BUDGET 3D SCANNER! Creality Ferret Pro Review

This little thing is one of the cheapest 3D scanners on the market, from the people that brought you the Ender 3, this is the Creality Ferret Pro. Despite the cute name and tiny demeanour, this claims to be a serious bit of kit, able to 3D scan anything from your face to your car, all wirelessly too. To be clear though, the Ferret part of the name refers to the little camera doodad on top. That can actually be purchased separately from the wireless bridge and the handle as the “Ferret SE” for £120 less, or you can pony up the extra for the WiFi box and the battery handle. If you do, this is the setup. Ferret scanner on top, connected to the Wireless bridge on the front, which itself is powered by the 5000 mAh battery built into the handle, and a little screw on tripod sits at the bottom. You do also have a phone mount in the middle, so if you want to scan stuff on the go this can be done entirely without a computer – although there are some limitations, but we’ll come back to that later – or you can hook it up directly to a PC with the included type C to A USB 3 cable, should you prefer that.

Specs wise, this thing makes some impressive claims, with the primary one being “0.1mm accuracy”. That’s kind of impressive considering the distance between points is 0.16mm, but hey what’s 0.06mm between friends anyway? This thing uses its two IR cameras, IR projector and colour camera to scan objects basically as big as you want, working between 150mm and 700mm away from the scanned object, and a minimum scan volume of 50x50x50mm – at least I think. The manual says 15x15x15 cm3 which doesn’t even make sense, so who knows. Oh, and the party trick here is using that colour camera to texture map at the same time so you end up with a coloured model when it’s done. Pretty cool right?

So what’s it like to actually use this thing? Well when scanning via your phone, besides the fact that it absolutely rinses your phone’s battery, it isn’t exactly the smoothest experience. I was getting something like 2 to 3 frames per second, connected via WiFi, which means it’s a little on the slow side to actually scan something, especially something as large as an engine bay. I wanted to scan my engine though because it has lots of identifiable and specifically sized objects like nuts and pipes, and this is the main application I can see myself using this thing for anyway. It only lost tracking a couple of times, mostly when I moved too quickly, although it did struggle with some geometry as you can’t really get close enough to scan smaller things properly. In general though you just kinda paint the object with the scanner’s sensor range – that shows up as a green rectangle in the UI – and slowly move around the object you are scanning to get more detail and a fuller picture. The scanning process creates a point cloud, which your phone then sweats turning into a mesh. Well, in theory it should, but on my OnePlus 7T Pro it failed to process such a large mesh, apparently running out of RAM. 

Luckily, once you set up the firewall rules correctly, you can open the Creality Scan software on a PC and wirelessly transfer the project and process it there. I had to do that for my engine, and that’s where I ran into a few other issues with the meshing process. Because the scan isn’t whole – as in I can’t scan all sides of my engine to create a whole mesh – what it ended up scanning was close to a mostly flat plane with some texture to it. The option to close holes and create a shelled body really didn’t know what to do with this, especially the bulkhead, which meant it ended up inverting half of my coils and valve cover. Disabling those settings, and increasing the max number of polygons, helped immensely, where I was able to export the model to an STL file, and then import it into fusion to take some measurements. Despite things like the nuts that hold my supercharger on being a little round and somewhat lacking detail, they did measure out to right around 13mm, which is accurate to what they are. The oil filter cap measured a little off as that’s a 36mm nut, but it reported more like 35.6mm. That isn’t bad for sure, but it isn’t within 0.1mm. The oil fill cap read as 20.14mm in fusion, but was more like 20.9mm in the real world. Still for basically photogrammetry that really isn’t bad.

I then brought the scanner inside and hooked it up directly to my laptop via the included USB C to A cable, hoping that the scanning process would be better when attached to a more powerful machine, and I guess I was half right. The scanner was able to run much faster, closer to it’s 30 FPS limit, but the actual scanning? Yeah that was much worse. I tried scanning this rook test print Elegoo offers with their 3D printers – I figured I could directly compare the 3D models for size and accuracy – but it outright refused. I tried it on a turntable and bare on my desk, but neither picked up. I tried something slightly larger, the remote from the Costco lights I recently hacked (video in the cards above) and that was just hilarious. The scanner did indeed pick it up… then it scooted the scan around like a snail all over the place, all while the scanner was as still as I could hold it. It wasn’t able to pick up any actual geometry, just a 2D picture of the remote over and over, across the snail trail. Maybe some of the included tracking markers might have helped here, but it’s annoying that this even happened.

I gave up trying to scan objects, and opted to do the face scan feature instead. I held it myself and basically did my best to scan my entire head, but here it struggled especially with my hair. There were lots of spots, even right at the front, that it really struggled to pick anything up. The result is a really weird and kinda low quality copy of something resembling my head – but with lots of holes in it. I mean it messed up my eye geometry, my neck, and definitely my hair. Obviously with more practice, someone else holding it, and more care taken to get the scan right in the first place it likely can be better, but I’m under no illusion that this is going to give you anything “production ready”. 

For me the very first stumbling block for this was the question, “what is this for?”, because this isn’t a LIDAR scanner so it isn’t really accurate enough for the sort of thing I’d use it for with cars and fabricating parts, and it definitely can’t give you 3D printer ready parts either. For a close enough approximation of something to then model around, sure, but that isn’t for me. I’m not everyone though, so I’d love to hear what you think in the comments down below – what would you use this for? If you do have a use case, the £200 to £340 this thing costs right now might very well be worth it – assuming you don’t fancy just using a free and open source software like Meshroom from AliceVision and a bunch of pictures from your regular camera anyway. The next levels of this sort of thing get you much closer to £1000 or more – and the truly professional ones are more like £10,000, so by comparison this is an absolute steal, even if you do definitely get less for your money. In short, I’m both impressed and let down by the Ferret Pro. The fact you can scan something even as large as an engine or an entire car with nothing but your phone (at least to scan, the processing might need a PC) is amazing, and frankly the quality is excellent for that, but as a “0.1mm accuracy” pro scanner? Nah, this ain’t that.