This is our Trotec Speedy 400, and it is a workhorse of a laser cutter. It's an industrial-level machine with industrial-level reliability and industrial-level performance, but like most industrial things, it comes with industrial-level maintenance costs. And we really do love our Trotec, but for the price of a single replacement part in this, we can get a whole new laser cutter, specifically an X-Tool P3. So what are you getting for your money?

We got kicked out of production because they're producing things and that's apparently too loud for filming. We do a lot of laser cutting here at Core. Jigs or prototypes for our production team, mounting plates for our PicoDev system, cases for Pi's, custom gift cards for school programs. We do a lot of random and regular laser cutting, and our Trotec has been an absolute unit of a machine for about a decade now. There is a reason why we recommend Trotec to anyone that listens. Right now, though, our machine needs a service and a new laser tube.

All machines eventually fail, and thankfully Trotec makes getting your machine fixed super easy. However, it's going to set us back about $12,500 for a new laser tube and labor. So when X-Tools released the P3, a desktop laser cutting machine that boasted near industrial-level performance for about the cost of a single laser tube, a part that we have to replace every two to three years, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't buy one of these on the company credit card and have a play around with it. X-Tools has been a bit of a disruptor for the last few years.

They started off making cheap and cheerful diode laser cutters, and a couple of generations later, we have the P3, their flagship large format cutter that tries to take industrial functionality and shrink it down to a desktop size and price tag. And it does it pretty well. The P3 is an 80-watt laser cutter, a nice level of power that lets you cut things quite fast. It has a 916 by 457 millimeter work area, what a mouthful, a very generous bed height, and a max speed of about 1200 millimeters a second, which is pretty decently quick.

If you pay extra like we did, you can get a whole bunch of goodies like an AP2 Max air filter so you can run it indoors, as well as a rotary cutter and conveyor system, which increases your work area to technically infinity. We'll talk more about that later. Now, there are lots of options for gantry-style laser cutters in this price range, and they all have different trade-offs, you know, bigger work area, more powerful laser, quicker gantry system. But something right now that's a bit unique to X-Tool and the P3 is the ease of use.

And I think that this is the biggest selling point for the P3, not only just for us here at Core, but also just in the wider laser cutting community that seem to have adopted it as well. First of all, assembly was a breeze. The documentation was really great, and there was clearly just so much thought put into the process. You could set everything up and get cutting in, I reckon, a couple of hours. The real ease of use, though, is in the software, X-Tool Studio. It is just a delight to use.

And on the P3, it goes even further as it integrates LiDAR and camera systems into the whole workflow. Open the lid, place your material on the bed, and then in the lid is a camera that takes a photo of your whole work area that will appear in X-Tool Studio. This makes it super easy to line up your material, and you can even take a close-up photo with another camera that's on the cutting head, and this lets you really accurately place your cut or engrave on something. You can also stitch together multiple close-ups to get a high-resolution view of everything.

It's just so darn cool. It feels like you're using a space satellite looking down on stuff and, like, enhance, enhance, zoom in. I don't know. When you close the lid, it auto-levels with LiDAR, which we found to be pretty darn reliable. And this camera system with the auto-leveling and just X-Tool Studio's general ease of use, it makes it so easy to just get a job on the bed and smash out a prototype or something like that. Look, I could rant about how good X-Tool Studio is for the rest of the video, but just one more example.

Stick with me, all right? When you use a material, it's often a good idea to run a power speed test to find the optimal cutting settings. X-Tool Studio has an inbuilt materials library where they've already done this for each material that you're probably going to be using. Now, they give you the best settings when you select the material, but each of these test cuts is actually a button that you can select to apply those settings. Like, what? Oh my God, that is genuinely one of the coolest things I've ever seen in a piece of digital fabrication software.

