 We're going to throw our Glowforge Pro, our Omtech Polar 350, and our X-Tool D1 into a ring and see which desktop laser comes out on top. What is up? A welcome back. Do you like to do a build or make it? So do we. And we have a new video each week. So remember to like, subscribe, leave us a comment, and hit that bell to be notified of our new videos. This week, we are doing a triple versus desktop laser challenge. That's right. So we've had our lasers for a while now. We've had the Glowforge for about three years. After the Glowforge, we upgraded to a standalone 100 watt laser. And then about a year ago, we got our X-Tool D1 laser. And then about six months ago, we got our Omtech Polar laser. In this video, we're going to compare the features and functionality of each of these lasers. If you're looking to buy a laser, then you're not sure which one. We're hoping to help you out here and share what we think about each one and a little bit about each of the features that we find the most interesting or the most helpful or even the most fun. We're going to test them in five different categories. And then we'll come up with a winner for each round and then a final winner at the end. Yeah. So let's meet our competitors in this corner. We have our Glowforge Pro, which is a 45 watt CO2 laser coming in at 94 pounds. It's 38 inches wide, 20.75 inches deep and 8.25 inches tall. And in this corner, we have our Omtech Polar 350 laser. It is also a glass tube CO2 laser. It's 50 watts coming in at 104 pounds. Its dimensions are about the same, 38.2 by 22 by 9.2 tall. Finally, in the featherweight division, we have our X-Tool D1. This is a 10 watt diode laser. It comes in at a whopping 11 pounds. This is 23.2 inches square and 6 inches tall. Round one. Price. All right. There are some big differences in prices here. For the Glowforge Pro, it's coming in at about $7,000. For the Omtech Polar 350, you're looking at about $2,900 and then another $100 for the software to go with it. So about $3,000 for that one. And laser number three is our X-Tool D1 laser and this one's coming in at about $1,100. There is a large price gap between all three of these lasers and I'm hoping in the next few rounds we'll find out why. But the winner of this round is the X-Tool D1. Looking at $1,100, you can't beat that. That is a great price point to come in for an entry level laser. Round two. Set up. So what does it take to actually get going? Well, for the Glowforge Pro, we were up and running in about 30 minutes. We really just took it out of the box, hooked it up to the internet, connected to the webpage, vented it out the window, and then it had a little QR code on all the materials. So all of our speed and power settings were good to go. It has a camera for autofocus, so I didn't even need to know how thick the material was. And at that time we didn't know anything about autofocus, speed, power. We didn't know about any of those things. I simply loaded a graphic and hit print. It was really easy. Total plug and play. For the Omtik Polar Laser, it was pretty easy. All you had to do was take it out of the box, remove some of the packing materials. It was super easy and quick to hook up the inline fan and the exhaust. There's a little setup time in software because we're using light burn, so you had to install the software. It was very easy to connect to the Polar Laser itself. What really takes time for the Polar Laser is it doesn't have some of those hand-holding features that the Glowforge has. We had to determine the focal height for the materials that we were using. We had to run a speed and power test to determine the proper speed and power for the materials that we were using. And we had to set up our camera for light burn. So there's a little more involved with the setup of the Omtik Polar Laser. It's not difficult. It just takes a little more time and a little less hand-holding along the way. Not as plug and play. For the X-Tool D1 Laser, that also took about 60 to 90 minutes. I'm going more with 90 minutes because we had to put it all together. We had to put the rails and belts together. It was pretty simple, but it did take a little bit of time. Yeah, this one requires assembly. So you are screwing the rails together. You're putting all of those belts on. You're adding some zip ties, running some cables. Like Garrett said, it's not very hard to do. But one step at a time following the video, it just takes a little bit of time. Connecting to the machine was also a breeze. You could connect by a USB. And then with the materials that it came with, it also came with a little guide of speed and power settings. So we would just flip the arm down. That would give us our autofocus. And then use the speed and power settings on our materials card. The great thing about all three of these lasers is they do come with some test materials. Glowforge came with several different boards with QR codes on them. So again, you don't have to know the speed and power settings or anything about that. With the Omtech Polar, it also came with several different size boards, thicknesses of boards. It came with some acrylic. And it was really nice to have that materials pack. The materials pack I loved the most, though, was the X Tool D1. Yes. I mean, they had the regular boards that you would get with the Glowforger Omtech with the acrylic and everything. But they went above and beyond. They sent some little silicone rings. Jewelry