Anycubic Photon P1 Known Issues: 22 Problems and Fixes

The Anycubic Photon P1 is a 2026 MSLA resin printer at $599 with a 10.1-inch 14K mono LCD (13320×5120, 16.8×24.8 μm pixels), a 223×126×230 mm build volume, a vat heated to 40 °C, and an optional dual-vat kit for printing two materials at once. It prints beautifully: TechRadar logged a 100% success rate across 20-plus prints, and 3Dwork recorded not a single failure over 100-plus hours of testing. What nobody tells you before you buy is the list of quirks underneath: transition layers that double your print time, levelling screws people actually strip, and a screen film everyone mistakes for a protector.

Below are 22 issues specific to the Photon P1, each backed by Anycubic's own documentation, hands-on reviews with real measurements, or owner reports from 2026. Generic resin problems — prints sticking to the film, elephant's foot, dialling in exposure — live in our resin printing failures guide and aren't repeated here.

The first 10% of layers takes hours, and the time estimate is off by half

This is the most common P1 complaint and the most maddening one. The slicer promises 6 hours, the printer takes 9 or 10. Watch the camera and you'll see the first few hundred layers crawling along at 50–70 seconds each, then the machine suddenly wakes up and finishes the rest at normal speed. Print quality is perfect, which somehow makes it worse.

One owner put numbers on it: a 3621-layer file where the first ~400 layers ate 5 hours and the remaining 3200 took another 5. Another, running the stock Anycubic Tough Resin profile, measured a consistent 1 minute 11 seconds per layer across 3333 layers — a 10-hour estimate that turned into roughly 65 hours.

Two separate mechanisms are responsible. First, transition layers: the stock P1 profile uses 15 of them, and exposure ramps down slowly from bottom-layer values across that stretch. Second, the intelligent light-off delay (Light-Off Compensation), which calculates resin flow-back time and inserts a pause before every single layer.

1. Open the profile in Photon Workshop and find Transition Layer Count. Stock value is 15 — drop it to 5.
2. Turn off the intelligent light-off delay in the same panel. Anycubic's docs advise against lowering light-off time, so if you start seeing under-cured bottom-layer edges, put it back as a fixed value instead of the smart one.
3. Update firmware and slicer. Anycubic fixed the P1's wildly wrong time estimate in Photon Workshop 4.1.6 — older builds lied harder.
4. Re-run the same file and compare. If the opening layers no longer eat half the job, that was it.

The smart algorithms break calibration and introduce wobble

The Photon P1 adapts lift speed and exposure on the fly through Dynamic Release 3.0 and Light-Off Compensation 3.0. Great on paper; in practice two identical layers don't print identically. An owner who got a review unit straight from Anycubic says the dynamic mode "leads to unstable quality and wobbling" and doesn't recommend it for production work. Tom's Hardware put it more gently in the cons list: the AI features "can be a little touchy".

One more limitation worth knowing up front: Photon Workshop has no UV power or PWM setting. If your resin overcures even at 0.7 s normal exposure — and that exact case is documented in the community — there's nothing to trim but the exposure time itself. That's a support ticket: the firmware does have internal power scaling, and an individual unit can ship misconfigured.

Dual mode disables vat heating and cuts your build area to a third

Two-material printing is the P1's headline feature, and the marketing skips the important part. Switch to Dual Mode and intelligent release, intelligent light-off and print heating all vanish from the print options. Anycubic's own guide states it in one line; FauxHammer says it plainly — the dual vat has no heating function at all.

The second surprise hits as soon as the kit is installed: area. Instead of 223×126 mm you get roughly 126×66 mm per side at 195 mm height, and each vat holds 350 ml instead of a litre. Layer height and anti-aliasing must match across both zones — only the resin profile and exposure are independent.

• Treat dual-material jobs as their own workflow: warm the resin bottle in a water bath beforehand, because the vat won't do it for you.
• Keep the room at 20–25 °C. With no heating and no dynamic compensation, a cold workshop hits your success rate directly.
• Level both plates separately before your first dual print — the wizard walks you through the dual-plate procedure.
• The small vats earn their keep with expensive resins: 350 ml gives a usable depth in a small vat, while the same 350 ml spreads into a puddle in the litre vat.

