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Glowforge Basic Review

editors choice horizontal
4.5
Outstanding
By Will Greenwald
Updated February 5, 2020

The Bottom Line

The Glowforge Basic offers powerful laser cutting and etching in a large work area for a relatively reasonable price.

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Pros

  • Relatively affordable.
  • Large print area.
  • Reasonably fast and powerful.
  • Works with a variety of materials for etching and cutting.

Cons

  • Requires good ventilation or a $1,000 Compact Filter.

Cutting lasers are powerful tools, but they're also quite expensive. The 45-watt Glowforge Pro, for instance, costs nearly $6,000and even that's less than most commercial options from companies like Epilog. You can get a much less pricey laser cutter in the form of the Glowforge Basic, which is just as large as the Pro and uses only a slightly less powerful 40W laser for $2,495. It's an ideal starter model, capable of handling fairly large jobs with ease for a fraction of the price of its larger sibling or more intimidating commercial lasers, and earns our Editors' Choice.

Design

The Glowforge Basic is identical in size and shape to the Glowforge Pro. It looks like a large-format printer, measuring 8.3 by 38.0 by 21.0 inches (HWD), with a large glass door that folds up on the top panel. A second, metal door flips down from the front of the laser, and opening both doors offers complete access to the internal cavity and its 11.0-by-19.5-inch cutting area.

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This cavity contains the laser head, which is mounted on a metal arm and can slide freely in all four directions thanks to tracks on its sides. The liquid-cooled laser tube sits, fixed, in the back of the cavity. A removable black crumb tray fits in the bottom, providing a surface on which to place your work material and plenty of room underneath for dust and small bits of material to fall through.

Glowforge Basic

The only physical difference between the Glowforge Basic and the Glowforge Pro is that the Basic lacks a feeder slot. The Glowforge Pro can accept materials of unlimited length (assuming you have the space in front of and behind the laser to feed them), as long as they're less than 20 inches wide. The Glowforge Basic is limited to pieces up to 18 inches long and 20 inches wide, which is still a pretty generous area. Both lasers still have cutting areas of 11.0 by 19.5 inches. This is plenty for many projects, and far more than the tiny Flux Labs Beamo's 8-by-10-inch workspace (though the Beamo can actually fit on a desk without any problems). Even Epilog lasers start with around the same amount of space as the Glowforge Basicthe Zing 16 has a 16-by-12-inch cutting area.

The top of the Glowforge contains one of the few physical controls and status indicators in the form of a big circular button in the lower right corner. The button lights up teal when it's ready to set up and white when it's ready to cut. Pressing the button when it's white starts a burn, while holding it down forces the laser into setup mode.

Besides the button, the only other indication of the laser's status are the two rows of white LEDs on the sides of the cavity, lighting up the work area when turned on. Similarly, the only other physical control is a power switch on the lower left corner of the back of the laser, next to the power connector. Everything between turning the Glowforge on and starting a burn takes place through the web app and not on the laser itself.

The back of the Glowforge also holds an exhaust vent, which connects to the included flexible duct tube. Burning lasers need ventilation because of the fumes and dust they produce, so you'll need to run the duct out of a window, or buy the optional $995 Compact Filter, a box with its own intake fan and very large filter cartridge that safely collects the exhaust from the Glowforge without an external outtake.

Glowforge Basic

Setup and Software

First, you have to unpack the laser, remove all of the brackets and bits of tape holding the components for shipping, and connect the laser head to the moving arm by slotting it onto a magnetic mount and plugging in a rhythm cable. After that, plug in the laser, flip the power switch on, and wait for the button to glow teal. The Glowforge web app will then walk you through connecting to the laser's ad-hoc Wi-Fi network, and making it join your Wi-Fi network. Once all that's done, you can start burning.

The Glowforge web app is simple and straightforward. It can accept bitmaps for etching and vector graphics for cutting, implementing a layer system that lets you arrange multiple cuts and etches at once. Sizing designs is as easy as dragging and dropping, and a camera under the lid provides a view of most of the workspace.

Be aware that the Glowforge Basic, like every other laser we've tested, is loud. The laser itself is effectively silent, but because it's burning various materials and requires ventilation, it needs powerful fans to flush out the dust and fumes it kicks up. Those fans are very noisy, whether you use the laser's built-in exhaust with a duct leading to the outside or the intake fan in the Compact Filter.