type things like a bracelet and a little charm. And then some dowels. Yeah, some dog tags. Dowels. I mean, it was like a treasure chest of test materials. Yeah. So I love that about the X Tool. There was a variety of things. It really let you know the types of things you can engrave on or even cut. It was pretty fun. It was pretty fun to open that box. Yeah. Like dig it through an old toy box. The winner for this one is the winner. It is Glowforge. It's the Glowforge Pro. I mean, it was very plug and play. I didn't need to know a thing between the camera and the autofocus. I literally helped me running in 30 minutes. Right. We came in blind. We finished set up blind. But we were cutting. We were cutting. Round 30, machine specs. What are they made of? So the great thing about all three of these is that they all use a 110 regular household outlet. You don't need a special outlet. You don't need special power. You can plug them all right into the wall. Next is bed size. So the cut area for the Glowforge Pro is 11 by 19 and a half. And actually, you're not limited to that 11 inches. Because of the passenger slot, it's really 19 and a half by infinity. By infinity. The Omtech Polar 350, the bed size is 11.8 by 19.5. It's a little bit taller than the Glowforge. It's got a little more room. And it does have a pass-through slot. So you can go infinity. But it's a manual pass-through slot, meaning you'll have to line it up in the software each time you pass it through. Whereas the Glowforge will really assist with that. For the X-Tool D1 laser, the cut area is 16.93 by 15.75. This is more of a square cut area and gives you just a little more room both ways. But the great thing about this one is you can actually pick it up and set it on things. Especially if you're engraving and you want to engrave on top of a whiskey barrel. You can set it right up there and engrave something right on the top of it. And it will also kind of work as a pass-through. But again, you'll have to manually line that in the software. Now next is material thickness. What can these things cut through? So for the Glowforge Pro, we find that it'll cut through quarter inch. Pretty efficiently. Now the specs on the Glowforge's website says it'll cut through up to a half inch with multiple passes, potentially flipping it over. I'm doubtful. So just our personal opinion, I'm not sure I could do a half inch on the Glowforge Pro. I think you could for smaller cuts with multiple passes. I'm not really sure about that flipping over thing. That seems hard to do. I don't think that would work. For the Omtech Polar Laser, it's saying 3 eighths of an inch. So that's believable. But it would probably be at a very low speed and probably multiple passes. But it does get through quarter inch MDF just as fast. It's not faster than the Glowforge. And for the X-Tool D1 Laser, that also goes through quarter inch. If you're going to go anything thicker than that, which I think it says it can go up to half inch, you're going to need, I think I read, 10 passes to get there. At 1 millimeter per second at 100% power. And I don't know who has that kind of time or that many fire extinguishers around. That is just a fire waiting to happen. I did get through quarter inch MDF using three passes at 2 millimeters per second and 100% power. So it is possible. It will cut it. It's just not a machine you're going to use for cutting every day. It will cut when you need it to on occasion. It's kind of an on occasion cutting type of laser. Round three machine specs winner is Omtech Polar 350. Yeah, this one was pretty close. We decided to go with Omtech because it's a little more power. The bed is just slightly bigger. They both have the pass through. They're very, very similar. Yeah, very similar. But we mainly cut through things. So I like the more powerful tube and the bigger cutting area. Round four interface. How do we talk to this thing? GlowForge uses their proprietary software. It is a web-based application. It's a $50 a month subscription. You have to have an internet connection to connect to it. And then you'll also have to have Wi-Fi to connect from your laptop to the GlowForge machine itself. But the great thing about the GlowForge subscription is there's so many features and functionality out there. There's a lot of features within the software itself. They provide cut files. They provide images, clip art. There's just so many cool things about their software. The Omtech Polar 350 uses light burn software. It's a $100 licensing fee. It does have lots of features. It doesn't have all the features that come with the GlowForge proprietary software, but it does have lots of features that it even includes using the camera. You don't need to have just an internet connection. You can connect to it through Wi-Fi, USB, or even an ethernet. So you're not required to have any kind of internet connection. You can be offline, connect directly to your machine and use it. The other great thing about light burn is that they're always putting out new releases and new features and functionality. Maybe not all those bells and whistles of the GlowForge software, but still they're always updating it and bringing out new features. And they're used so widely that the X-Tool D1 laser also uses the light burn software. For this one, you can connect to your X-Tool D1 laser using USB or Wi-Fi. Round four winner actually is a tie. I chose the Omtech Polar