One bit of pleasant arithmetic: the dual-vat assembly costs $100 on its own, but the printer bundled with the dual platform is $619 against $599 for the base machine. Buy it upfront and the kit costs you $20, not $100.

The slicer centres both models on the middle of the whole plate

Same dual-vat story, software side. Switch to Dual Mode, load two models, and Photon Workshop centres them on the middle of the entire plate rather than on each half. Tom's Hardware called this the main friction point when setting up dual prints and reported it to Anycubic. Early builds also flipped the models away from each other — Anycubic fixed that in Photon Workshop 4.1.5.

1. Scale the models first, then drag each one onto its own half manually, checking against the zone outlines in the preview.
2. Keep Photon Workshop current — several dual-mode annoyances were closed in 4.1.5 and 4.1.8.
3. Remember that only Photon Workshop can prepare a dual-material job. Lychee and ChiTuBox will slice single-vat files for the P1 quite happily, but they don't do dual mode.

Levelling screws strip: never fully loosen them first

Read this before your first calibration. One owner did what every other printer taught him — fully loosened all the plate screws, then started assisted levelling. The system began asking him to tighten the rear screws to readings of 1600 and 1200 — against a working range of 0–100 N. The force required felt surprisingly high, and two screws stripped. That left the plate unadjustable: on the P1 the screws are part of the lifting arm, and the plate only has access holes for them.

1. Clean cured resin off the plate with alcohol — residue skews the sensor readings.
2. Pick the mode that matches your plate: single or dual.
3. Install the plate, remove the vat, tap Continue. The plate homes first, then descends in three speeds: fast, medium, slow.
4. Turn the screws with an H2.5 Allen key strictly as the arrows indicate, only until the reading falls inside 0–100 N. Never back them all the way out.
5. When the arrows disappear, tap Continue, wait for the re-check, then Finish.

It's also worth knowing that "auto-levelling" in the P1's marketing is exactly that — marketing. What you get is assisted levelling: four pressure sensors in the screen corners report force, and a human turns the screws. Re-level after the plate has been dropped, after replacing the plate or the exposure screen, and after a failed print where the model stayed in the vat.

Wave Release is a film on the screen, not a screen protector

Nearly every new owner trips over this. You go looking for a "screen protector for the Photon P1" and there isn't one in the catalogue. The reason is the layer stack: build plate → nFEP film in the vat → textured Wave Release film bonded to the screen → glass and the LCD itself. There is no separate protector in between. Wave Release is the screen protection.

Which explains the friction. A two-dollar generic protector won't do: without the texture you lose the advertised peel-force reduction of up to 60%, and the dynamic algorithms lose the stack they were tuned against. A replacement runs $29 versus $39 for a two-pack of nFEP vat film, it's fiddlier to fit, and for the first months it was simply unavailable in most regions — which is exactly what an r/AnycubicOfficial owner complained about.

• Keep a spare textured film on the shelf. It's a consumable, not a lifetime part.
• Pull the vat after every print and inspect the film on the screen. Wipe uncured resin off with a lint-free cloth and alcohol.
• Don't scrape cured resin off the textured film — you'll take the texture with it. That's a replacement job.
• When ordering, keep the two films straight: nFEP goes in the vat, Wave Release goes on the screen.

Resin leaks under the vat and cures on the screen film

The symptom is deceptive: prints fail in one specific area of the plate, as if that zone were under-exposed. Lift the vat and you find a puddle underneath, part of it already cured onto the textured film and locally blocking the light. The vat film itself may show no visible hole at all. This isn't a one-off — there's a thread on r/AnycubicPhoton, a second owner confirming a month later, and an Amazon review describing the same leak from a factory-fitted vat.

1. Remove the vat and pour the resin out through the front spout, always through a funnel with a filter. Never pour from the rear wall — that's how vats get damaged.
2. Wash the vat and hold the film up to the light: local deformation without an actual puncture is entirely possible.
3. Wipe uncured resin off the screen film with alcohol. If it has cured, replace the textured film.
4. If a print already failed and there are cured shards in the vat, run the vat-cleaning function: full-screen exposure for 20–30 s, then lift the whole cured sheet with a plastic scraper. Never a metal one.
5. On reassembly check that both vat latches clicked home. That's a built-in safeguard: with the latches open, the printer lid physically won't close.

