New Engrave Settings

So, I just tried to engrave a photo for my daughter for Christmas. I wanted it to look great, so I selected the HD Photo setting. I believe it set the speed to 500 and the power to 11. Convert to dots, and 450 lpi. (I had it set for medium draftboard, using 1/8 MDF from Amazon.) I hit print, and it told me it would be almost 5 hours. I thought, what the heck, I am not doing anything else at the moment. I hit print and let it run for maybe 5 minutes. It literally was not putting a mark on the wood. Is 11 power really what they came up with? I don’t think if this had masking on it that it would have left a mark.
Has anyone managed to get an engraving out of 500/11/450?

That would be pretty weak on MDF.

Cork, sure, mahogany yeah… they both take marks very easily. MDF/draftboard, nope, and definitely not masked.

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That is what I thought. Mine is unmasked, but still, it was the Medium Draftboard settings that I chose in the GFUI. The power setting was 11 for the HD Graphic as well as the HD Photo.

I usually engrave at 1000/50 on that stuff with no masking.

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HD photo settings are useless. It’s been reported and nothing has been done about it.

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Be careful at high speeds with designs that feature thin lines, particularly vertical lines. You can lose a great deal of fine detail in those cases.

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So far so good.

I’m just getting started and haven’t ventured into a photo engrave yet, but I have been engraving some line drawings onto things, in particular trying to understand the various settings.

In case it’s helpful, here’s a result of testing the presets on Medium Cherry Plywood


:point_up:"Draft Photo" 1000/Full/170 (dots)


:point_up: “SD graphic” 1000/Full/270 (dots)


:point_up: “HD graphic” 350/21/450 (dots)

While the HD graphic definitely came out, it was lighter than expected.

The draft photo definitely had some rough edges on some lines due to not enough LPI.

The SD graphic is probably my favorite, but did burn away some of the detail.

If I did this particular engrave again, I’d probably try similar settings to the HD graphic, but maybe a little more power.

Hope this is useful.

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Thanks. That’s great. I think doing an engrave that slow would be a nightmare. The one I was doing (and 8x11 photo) would have been almost 5 hours, and that was at 500 speed. I did it at 1000/full and it came out okay. Good enough for my purposes this time. And even that was an hour and a half. I am afraid of 350 speed.