Laser with the light burn software because of the camera functionality. Now I chose the GlowForge as you can see because all the cool features and functionality that GlowForge provides, there's just so much hand-holding with the GlowForge. But really, when you talk about light burn, training wheels are off, you're gonna do some of the same cool things and even more, there are some things that light burn can do that GlowForge doesn't have available yet as a feature. So it's really such a toss-up. Yeah, this is a hard one, this is a hard one. We really negotiated on which was the winner. I also like being able to work offline though. Well, that's huge. I know if you've seen any GlowForge forums, one of the biggest complaints is that you have to be connected to the internet. So if you live in a rural area and a storm rolls through and you don't have any internet, you're gonna have to wait to work. But that's not necessarily the case if you're using light burn or in this case, the Omtech Polar Laser or your X-Tool D1 Laser. Round of five, features. What kind of bells and whistles do these things come with? Well, our GlowForge Pro comes with autofocus. I love this autofocus. It has a second camera on the laser head itself that will tell me how thick my material is. And the camera, the camera is great. The camera is on the lid and it has a self alignment. It will do all of the aligning of that camera itself. It is great, but there's no frame feature. So you can't frame out where on the material that the image will land. You have to trust the camera. It does have air assist, but that's basically just a built-in computer fan that just kinda spits air towards your cut. It doesn't actually clear the smoke or debris and assist that laser getting through. It just kinda spits out the smoke. Which causes a little bit of char which requires you with the GlowForge to do a lot of masking of your materials. You can get around some of that char with the masking, but it is an extra step. It does have exhaust. It comes with an internal fan, but you're probably gonna need an external inline fan or even that optional GlowForge air filter, but that thing's expensive. It does not have a rotary attachment nor can you use a rotary attachment with the GlowForge Pro or any of the GlowForges. But it does have image trace. Because it's got the camera on the lid, I can put an image, like a piece of paper image, in the bed, take a snapshot of it, have the software convert that to a cut file, replace that piece of paper with some materials and cut that thing out. So real scan and cut feature? Yeah, it's kinda like a scan and cut, yeah. The old scan and cut. So for the Omtech Polar Laser, let's compare the same features. Autofocus, yes, kind of it has an autofocus feature. Not as cool as the GlowForge, but the way that Omtech Polar Laser has designed their autofocus feature is that they're telling you where your bed size sits. Then you subtract the thickness of your material, you enter that in light burn, and it automatically adjusts that Z-axis or your laser head to the correct focal length. So it doesn't do it completely hands off like the GlowForge does, but. We'll call it semi-manual. So, but it is considered, on their website, they do consider that their autofocus. So it does have autofocus. You do have to manually align the camera when we first set up light burn. We had to use a dot pattern to align the camera and get that going, but it's nice to have that camera feature. It will show you where your image is going to cut on your material. So it'll show you directly in your laser bed and you can move your image around to, you know, maybe a free section. You're a used piece of wood. This is a free area on that piece of wood. You can line it up and know exactly where you're going to cut at. Well, I did use that camera on the Polar Laser to align some images on coat hangers. And they landed exactly where I wanted them to. Yeah, the camera feature is really nice. It does have the frame feature. So you're not necessarily tied to having to use the camera every time. If you're going to do something really quick, you can just hit frame and you can see, oh, yeah, if it's going to fit in my space right there and you don't need that perfect placement. But if you want that perfect placement like those hangers we did, yes, you have that option. Because it has great air assist, it really does have true air assist. There's very little to no masking with the Omtech Polar Laser. Those cuts are clean. It comes standard with an inline fan and this fan has some serious power. It has, what is my specs here? 282 to 303 cubic feet per minute. It really moves that air. You really don't see a whole lot of dust or smoke. You really don't see a lot of smoke buildup in that laser bed. And it comes with the rotary attachment. And not only does it come with one rotary attachment, it comes with two rotary attachments for different types of or different sizes of tumblers or there's just so many other things. Jewelry. There's lots of things that are round and you want that rotary feature. That was one of the big reasons why we got our X Tool D1 Laser was for that rotary feature. So we love that about the Omtech Polar. And when we talk to Image Trace, the Omtech Polar will do that as well. You can put an image right in your bed. Let's say you have a picture of a butterfly. You can lay it down in there. It'll scan that butterfly, turn it