The flat build plate pools resin, and the screw holes mark direct prints

The P1's plate is SUS 304 stainless with better than 80 μm flatness, which is genuinely good. What isn't good is that the top face is completely flat: no crown in the middle, no channels to guide resin back down. After a print there's a pool sitting on top that makes a run for the bench the moment you lift the plate. Everyone mentions it, from 3DWithUs to Reddit owners: let it drain 5–10 minutes before washing, because the resin finds places to hide.

The two prongs on the front of the vat, where you park the plate sideways to drain, are the right idea executed in a hurry. Tom's Hardware called the arrangement "clunky and an obvious afterthought": resin still runs down the handle, the lid won't close while the plate sits there, and a tall model either dips back into the resin or doesn't fit at all.

Then there are the four recessed screw-access holes on the underside of the plate. Irrelevant for supported miniatures, but on direct-to-plate prints small blobs cure in those spots. That is precisely why a dental lab posting in r/AnycubicPhoton passed on the P1 — their models print straight onto the plate.

• Don't lift the plate straight away: park it on the prongs for 5–10 minutes, wipe the top face, then remove it.
• Better still, leave the plate mounted, put a tray over the vat and scrape the models off in place.
• For direct-to-plate work, get the perforated steel plate — $99 against $59 for the standard one. It reduces the hydraulic suction on the opening layers.
• A flexible magnetic sheet on top makes small parts easier to pop off by flexing instead of chiselling them free. One community caveat: on third-party flex plates the magnetic layer can start peeling after contact with resin.

The lid gap: smell, dust, and UV leakage on early units

The hinged lid beats the old lift-off hoods, but it doesn't seal along the top edge. The 3DVision review is blunt about it: the gap means you smell resin during printing and there are volatile compounds in the air. Owner Bulkamancer Sculpts adds the other half of the problem — dust travels the other way, straight into the machine.

Early units had a more serious version of the same story. Reviewer FauxHammer found resin curing on top of the build plate after a print in a brightly lit workshop and confirmed with a UV meter that the lid passed some ultraviolet. Anycubic's first answer was to print in a dimmer room; later they replaced the cover with one that blocks UV properly. The 3Dwork team, who tested a pre-production unit, confirm the same: production machines got a better lid and the vat's max-fill line moved lower.

1. Run soft weatherstripping along the lid edge — owners do this, and it handles both the smell and the dust.
2. Hook an extractor to the rear vent port. It's designed for the AirPure 2.0, a mains-powered fan unit with two hoses, and it is not included with the P1.
3. If yours is an early unit and resin cures on the plate after a print, record a video and open a support ticket — the cover gets replaced.
4. For fumes and workshop ventilation in general, see our measured breakdown of 3D printing emissions.

Chamber overheating on long continuous sessions

The first prints go perfectly, then somewhere into a long back-to-back run things start failing: full plates don't finish, models detach, parts warp. This isn't a cursed unit — Anycubic documents the mechanism in its own maintenance recommendations. The vat heater and the UV source warm a sealed volume together, the internal temperature climbs past its working range after a few hours, and the resin starts behaving differently.

• Parameters: increase light-off delay by 1–3 seconds and reduce peel, lift and retract (plate descent) speeds by 0.1–3 mm/s.
• Model prep: hollow large parts with a 1.5–2.0 mm wall, avoid 100% infill, and split big batches across several sessions.
• Environment: hold the room at 20–25 °C, leave at least 10 cm of clearance on each side of the machine, and add a small auxiliary fan if needed.
• After a long run: if the resin is above 40 °C, let the machine cool to room temperature before the next job.

Resin level sensing: 200 ml in the big vat blocks the print

You pour a modest amount of an expensive resin into the litre vat, hit start, and the printer tells you there isn't enough material and refuses the job. The same amount in a small vat from the dual kit is fine. The reason is how it measures: the P1 estimates level with the force sensor on the arm before the print starts, and in a wide vat 200 ml spreads into a thin film that reads below what the model needs.

The same sensor brings a second catch: there is no level monitoring during the print at all. For tall solid models that need more than a litre, the printer warns you up front and lets you tap Ignore — but you'll be topping the vat up by hand after roughly 2–3 hours. There's no auto-refill system, and Tom's Hardware listed that as a con in its own right.