Cutting Materials and Speed

The Glowforge Basic can etch and cut multiple materials easily, including acrylic, leather, paper, rubber, and wood. It can engrave all of these materials as well, along with anodized metal, ceramic, glass, and stone.

Glowforge sells its own cutting materials, like acrylic and wood, under the name Proofgrade. If you use a Proofgrade material, the protective film on it will have a QR code that the laser will use to automatically identify the material and configure the correct laser settings. This isn't necessary, though; you can manually choose from dozens of laser presets based on material and use your own.

According to Glowforge, the Basic is about a third the speed of the Pro in burning, with a slightly weaker 40-watt laser. Despite this, the Basic was speedy enough in test cuts and engravings. It cut out the components of a box and a set of calipers from Glowforge's sample projects in draft board in under 25 minutes, and engraved three acrylic plates with simple images in just over an hour. Larger and more detailed engravings will of course take longer, especially if you use the HD Graphic option for more clarity in the burn, and you shouldn't be surprised to see burn times of seven hours for particularly big photo engravings.

Glowforge Basic

Performance

I performed multiple test burns with the Glowforge Basic, both cutting and engraving various shapes and graphics on acrylic and wood. The different parts of the aforementioned draft board box and calipers I cut came out accurately and precisely, with smooth, even edges. The delineated measurement marks on the calipers match the millimeter, centimeter, and inch markings of a small commercial tape measure. The smaller markings got a bit scorched because I removed the protective film on the material before burning, but the cuts and markings were still precise. Had I kept the film on, or perhaps used plywood instead, the results would have looked cleaner.

An acrylic plate of the PCMag logo came out precisely, with the laser etching the red material white with a noticeable emboss in the acrylic. Using the laser to cut the logo out from a larger plate produced even smoother edges.

Logos and simple graphics are easy, but photos are tricky to properly burn. The Glowforge Basic, like the Glowforge Pro, has Draft, SD, and HD options for both graphics and photos, but complex photos aren't always served well by these options and how they dither laser pulses to produce shading. A 3D Photo option uses a different method of handling shading, burning deeper into the material to represent the darker parts of the image, and tends to produce the best results if you properly prepare your photo first (a fairly direct but technical editing process that requires turning any photo from color to black and white, adjusting levels to round out and center the histogram, and sharpening the photo slightly more than usual).

Glowforge Basic

After preparing a photo of a friend using the free software Paint.net, I made a test burn in clear acrylic. It turned out surprisingly well, with most details like the markings of a camera and a bus in the background coming through sharply. Very fine details, like the much smaller markings around the camera's lens, became slightly indistinct, but considering the relatively small seven-by-five-inch size of the design, the overall results are still very sharp.

I then made a book-shaped box out of walnut plywood. Its sides are interference fit, while its spine has a curved hardcover look with a series of parallel cuts that provide the material with enough flexibility to bend. There's even a sliding latch system consisting of three wooden plates held in place with four teeth on the side of the book. The box is functional and technically impressive, especially for a simple 15-minute cutting job. It highlights how creative you can get when working with a laser cutter and a variety of materials.

An Affordable Way to Burn

The Glowforge Basic is a powerful, flexible laser cutter and etcher. At $2,500, it costs less than half as much as the Glowforge Pro while only giving up some cutting speed and a feeder for very long pieces, and for just $600 more than the Flux Beamo it offers well over double the workspace and a faster, more powerful laser. Compared with Epilog and other commercial cutting lasers, the Glowforge Basic is a downright steal, and a fantastic way to get into laser etching and cutting, earning our Editors' Choice.

Glowforge Basic
4.5
Editors' Choice
Pros
  • Relatively affordable.
  • Large print area.
  • Reasonably fast and powerful.
  • Works with a variety of materials for etching and cutting.
View More
Cons
  • Requires good ventilation or a $1,000 Compact Filter.
The Bottom Line

The Glowforge Basic offers powerful laser cutting and etching in a large work area for a relatively reasonable price.

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About Will Greenwald

Lead Analyst, Consumer Electronics

I’ve been PCMag’s home entertainment expert for over 10 years, covering both TVs and everything you might want to connect to them. I’ve reviewed more than a thousand different consumer electronics products including headphones, speakers, TVs, and every major game system and VR headset of the last decade. I’m an ISF-certified TV calibrator and a THX-certified home theater professional, and I’m here to help you understand 4K, HDR, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and even 8K (and to reassure you that you don’t need to worry about 8K at all for at least a few more years).

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Glowforge Basic $2,495.00 at Glowforge
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