xTool S1 40W Review: It's Finally Time To Spring For A Home Laser Cutter & Engraver

You've probably been thinking about getting a laser cutter or engraver. Almost everyone has been thinking about it. They're so quick, precise, and ridiculously useful that even many woodworkers who pride themselves on their precision with traditional tools have outfitted their shops with laser cutters. But which laser is right for you? And which will be right in a week, when half of the lasers on the market will be brand new? Even in an industry that seems to move at the speed of light (see what we did there?), consumer laser cutters/engravers rarely change the playing field all at once the way xTool's new S1 40W seems to. The list of things that make it special is long, and they aren't all about the S1's extra power. xTool says the S1 40W is "aimed at DIYers, designers, artisans, woodworkers, small businesses, and educators looking for affordable and high-powered lasers," and that raises as many questions as it answers. Can one device be targeted at all those groups and still do things well?

We set out to answer this question from a few different angles. The S1 elevator pitch is that it's a powerful, enclosed, and unusually safe diode laser at a reasonable price. That's certainly unique among prosumer lasers, but that doesn't mean it has an audience. Is it more suitable for home or business use? Is it right for new users or pros? And what if this is your first laser?

The S1 packaging was oddly satisfying. All of the basic components are packed within the enclosed bed with the sort of density and precision that makes it hard to throw away the packing materials. Pulling everything out, though, we got the sense that there should be more things to assemble, like one of those 3D printers that comes cheap because you'll have to spend an afternoon putting it together. Not so with the S1. It's hard to overstate how simple it was to set it up. The guide provided in the box mostly consists of illustrations and tasks that are named more than explained. But if this brings to mind ambiguous furniture-assembly sketches, you're not getting the right picture. The S1's installation guide is almost always perfectly clear.

The finer points of installing the software and using the laser were occasionally a little mysterious. xTool is a very online company, and when product setup relies on online media it should be very clear what info is available and where to find it. Once we figured out the flow, it all went smoothly. There was an occasional hiccup when the main setup guide conflicted with newer instructions included with a separate component, but any momentary confusion that caused was easily resolved by relying on the newest and most specific guidebook.

The S1 never missed a beat when cutting, aside from minor trouble with a climber's hangboard from laminated layers of ¾-inch pine furring. When the laser encountered knots in the ¾-inch pine, a few extra passes were required to cut all the way through, which we expected. Pine furring is unpredictable in this way and, unsurprisingly, is not officially supported by the S1. It's worth noting that by the time we had finished cutting all the pieces for the hangboard, the smoke purifier's replaceable prefilter layer was so clogged that, even on the highest setting, no air was pulled through the purifier. Far from a negative, this means that all of the particulate matter trapped by the purified ended up in the filter and not in the craft room, even though we stubbornly used unsupported materials.

We also did some quick-and-dirty inlays when experimenting with the Revolution Ply and making the phone case. This precision required for this sort of work might not be best suited to the XCS software, but it did an admirable job for the little time we put into refining the inlays. The trouble with inlays is that they're not a simple matter of cutting the inset piece at a slightly different size from the void, as you might expect. You can get close that way, but the XCS software makes it as easy as possible with its Outline Offset functionality.

The S1's dynamic focus engraving is also a unique process by which the laser adjusts its z-axis (vertical) position to keep itself focused on curved surfaces with a slope of less than 15 degrees (picture a dinner plate). It works by mapping out the surface height of the material at various points, much the way mesh bed leveling works for 3D printers. You do this by marking the upper left and lower right corners of the work area as usual, then defining a grid (in rows and columns) for the laser to make additional height measurements. The maximum of 20 rows and 20 columns gives you as many as 400 measurement points to map out (use a finer grid for larger and more complex surfaces, and fewer points for simpler items). Then, when engraving, the laser moves vertically, conforming to the different heights of the material's surface.

Without a camera, the S1 does this mapping with the positioning sensor that's attached to the laser module. You must make sure your grid is fine enough to catch the highest point of your material. Otherwise, the positioning sensor can be dislodged (or can dislodge your material) as it moves across an unexpected high point. Resetting the sensor is easy, but it will start the somewhat slow mapping process over from the start.

There are some (mostly minor) quirks and bugs in XCS that are worth noting. Keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl-S don't work if one of the tool palettes has the focus, for example. And when you align two or more objects, there doesn't seem to be any way to predict which is going to move. We also ran into a few instances of imported vector SVG files not being imported correctly, though they would generally import into Inkscape properly. However, this could have been the fault of the software with which the SVGs were created.

Perhaps the most serious problem we found with XCS is that there's no clear way to import one document created in XCS into another, even by copy-and-pasting. For example, one element of our soldering station, an XLR connector holder, was created separately from the main document. We never found a way to combine the documents, and ended up recreating the XLR component within the main document. This is perhaps the best argument we found for designing such elements in a program like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape rather than XCS. The only other meaningful bug we found was that the undo functionality would do an incomplete reversion if you were changing too many things at once, which we discovered while experimenting with a test grid. Applying settings to multiple selected objects worked great, but undo didn't change all of them back, so take care to double-check complex jobs.

xTool's broad targeting of crafters, small businesses, and educators now sounds reasonable to us. The safety features make it a natural for the home craft room or a classroom. XCS is very complete but simple enough for home and school use. xTool describes the S1 as a great and cost-effective starter device for small businesses, and that also sounds right. We found it immediately useful in service to a woodworking shop, a luthier's toolkit, a greenhouse full of custom hydroponics systems, and an I.T. homelab. xTool does a great job at supporting crafters and people with laser cutting/engraving businesses, but don't discount the machine's utility for less crafty and more tool-oriented endeavors.

It's worth putting some time into learning software like Illustrator or Inkscape to make the most of the S1 in the long term, but that's not a downside for the laser any more than an inability to come up with cabinetry plans is a shortcoming for a table saw. Those tools enhance the S1's utility, just as the S1 enhances your own work. We give it a big thumbs up. And, more significantly, we give it an exhaust hole in an exterior wall. What greater love is there?