A line or layer shift at the same height every time

When the defect lands at the same height print after print — one owner caught a line at about 18.7 mm and could see it on the supports too — the film and the screen are almost certainly innocent. Look at the Z axis mechanics instead: a dirty or dry ball screw and dried-out grease on the rails.

1. Remove the vat and plate, wipe the ball screw dry with a lint-free cloth.
2. Home the axis: Tools → Move Z Axis → Z-Axis Home.
3. Apply a little grease along the full height of the screw. Then select a 50 mm step and tap four times to bring the arm down.
4. Grease the lower section near the motor, home again, and run one full up-down cycle to distribute it. Wipe off the excess.
5. Clean the rails with ethanol and apply a thin layer of rail oil. The cover is held by 10 screws, but you can reach the bearing blocks without removing it using a syringe up to 15 mm in diameter.

Official intervals: service the ball screw roughly every 3 months, or immediately if the Z axis gets noisy. Rails get fresh oil monthly and a full clean-and-relube every 3 months. General printer care lives in our maintenance guide.

2.4 GHz only, files routed through the cloud, and LAN mode that won't switch

Networking is the P1's weakest area. The module is 2.4 GHz only, the antenna is internal and doesn't reach far — 3Dwork reports frequent drops when sending large files if the printer isn't near the router. There's no Ethernet port at all.

Then there's the architecture. Sending a job from the slicer doesn't go straight to the printer: the file is compressed, uploaded to the Anycubic cloud, and only then pushed to the machine. For 3Dwork a complex file took 3–4 minutes to prepare and as long or longer to send, and the team went back to USB. Bulkamancer Sculpts frames the objection best: it makes sense for a farm, but for a single printer it's extra failure points and a hard dependency on an internet connection.

1. Set up a dedicated 2.4 GHz SSID with WPA-PSK or WPA2-PSK. Keep the password under 32 characters or the printer won't take it.
2. Move the printer closer to the access point or add a repeater. If jobs still take minutes to arrive, print from USB — that's not a defeat.
3. For LAN mode, unbind the printer from the cloud completely first, then enable LAN. The "public network start" and "lan already on operation not permitted" errors hit people who try to switch on the fly; a full printer restart clears them.
4. Remember that remote sending only exists in Photon Workshop. Lychee and ChiTuBox will slice for the P1 but won't push over the network.

USB drive not recognised: .pp1 files, root directory only

You plug the drive in and there's no icon on the screen, or the file simply isn't in the list. The P1's requirements are strict and buried deep in the documentation.

1. Check that Photon Workshop is set to the Anycubic Photon P1 profile and the file extension is .pp1. A file sliced for another model throws error code 300.
2. Put the file in the root of the drive, not in a folder.
3. Format the drive as FAT32. Capacity no larger than 64 GB.
4. Save from the slicer to your computer first, then copy to the drive. Writing straight to the stick is a common cause of corrupt files.
5. Eject the drive safely. If none of that helps, try a different stick before you start suspecting the mainboard.

Exposure screen: half-screen output, flicker and light bleed

Rare, but unambiguously a hardware group: the screen exposes only half its area, the image flickers, or light bleeds past the layer outline. Anycubic published a dedicated guide for it with a clear diagnostic order.

1. Update to the latest firmware — some exposure faults were fixed there.
2. Check the screen ribbon cable: seated properly, no damage to the cable or the connector. Reseat it if in doubt.
3. Run the exposure test: remove the vat and plate, lay a sheet of A4 on the screen, go to Tools → Exposure Detection, select the first image and hit Exposure. The picture on the control screen and the exposure screen must match. Don't look directly at the exposure.
4. If the images don't match, record a video and contact support. A replacement screen is $129, or $148.35 in the EU.
5. After replacing the screen, re-level the plate.

"Build plate not installed" and zero peel force: the hidden strain gauge calibration

On the P1 a single strain gauge in the build-plate arm measures resin level, peel force and levelling. When it drifts or loses contact, several functions break at once: the printer claims the plate isn't installed when it plainly is, it reads zero peel force and halts the job, or it demands more resin in a full vat.

