3d Printer K Screen resolution and XY resolution Explained

When buying a Resin Printer, not all the ideal comparison information is available. There's much talk about screen resolution, spouting things like 2K, 4K, 6K, 8K, etc, but that alone does not make a fine quality resin print. So let's just look at these various snippets of information and see what they are - and how to calculate them for comparison purposes (the video at the bottom of this page will help too).

2K, 4K, etc. What’s It Mean?

Don’t be fooled by the K values of screens. These figures merely depict the number of pixels along a screens X Axis (the longer side). So a 4K printer has 4000 pixels (with K of course meaning a thousand).

XY Resolution

This is being seen as an increasingly common unity of comparison. In essence, it combines the pixels values and the physical sizes of both X and Y axis. It’s easy enough to calculate:

X axis length in mm divided by X axis Pixels multiplied by 1000 to convert to microns

Lower XY Resolution results are more advantageous and it demonstrates a finer print quality performance.

Pixels Per Inch (PPI)

PPI is probably a better comparative tool, but is less frequently provided by manufacturers. The premise is simple enough – in a given area (in this case a one inch cube), the more pixels are present, the sharper and more details the result. So, bigger is better. Calculating this isn’t difficult but it can involve a use of Pythagoras Theorem. The calculation is:

The number of Pixels on the screen diagonal divided by the length of the diagonal in inches

Whilst finding the X and Y values is easy enough, an accurate Diagonal measurement is unusual. Hence the need for a little Pythagoras.

Summary

The above is a very quick look at the topic I covered in much more detail in my video below.