My biggest take away, the speed can be massively exaggerated. The vast majority of videos posted are sped up 4-20x making the machines look as if they're flying. The reality is, I've found it to be exaggerated. 2000mm/sec is 78in/sec for example, which is a fairly fast speed on the fiber. This is faster than Chinese CO2's, but on par or slower than most Western CO2 lasers. The biggest difference: A CO2 laser you can load up the bed full of parts but with a fiber laser, you're typically limited to under 11.8"x11.8".

Next week I'll finally be able to run the job I bought the machine for due to the plates taking 8 days longer than expected. I now expect the job to take 2x longer than I expected. Now that's obviously on me, but I think it's a valid heads up, that not only is the machine speed not as fast as it appears on videos, it also requires constant attention changing out parts.

I'll maybe give an update next week when I've finished this job and maybe my opinion will have changed. I have my doubts.

At this point, I'd only go with a fiber if you need to eat into metal or hard coatings like knives and guns. In addition, I think I'm going to push a lot of my brass engraving to the fiber in the future. On text, it's a bit faster than my CNC rotary engraving but allows me to use any TTF font vs just engravers fonts and also, on logos and big text, it's a huge difference. I did a logo playing around that took 2-3 minutes that would easily take 10+ on the rotary, and it got all the detail easily. I just hit it with acid after to darken. I don't go for crazy depth. Just enough to acid darken.