1. Reinstall the build plate — sometimes that's all it takes.
2. Go to Other → Self-Check and see whether the force detection icon is green.
3. If it isn't: remove the bottom cover with an H2.0 Allen key, then unplug and reconnect the strain gauge board connector.
4. Still nothing? Run the hidden mechanical calibration: Settings → System Settings → About → Details, tap the Device Name field ten times in a row, then pick Mechanical Calibration.
5. In the routine: remove the plate, tap "Already removed", put the plate back on the arm (you don't need to lock the latch yet), tap "Installed" and wait for the completion message.

Vat heater faults: code 307, oxidised contacts and a temperature that won't move

Heating on the P1 rests on three parts: the PTC heating belt, the NTC temperature sensor, and the gold-finger contact block between the smart vat and the adapter board. A failure or oxidation in any of them throws the same error — code 307. The firmware deliberately stops heating when the temperature doesn't rise, so a dead sensor can't leave the belt running unchecked.

1. Look at the temperature reading. Anything outside 10–70 °C throws the error the moment heating starts.
2. Inspect the metal contacts on the vat and the adapter board for oxidation. Reseat the vat, release the handle and raise and lower the contact block for about ten seconds.
3. Test heating manually: set the target 5 degrees above current and feel the inside of the vat. If nothing warms up, the system reports the fault after roughly 5 minutes.
4. Remove the bottom cover with an H2.0 Allen key and reseat the harness between the adapter board and the mainboard — a classic culprit.

While we're here, what counts as normal: ±1–2 °C swings around the target during holding are ordinary thermostat behaviour, not a fault. Brief 2–3 °C excursions during stirring or in a cold room are fine too. Worry if the temperature refuses to climb, swings by more than 3–5 °C, or the vat is hot to the touch while the screen still reads room temperature.

The textured film softens fine detail a little

This is the price of lower peel force. The Wave Release texture reduces the contact area — and scatters light slightly at the same time. On flat top surfaces parallel to the screen and on straight edges the texture pattern is faintly visible, and fine detail reads a touch softer than on a printer with a plain clear film. FauxHammer sees it on calibration charts, owner Bulkamancer Sculpts sees it on flat tops; both agree there's effectively no difference on figures and complex geometry.

If maximum crispness on flats matters, orient the model so no large plane sits parallel to the screen. The textured film can technically be removed, and Anycubic has said it will become a properly replaceable part — but the reduced peel force goes with it, and the dynamic algorithms are tuned for that exact stack, so you'd be back to dialling lift and descent speeds by hand.

22–35 mm/h: the P1 is slower than people expect

The quoted 25–35 mm/h at a 0.05 mm layer with standard resin is honest, but it disappoints anyone coming from a speed-focused machine. 3DVision measured a 196 mm part taking 9 hours — 22 mm/h. With Sunlu Flexible Resin at 2000 cps it dropped to 13 mm/h. For comparison, the Photon Mono M7 Pro hits 130–170 mm/h with high-speed resin.

That's a priority call rather than a defect: the self-check before every print, the dynamic release and the preheat all cost time and buy the consistency the P1 gets praised for. TechRadar recorded a 100% success rate across 20-plus prints in a 5–10 °C workshop — in an unheated space that's worth more than an extra hour. High-speed resin helps a little: a small figure went from 1 hour 38 minutes to 1 hour 27.

Photon Workshop: crashes, lag and auto-supports you can't trust

Anycubic's slicer has improved a lot, but it still trails Lychee. 3DVision measured frame rates dropping to 10–15 on detailed models, which makes prep genuinely uncomfortable. Their auto-supports on chess pieces performed poorly and curled the edges of the models; placing supports by hand fixed it.

• Stay current: Anycubic has closed crashes on slicing after renaming a resin, a freeze after toggling the camera, a crash when dragging the support tip-size slider, and a crash when renaming support scripts.
• On macOS check your version first. An issue open since 31 July 2026 with no reply reports that on macOS 26.5.2 anything newer than 4.0 crashes — early 4.x on slicing, later builds on import.
• There is no Linux build of Photon Workshop, and the request has been sitting in the tracker since 2021.
• For complex projects and better supports, use Lychee: full P1 support, but no network sending.
• Always eyeball Photon Workshop's auto-supports and fix them by hand around thin connections and big overhangs.

Factory defects reported by early owners

The data doesn't point to widespread defects — the P1 sits at 4.3 out of 5 across 52 Amazon ratings. Still, it's worth knowing the individual failures by sight so you don't spend weeks blaming your own settings.

