These are the settings behind our own burns on the xTool F2 Ultra UV: crisp, clean K9 crystal with no cracks. Start here, then fine-tune for your machine and your batch of glass.
The settings
xTool's built-in K9 preset uses 80% power, 60 kHz and 0.04 mm layers. Ours burns cooler and faster, and the dots stay separate and crisp instead of milky. If a burn comes out milky, lower the dot duration first.
- Power: 65%
- Dot duration: 200 µs
- Frequency: 40 kHz
- Layer height: 0.2 mm (xTool Studio will not go above 0.2 mm for point clouds)
- Passes: 1
Importing the file
- Download the PLY from DTO Crystal. It is named for xTool Studio and already sized in millimetres.
- In xTool Studio, import it and choose Keep size. Do not use auto-fit: the file is already centred in your blank with clear glass on every side.
- Pick the same crystal size in xTool Studio that you picked on DTO Crystal.
Standing or lying flat
The F2 Ultra UV engraves inside a 70 × 70 mm area. A 50 × 80 mm block lying flat is longer than that, so the picture has to shrink to fit. Stand the block up (our Portrait Block, 50 × 50 × 80) and the photo gets the full 80 mm of height. Standing burns take a little longer.
Which quality to pick
Photos of people and pets look best on Premium. Lite is for text, logos and quick test burns.
- Lite: 600,000 dots. Fastest burn, about a quarter of Premium's time. Good for text, logos and test burns; photos look grainy.
- Standard: 1,500,000 dots. In between: smoother photos than Lite, faster than Premium.
- Premium: 2,200,000 dots. Best for photos: the smoothest, most detailed look.
After the burn
- Clean the glass with a microfibre cloth before you photograph or gift it. Fingerprints show up under an LED base.
- Photograph it in a dark room on an LED base, straight on and a little from the side.
- A line that looks like a mirror image under your lettering is the bottom face reflecting it, not a second burn.
Tune the files to your own laser
Every laser and batch of glass is a little different. The calibration crystal is a small test card of grey patches: burn it once, photograph it, and the site measures how your machine turns dots into brightness.