into a cut file, put your wood in and it cuts it right out. The last but not least is the featherweight, the X Tool D1. Does it have auto focus? Kind of. Kind of. You just flip an arm down that's on the side of the laser head and drop it up against your material, tighten the laser head and flip that arm back up. I mean that is the fastest of any of these focusings. I wouldn't say it's an auto focus, but it sure is an easy focus and it is the fastest. It's faster than what the Glowforge will set its cameras and do its measurements. It's faster than me doing the math out of my material thickness and entering it into light burn. I don't need to know how thick it is. I just drop it till it hits. Yep, unscrew it, set that arm down, screw it back in, flip the arm up and you're good to go. It does not have a camera. I don't think you need a camera with this because it does have that light dot framing. So it may not be precise, but it'll be good enough. It'll show you where it's going to put its image and you'll be able to make sure that your cut image is in the right area on your material, whether it's your tumbler or it's your bed. This one also comes with some really good air assist. I was surprised, but with this air assist, I mean it's not beefy, but it does keep your cuts clean. It comes with this cute little motor that sits off to the side. It does a great job of blowing the air in and the other great thing about that little motor which might be surprising is it has these four little suction feet on the bottom. It keeps it super quiet. Yes, it's very quiet. It does not come with any exhaust. I mean, you're just a raw dog and all the smoke that comes off of that thing. You really do have to be in a well-ventilated area. This thing isn't gonna be up in your bedroom unless you step out, close the door and then you can't see what's going on. Yeah, but then your whole room will smell like whatever you want to cut. True, true. It's gotta be outside in your garage with the door open or I don't know. They do make cases that you can set over top of it that you can then hook up into an inline fan but I don't have one. Yeah, we don't have that. So I can't really speak to that. I do know that when we use our XLD one, we take it out to the warehouse. It doesn't let off a ton of smoke or a ton of fumes but we don't use it in this room. We do really need it out there in the warehouse. It does get smoky. It's not as cool as the Polar Laser coming with two rotary attachments but it does come with one adjustable rotary attachment so you can put different circumference items in the same attachment. That was one of the big selling features for us for that XLD one laser is we really wanted to engrave tumblers and that's the whole reason, I would say that was 90% of the reason why I got it. Yeah, me too. I really wanted to be able to do tumblers. So we love that and that's one of the strengths of the XLD one laser is that engraving so it's perfect for that. It does not have image trace capabilities. There's no camera on it so it can't scan anything. It does not need a water chiller. What we didn't mention was that both the Glowforge Pro and the Omtech Polar 350 both come with built in water chillers. There's no maintenance for those. It does use like in our big 100 watt lasers we need a whole separate water chiller. The great thing about these desktop lasers is they require a water chiller but it's built in no maintenance. Did you know you could get all of our files behind the scene content and even a Kim and Garrett After Dark podcast? As well as monthly Zoom calls, access to a secret Facebook group and we'll even send you one of these fancy t-shirts all for $20 a month. It's the best way to support this channel. So join us over at patreon.com. Wrap up. What did we learn? Who won? Well, in our opinion, we're gonna have to say that the Omtech Polar 350 is the winner and it's not to say we don't love our Glowforge. I think it was a tight race. Yes. I love all of my children the same. $3,000. You get all the features and functionality that you're gonna wanna use with a desktop laser and you're getting that rotary attachment, the exhaust, all of the features and functionality for $3,000. And I feel like that's in the middle. You have 7,000 on one end, 1100 on the other and this is just a happy medium with all of the bells and whistles of both. Well, maybe not all the hand holding, but it does have that rotary attachment. And again, the reason why we're talking about these as desktop lasers is because these things can all be used in your craft room. So this isn't a requirement of having to fill your garage with a full standalone desktop laser like we've done. The great thing about these desktop lasers is that it can be used on a tabletop out of the way. The D1 is light and portable, where the Glowforge or the Omtechs can be put right in your craft room, vented out a window and you can use it as one of your crafting tools. Have you gotten a laser? Are you still in the market? What laser are you planning on getting? Did this help at all? Leave me a comment down below to let us know. Otherwise, we are about out of time, so if you're not gonna join us for our patron after show, we will see you next week where we'll do it, build it and make it again. And don't forget to join us on Tuesdays for our lives, where we'll paint a new door sign, chat with you live for about an hour. All right, we'll catch you later.