merchandise machine that can fit on your desk. At this price, this is one of those devices made for dedicated creators. Perhaps you and a few friends can cobble together the money necessary to share a UV printer and then suffer through a long queue as everybody tries to print their art.
The EufyMake E1 is a first of its kind. Like the 3D printer boom of yesteryear, we’ll hopefully see more UV printers of this caliber. More products usually mean lower prices. One day, you may not have to pay nearly as much for what’s—for the moment—one of the coolest printers ever made.