The first time I upgraded from the resin that came in the box, I went straight to the most expensive bottle on the shelf. The logic felt obvious at the time. If you are going to invest in a resin printer and spend hours painting the results, surely the premium resin will print sharper, paint better, and generally pay for itself?
After twenty seven years in the miniature hobby and several years resin printing, I can tell you that logic is wrong. The most expensive resin for miniatures is almost never the best choice. Price and print quality stopped tracking together somewhere in the middle of the market, and anyone buying the top-shelf bottle is usually paying for a label, a dental application, or a marketing budget rather than a sharper miniature. In this article I want to explain why, and point you at the three bottles I actually reach for in my own workshop.
Why expensive resin is not automatically better
Resin pricing does not reflect print quality in the way that most hobbyists assume. When you pay a premium for a bottle of resin, you are usually paying for one of three things:
- A speciality formulation for a non miniature use case (dental, engineering, high temperature tooling)
- A branded partnership with a well known sculptor, studio, or printer manufacturer
- A marketing budget that has nothing to do with the chemistry in the bottle
None of those things make a resin better at printing miniatures. A $60 bottle of dental resin will give you a very firm, very pale, very expensive miniature that chips when dropped. A $50 bottle of branded resin from your favourite sculptor is often the same formulation as a $25 generic resin with a different label. The marketing budget is all yours to pay for.
This is the part of the resin market that gets hobbyists in trouble. The premium price sets the expectation. The expectation sets the disappointment when the prints turn out identical or worse.
What actually matters in a miniature resin
Strip away the marketing and there are really only four variables that matter when you are printing 28mm or 32mm character miniatures.
Detail retention
Can the resin hold fine detail like faces, filigree, chainmail, and fabric folds? This is partly chemistry and partly exposure calibration. Most mid priced miniature resins hold detail perfectly well at 18 to 25 micron pixel size. You do not need to pay extra for it.
Flexibility
Pure stiffness is the enemy of a miniature. A rigid resin prints sharp but shatters when dropped off the table, snaps at thin sword blades during painting, and splits at cape edges when you prime. A flexible resin holds the sculpt and survives the abuse of actual hobby use. The best miniature resins sit in the middle of the flex scale. Stiff enough to hold detail. Flexible enough to survive your thumb.
Ease of use
Some resins are fussy. They need exact temperatures, specific shake schedules, particular wash solvents, or long cure times. A resin you cannot realistically use every time is not a resin you will actually use. The best miniature resins forgive a bit of laziness.
Cost per figure
Resin is consumable. You will go through bottle after bottle over the life of a printer. A $5 saving per bottle across fifty bottles is $250 of painting supplies you did not have to spend. The price per millilitre matters.
Nowhere on that list is “costs more than its neighbours”. Price does not appear as a variable because it is not one.
The three resins I recommend
Here are the three bottles I actually use, in order of what I would pick first for a given job.
Wargamer Resin
Purpose built for printing miniatures. Flexible enough that you can drop a fully painted character off the table without snapping the sword. Stiff enough that faces, filigree, and 0.5mm spear tips print crisp and stay crisp.
This is the resin I point beginners towards first. The flex is in the sensible middle of the scale, so you are not fighting the material at the support removal stage or during priming. Exposure calibration is straightforward, the smell is tolerable compared to some rivals, and the price is reasonable given what you are getting.
If you are new to resin printing and want one bottle that will cover nine out of ten miniature jobs, Wargamer Resin is that bottle.
TGM 7
If Wargamer Resin sits in the sensible middle of the flex scale, TGM 7 sits further towards the flexible end. The detail is genuinely excellent. I have printed character models in TGM 7 that match anything coming out of a professional studio. The flex means the prints survive repeated handling during painting, which matters more than hobbyists often realise.
The catch is that the flex makes TGM 7 slightly harder to work with. Supports are a bit more awkward to remove cleanly because the resin bends rather than snaps. Washing and curing need to be dialled in properly or you end up with models that feel slightly tacky to the touch. This is not a beginner resin. It is a very good resin in the hands of a hobbyist who knows their workflow.
If you have your wash and cure process properly calibrated and you want the best detail and flex combination available for character models, TGM 7 is the bottle I reach for.
Sunlu ABS-Like
The cheap workhorse. Dependable, predictable, and cheap enough that you can buy it by the bulk pack without flinching. It is not the most flexible resin on this list and the detail retention sits a notch below the Wargamer bottle on very fine work. What it does do is print miniatures that look good, cost very little per figure, and never leave you staring at a $50 bottle wondering if you are using it fast enough.
I use Sunlu ABS-Like for everything that is not a character model. Army rank and file, vehicles, terrain, tokens, casualty markers, anything where the figure needs to look acceptable rather than exceptional. For that job it is unbeatable on value.
The cheap resin trap in the other direction
I want to head off an easy misreading of what I have said above. The argument is not that cheap resin is always better. There is a floor. The cheapest, most obscure resin on a random marketplace listing will often be a product you should not put anywhere near your printer. Uncalibrated exposure curves, inconsistent batches, horrific smell, terrible flex, or outright toxic formulations are all real risks at the very bottom of the market.
The point is that the relationship between price and quality flattens very quickly above the floor. Once you are in the mid market, paying more does not get you more. Sometimes it gets you less.
How to evaluate a new resin
When a new resin appears on the market, a few straightforward tests tell you whether it is worth keeping.
- Run a resin exposure calibration test (RERF on Elegoo machines, equivalent on others) and see whether the recommended exposure actually works. Poor calibration documentation is a warning sign.
- Print a miniature with fine detail, cleanly wash and cure it, and drop it onto a hard floor from waist height. If it survives, the flex is in the sensible range. If it shatters, the resin is too brittle for miniature use.
- Paint a primed test model. If the primer beads or the paint adhesion is poor, the resin is curing incorrectly or the wash has not fully cleared uncured residue.
- Track cost per figure across a month of actual printing. The cheap bottle that prints twice as many miniatures for the same money is the cheaper bottle, regardless of shelf price.
Four tests, four honest data points. Trust those over the marketing.
Where to go from here
If you want the longer conversation about why cheap resin does not mean bad resin, my video on the same subject covers the same ground with bottles on screen so you can see the differences for yourself. The three resins above sit in the Recommended Resins section on the home page, and the full resin buying guide goes into more depth on the current market.
If you are new to resin printing entirely, start with the clean beginner setup article which covers the printer, workspace, and safety gear you need before you pour your first bottle. For the opinionated version of what I would do if starting today, including which bottle I would reach for first, see if I was starting resin printing in 2026.
Whichever route you take, please do not spend $60 on a bottle that is going to print worse than the $25 one sitting next to it. Spend the difference on paint instead.