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I felt like I was experiencing deja vu with the Elegoo Jupiter 2. While it offers a litany of impressive advancements you often see in modern 3D printers, it also reminded me of old-school machines from when I first started testing way back when – in short, it can be picky. That means you'll need to lay in the groundwork first, and newcomers may want to steer clear as a result. However, you're in for a treat once all is said and done.

Elegoo Jupiter 2 features & design

Price

$949/£799

Printer type

Resin

Resolution

16K (15120×6230)

Build volume

302 × 162 × 300 mm

Speed

Max. 90mm/h

Screen

14in 16K Mono LCD (Quick-Swap)

Build plate

Laser engraved

Leveling

Automatic

Connections

USB-A & Wi-Fi

As you may be able to tell from its sheer size, the Elegoo Jupiter 2 is all about volume – it has a build area of 302 × 162 × 300mm. That means it's a shoe-in if you want to print larger models, a lot of projects at once, or simply want to give yourself the option.

It's got many of the amenities you'd expect from a 3D printer in 2026 as well; there's a heated resin vat to keep the goods toasty even when temperatures drop outside and 16K resolution, not to mention automatic leveling. However, the cherry on top is a resin auto-fill/remove feature that reduces the mess of swapping out material.

(Image credit: Future/Benjamin Abbott) Next, the design has gone from strength to strength. Something I like about recent Elegoo machines (like the Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2 ) is that they feel as though they belong in a sci-fi starship from the Alien universe, ready to churn out anything frontier colonists could need. That's certainly the case here thanks to a metal case with doors that swing outward. It's so much nicer than the usual plastic front or box lid, and I can see it being much less messy long-term.

Just one word of warning: this thing is incredibly heavy. Go careful when getting it into position.

Elegoo Jupiter 2 performance

(Image credit: Future/Benjamin Abbott) If you want the maximum number of models being printed at once, or are printing out enormous projects, the Elegoo Jupiter 2 is an excellent choice. It can fit a small army of miniatures onto the build plate and has a sizeable volume for taller projects, so go wild.

Still, a word of caution: it'll take a while, especially if you choose particularly big models. This printer lacks the speed of predecessors like the Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra 16K (90mm/h at maximum compared to the Ultra 16K's 150mm/h), and having tested a handful of faster machines in recent months, I noticed the difference. Sure, this isn't a problem per se. I suspect there's a technical reason for that more conservative pace too. But it's a little disappointing nonetheless.

Fortunately, the results are good enough to pave over any cracks. That 16K resolution is doing good work here, producing handsome prints you'll be proud to show off.

Getting to that point will require some patience, though. While it's crucial to have your settings dialled in and test prints finished with any 3D printer, I found it especially important here. This might not be the case for everyone, but in my experience, you can't get away with as much when it comes to the Jupiter 2. Whereas the likes of the Anycubic Photon P1 feel idiot-proof and allow for some margin of error, you must follow the letter of the law here. Yes, my choice of water-washable resin could be to blame, and environmental factors may have played their part as well (I was testing during a particularly strong heatwave, so maybe the material wasn't reacting as it normally would), but I experienced more failures with the Jupiter 2 than any other 3D printer I've tested recently. Things only started paying off once I really examined my settings under a microscope, and that sort of tweaking – not to mention the frustration of "arg, why isn't it working?!" – took me back to the old days.

(Image credit: Future/Benjamin Abbott) Luckily, your patience is gonna be rewarded. Once you're locked in, you can produce everything from prop masks to a small army of wargaming models (for Malediction , say) at once. The high level of detail means you aren't compromising to achieve that aim, either.

And oh boy, but that resin auto-fill feature is fantastic. So long as your machine is level, it'll fill up the vat with as much resin as you need right off the bat. Once you're done, you can then click a button to suck most of it back up again. While it's incredibly handy at the best of times and avoids having resin just hanging around in the vat, I found this to be a life-saver during failures – it meant I didn't have to break out a funnel and messily try to pour away the resin so I could retrieve ill-fated prints. Throw in a camera for tracking progress remotely and a heated vat for the perfect garage or shed printer.

Should you buy the Elegoo Jupiter 2?

(Image credit: Future/Benjamin Abbott) The Elegoo Jupiter 2 reminds me of old-school 3D printers; it's not as forgiving, so you'll need to make sure you've crossed the 'T's and dotted the 'I's in terms of settings. That said, it makes up for any fiddliness by offering an enviable volume and bringing modern advancements like a heated resin vat and a high-resolution screen to bear. The results are great.

However, I'd recommend it only for those who are already familiar with 3D printing – I think it'd be a bit of a headache for newcomers to figure out.

Buy it if...

✅ You want to print larger models, or a lot at once: You'll struggle to find many machines that are bigger than this.