• Dead on arrival. Heating stalls around 25 °C, Skip does nothing, homing won't run, calibration loops forever. Only a full power cycle gets the machine back, and a firmware rollback doesn't help.
• Z axis stops mid-print. After three hours the plate stopped rising; the motor makes noise but nothing moves. The thread never got an answer.
• Dead exposure zone. An Amazon review describes an area of the plate that never cures properly, about 100 print hours into a new machine, with support refusing to acknowledge the defect for a month.
• Tacky surfaces after washing and curing. Always in the same spots on the plate. The owner tried two resins, 0.05 mm layers, 2.0 s exposure, different lift settings and up to three wash cycles — community theories point at uneven exposure or a warped plate.
• Tearing on large models. On the stock 14K Texture Resin profile, with pre-made supports that work on other Anycubic printers. Unresolved.
• Missing screws and separately shipped add-ons. Kickstarter dual-vat kits and perforated plates arrived later than the printers, and one bundle shipped without the levelling screws — support sent them, but that's a 7–14 day wait.

Owner advice across all of these is identical: don't fix it yourself and don't wait it out. Record a video of the symptom, run the self-check and screen test, open a ticket and ask for a replacement. People who bought directly from Anycubic report that replacements go out without much argument. One encouraging signal too: a buyer reviewing on 20 August 2026 notes that the mixed reviews were mostly from the launch window and that by August most of those issues had been resolved.

The small stuff that isn't on the spec sheet

• The supplied power cable is exactly 1 metre and the PSU is internal. If the outlet isn't right there, you need an extension.
• There's no physical power switch, just the button on the case. No Ethernet port either.
• The feet aren't height-adjustable. Level the bench underneath: a tilt leaves the resin sitting unevenly and can splash one side of the case at the end of a print.
• The lid needs roughly 65 cm of height and 53 cm of depth to open fully. Short on space? The side hinge screws come out and the lid becomes a removable cover.
• The lid is very dark. Watching the print by eye isn't happening — that's what the camera is for.
• The camera is 480p with two amber lights and a privacy shutter. Enough to see that a part has detached, not enough to inspect a surface.
• The Z-axis movement controls are buried in submenus even though there's plenty of screen space.
• Resin can splash and film the vat edges during the preheat cycle — both 3DWithUs and 3Dwork note it.
• No sample resin in the box. The 8 GB drive holds the manual and one test file — plus a funnel model for draining resin, which is worth printing first.
• The interface is available in several languages, and localisation quality varies noticeably between them; the English UI is the polished one.

Anycubic Photon P1 error code reference

Anycubic resin printers use their own 300–314 numbering, and the P1 can show almost all of it. The exceptions are 308 and 309, which belong to the automatic resin feeding module the P1 doesn't have.

Running costs: what the consumables actually cost

The P1 has more wear parts than a typical entry-level resin printer, and two of them are films you will replace on a schedule. Worth budgeting for before you buy rather than discovering mid-project that the part you need is out of stock.

Prices are from the official Anycubic store as of 30 August 2026. Regional availability is the real variable: the Wave Release film in particular was hard to source in the first months after launch, so ordering a spare with the printer is cheap insurance. The machine itself is $599, or $619 bundled with the dual-colour platform.

General resin printing problems

Everything above is specific to the Photon P1. Alongside those you'll meet the standard resin printing problems that every MSLA machine shares. We've covered each separately:

• Prints left on the film, elephant's foot, delamination, banding, suction on hollow parts — 13 resin printing failures and how to fix them
• First print, choosing resin and gear, dialling in exposure — resin 3D printing for beginners
• Which Anycubic resin suits which job and at what settings — guide to 13 Anycubic resins
• Washing, support removal and curing without ruining the part — washing and curing guide
• Fumes, ventilation and protection — measured breakdown of emissions
• Routine printer servicing — maintenance guide
• Sanding, priming and painting your prints — post-processing

If you're choosing between Anycubic models, the neighbouring write-ups help: Photon Mono M7 issues, Photon Mono M7 Pro issues, Photon Mono 4 Ultra issues and the Photon Mono 4 vs M7 comparison. From the competition, the Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra 16K sits in the same class. And to work out what a print actually costs you, there's our print cost calculator.

Frequently asked questions