I cannot stop talking about it. Every time somebody asks, like, what's good about the P3? I'm like, look at this. And they're like, oh, that's pretty cool. I feel like I'm overly excited about that. I don't know. All right, a little anecdote here that's relevant, and I can't stop thinking about it. I bought a Prusa Mark II in 2016. It was a killer machine and an absolute workhorse, but it came from a bit of an older age of 3D printers where you had to really understand the machine. You were often babying it to get good results.

Then in 2023, I upgraded to a Bamboo P1S, and I was just amazed at how easy it was to print something. There were so many automated systems and software niceties that it just worked out of the box. You didn't need to know the machine inside out. The P3 feels like that jump, going from a machine that you sort of got to know to a machine where you just, you know, line it up on the camera and hit cut or engrave, and, you know, it just works. Both machines can do phenomenal work, but one saves you time messing around, and it's just effortless to use.

And this is great for us here at Core because, you know, easy machine, less faffing around. That's pretty self-explanatory. But the fact that someone outside of the production team could figure out how to get something cut for their own project with minimal fuss, that's pretty sweet. But I also imagine that for a setup in a library or makerspace, this would be stellar as well. The steepness of that learning curve to get going with the machine is so much less, and it's kind of brought laser cutting to the point where people from very non-technical backgrounds can happily learn to use a machine like this.

One more thing I want to touch on, features. This machine packs them. Now, disclosure, we haven't set up a lot of our extra goodies yet, but we probably will in the future for specific guides that we'll be making on them. Like most machines, it has a rotary attachment for engraving round things. I've gone ahead and looked at the whole process of it yet. I haven't used it, but it does look way easier to use than other machines, thanks to X-Tool Studio. Again, I said I'd shut up about X-Tool Studio, but it just keeps coming back.

The P3 also has a funky conveyor system, which lets the machine slide materials through itself, and this expands your work area to 600 millimeters by technically infinite. As long as you can support your materials on both sides and find a piece of stock large enough, you can cut whatever length thing you want, as long as it is 600 millimeters wide or less. We have a few large signs that we want to get cut up, and this is just going to be so fantastic for that. Just a tidbit on the conveyor, though, it does kind of open up the machine and expose the internals a bit, so it does turn it from a class one laser device to a class four, so there are some extra safety requirements there.

With the LiDAR system, you can perform engraving on 3D surfaces as well. It doesn't have to be flat. I don't see us personally using that much here, but I can definitely see the value of that for a lot of other people and their use cases. And just as a nice thing, X-Tools lets you get an IR laser module and just whack it on your gantry, and you can engrave things onto metal. CO2 lasers can't really work on metal very well. It's also got a few flame sensors on the inside and an optional CO2 extinguisher to automatically put out fires.

You obviously still have to watch your laser cutter at all times, but it's just a bit of extra peace of mind to know that it has these systems. So, like most things in life, making a laser cutter is an optimization problem, and I feel like the P3 gets it pretty right. Instead of using a fancy metal RF laser tube, it uses a water-cooled glass tube. It would be really nice to have a metal tube, do not get me wrong, but an 80-watt tube like that would make the machine cost a fortune. You could replace the stepper motors driving the gantry with high-end industrial servos and get triple, if not quadruple, the cutting speeds. Again, though, that would cost a lot of money.

You could spend a bit of money and develop some really nice and easy-to-use software for your machine, which they did. The P3 just seems to strike a nice balance and results in a machine that is beginner friendly and provides a really premium experience, but it still a machine that feels capable of serious work. And that is a really strong selling point for a machine that is aimed at the high-end of the non-industrial use.

So, are we going to throw out our Trotec and commit solely to the P3? Probably not anytime soon. I wanna make it clear, this video is not meant to talk smack about Trotec, we love our Trotec machine and these two will probably be working side by side for a while. But, if I were in charge of fitting out a makerspace for a uni, or if I were starting a home business with a limited budget. The value proposition of the P3 is an extremely attractive offer. If you do wanna read a bit more about the P3, we have a more in-depth written guide linked below. Regardless, until next time. Happy making.