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Pros
- Impressively small and inexpensive for a laser cutter.
- Accurate cutting.
- Great for etching simple designs and logos.
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Cons
- Not particularly good at etching photos.
- Software is sometimes finicky.
Laser cutters for etching signs, designs, and photos into wood, plastic, and metal are powerful tools, but they're also very large and expensive. Glowforge's cutters run from $2,500 to $6,000, while Epilog's start at $8,000 and head into five digits, and all are massive boxes. Flux's Beamo tries to be the smallest, most affordable laser cutter available, with a $1,499.99 price and a footprint that actually fits on a desk. It's a capable cutter for simple etching, but it isn't nearly as good at detailed burns as the Glowforge Pro. Still, if you just want to etch logos and cut work pieces, this is the most wallet-friendly way to do it.
Relatively Tiny
The black metal Beamo is modestly sized for a laser printer, but downright puny for a laser cutter. At 7.0 by 21.2 by 17.4 inches (HWD), it looks almost travel-sized when sitting next to the Glowforge Pro (8.3 by 38.0 by 20.8 inches). To be sure, both are petite compared with an Epilog cutter, the smallest of which is the size of a large coffee table, but the Beamo box will be at home on a desk or stand too small for any other laser cutter on the market.
The Beamo's top features a flip-up clear door that exposes a work area measuring 8.2 by 11.8 inches, just a bit smaller than a sheet of US letter paper (but big enough for A4 paper). To the right of the door is a 6.0-by-3.2-inch touch screen with a light-up power button below it. When you switch the Beamo on, the screen displays a variety of status and maintenance menus. You can control the device manually to perform maintenance or print pre-exported jobs from the laser's onboard memory or a USB drive. More importantly, you can check the cutter's network status and get its IP address for connecting the Beam Lab software to start using the laser.
Around the back, you'll find an exhaust port for the included duct hose and clamp (you'll need to run the hose out of a window to keep your work area free of possibly hazardous dust and fumes), along with two USB Type-A ports, an Ethernet port, and the power cable connector. One of the USB ports will be occupied after setup by the included Wi-Fi dongle, unless you're running an Ethernet cable from your router.
Beam Lab
To use the Beamo, you need to install the Flux Beam Lab software for macOS, Windows, or Ubuntu Linux. It's a capable package for setting up etches and cuts, though it isn't quite as streamlined or reliable as Glowforge's web-based app. During network hiccups, Beam Lab hanged repeatedly instead of giving an error, requiring me to forcibly close the process.
It also has fewer presets for materials than Glowforge, and the presets are a bit finicky—cutting 3mm thick acrylic using the 3mm Acrylic setting worked fine, but etching that same acrylic with the Shading Engraving Acrylic setting produced results that were too light, forcing me to tinker with the laser's power and speed settings to get a darker etching.
Beam Lab uses a layer system similar to Glowforge's web app, letting you program multiple cuts and etches with different settings for the same job. You can set the laser to etch a surface with one layer, then cut it out neatly with another. The software lets you import bitmaps (photo files such as .jpg) for etches and vector graphics (such as .svg) for cuts. You can also draw simple designs with the app's shape tools, free-form pen, and text input. If you want to simply engrave your name on an item, you don't even need to create a file; you can just make a text box in Beam Lab.
Real-World Results
The Beamo's 30-watt laser is less powerful than the Glowforge Pro's 45-watt unit, but it's still more than capable of cutting acrylic, leather, and wood, as well as etching all of those materials plus anodized metal, glass, rubber, and stone. It can cut acrylic up to 5 millimeters thick and leather or wood up to 3mm thick. As mentioned, the cutter's working area is 8.2 by 11.8 inches (8.2 by 10.2 inches for borderless jobs).
The device isn't quite as good at etching as the Glowforge Pro, because it lacks the latter's 3D etching preset that automatically adjusts laser power to produce burns of different depths based on the darkness of the grayscale picture it's following. There's a Shading mode, but it isn't as effective at keeping fine details. Beamo uses laser pulses to produce dithered gray effects, which look relatively grainy and less detailed.
When I printed a picture of my girlfriend's family on acrylic, the end result was filled with almost static-like dots for the sky, and their faces showed little detail. It looked much better when backlit by a strong light, but on its own the etching was difficult to discern.
Simple patterns like logos, shapes, and text come out much better. I cut some red acrylic squares and etched the PCMag logo on them, and they came out far cleaner than the photo etchings. If you're more interested in branding and patterns than reproducing photos, the Beamo is quite capable.
The Beamo is also a very strong performer for cutting. I had no issue burning a holder for my Gunpla model kit runners (plastic racks filled with individual parts) using three sheets of acrylic and a tweaked design in Inkscape. Using the 3mm acrylic preset, the Beamo cut out the shapes quickly and precisely. Other cutouts also came out just as I intended.
A Solid Entry-Level Laser Cutter
In short, Flux's Beamo is both the most compact and least expensive dedicated laser cutter and engraver we've seen. If you plan on working with wood and acrylic and want a capable cutter to make precision shapes at a fraction of the price of the Glowforge Pro or any Epilog laser, it's an excellent choice. However, you get what you pay for, and the Beamo's etching capabilities aren't nearly as strong as the Glowforge's. That isn't an issue with text and logos, but can be a problem if you want to etch complex art or photos.
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