✅ You want a sturdy, practical design: Besides a brilliant metal design that opens like a cupboard, the Jupiter 2 offers auto-fill resin functionality that reduces mess by a significant amount.

Don't buy it if...

❌ You're new to 3D printing: I found this machine to be less forgiving than other 3D printers, so would avoid it if you're new to the hobby.

❌ You don't need a massive printer: It sounds obvious to say so, but those who don't need such an enormous printing volume regularly will find smaller and far cheaper options elsewhere that are likely to suit them better.

How we tested the Elegoo Jupiter 2

(Image credit: Future/Benjamin Abbott) This review was conducted using a sample from the manufacturer.

I spent two weeks printing off a variety of models with the Elegoo Jupiter 2 in my shed, ranging from smaller miniatures for D&D to larger terrain and monster models. This allowed me to see how it managed across a range of projects.

You can learn more about our process via the GamesRadar+ hardware policy .

Full text

The question of where data lives has become considerably more fraught over the past few years.

A mix of regulatory scrutiny, geopolitical tensions across the Atlantic, and the related unease about the concentration of infrastructure power among the hyperscalers have all combined to push data sovereignty up the executive agenda.

The result? A strategic posture that’s increasingly shaped by political anxiety rather than operational logic.

And while both need to be considered by the boardroom, leaning too much on the former leads to very different decisions.

To be clear, there’s no debate that compliance with data residency requirements remains a genuine obligation for organizations in regulated industries, and nobody is suggesting otherwise.

The concern is with what comes next: many organizations are at the "we must manage our data carefully" stage, and are considering a leap to "we should consider exiting hyperscaler infrastructure entirely." While the logic could be understandable, the reality is that full disengagement is neither effective nor necessary for the bulk of organizations.

The hyperscalers earned their position because they offered capabilities that were genuinely difficult to replicate at scale, and the organizations that depend on them most deeply are not in a position to unwind that dependency in any near-term timeframe. A multi-year transformation program with substantial execution risk is rarely the right answer to a political concern that may itself shift within that same period.

Conflating data residency and operational resilience

The focus on sovereignty has meant that ideas about data residency, infrastructure control, and operational resilience are being treated as interchangeable concepts. While connected, these are distinct ideas with distinct impacts on a business’s ability to function effectively and comply with regulation.

Let’s consider the incidents that really bring organizations down, and what makes data recovery harder than it needs to be. It’s system failures, slow incident response, and exploited security vulnerabilities that take customer-facing services offline, erode trust and incur regulatory fines. A platform that fails during peak demand causes the same commercial and reputational damage regardless of where its data is stored.

Similarly, a security breach does not become more or less severe based on whether it occurred on domestic or international infrastructure. The metrics that determine whether an organization functions under pressure are uptime, security posture and the quality of incident response capability. Sovereignty is one input to that picture, not the frame through which the whole picture should be viewed.

Simply put, an organization is not resilient simply because its data sits in the right jurisdiction. Resilience is an architectural and operational property that has to be built deliberately.

Where real control lives

If sovereignty decisions are best understood as one component of broader operational resilience, then the more productive question is where in the stack is control most effectively exercised. The answer, particularly as AI applications proliferate, is primarily at the data layer.

The database has moved beyond its traditional role as a storage mechanism. In modern architectures, it is often the most reliable point of deterministic control in the entire stack: the place where governance is enforced in practice rather than documented in policy.

Data location, encryption , access controls, cross-region movement – all of these are data infrastructure questions at heart. Getting them right is what makes meaningful sovereignty achievable, not as a political statement, but as an operational capability.

So in turn, when an organization has genuine control over governance at the data layer, suddenly the choice between a hyperscaler and a fully domestic alternative becomes less relevant. The question shifts from which provider to use to whether the infrastructure is flexible enough to enforce the appropriate rules for each workload. That reframing tends to produce considerably better outcomes.

In practice, this means building in tiers: cloud-native performance where the business requires speed, scalability and flexibility, on-premise or segmented deployments for regulated workloads, and the architectural flexibility to move between configurations as circumstances change. After all, regulations will continue to evolve.

The geopolitical environment that is currently driving sovereignty conversations will look different in three years. That means infrastructure decisions made under today's conditions need to remain workable under tomorrow's.

Building for change, not for certainty

The practical implication for technology leaders is straightforward: meet your regulatory obligations, exercise genuine control at the data layer, and build the architectural flexibility to adjust as requirements shift.

But after that, it’s important to give equal attention and consideration to the failure modes that are statistically far more likely to cause very tangible and costly problems: outages at peak load, delayed incident responses and vulnerabilities that could be exploited.

At the end of the day, those are far likelier to be discussed in post-mortems – not sovereignty. And while sovereignty deserves its place in the technology strategy conversation, it should sit within a resilience framework, not above it.

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This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives , our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

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