Einstar EZ GO 3D scanner splits into a 125 g scanner and a 163 g battery grip, and your phone is the screen

The EZ GO comes apart. The scanning unit, which EINSTAR’s own page lists at 125 g, clips onto a 163 g grip that holds a 5,400 mAh battery. The screen is whatever phone you own. As 3DPrinting.com put it, “the scanner talks to a phone over Wi-Fi, the phone becomes the screen.” Handheld scanners used to come with a laptop and a tether. This one comes with your pocket.

It has two light sources. The maker’s page describes a Laser HD mode with a blue laser in 15 + 15 crossed lines or a single line, rated for resolution from 0.05 mm to 10 mm at 160 to 550 mm away. The other, IR Rapid, uses an infrared VCSEL at 0.2 mm to 10 mm and 160 to 800 mm. Both are Class 1, and the page lists 1,150,000 points a second for the laser and 6,550,000 for infrared. The battery runs “up to 2 hours,” with a footnote that runtime varies with the phone, the connection and the mode. Files come out as STL, OBJ, PLY, 3MF and ASC. There is a 14-day trial and a one-year warranty.

Then comes the part the headline specs skip. The scanner does no thinking on its own, so your phone does it. 3DPrinting.com lists EINSTAR’s stated minimums: for Android, “Min: Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, 8 GB RAM, Android 15,” and for iPhone, “Min: A15, 6 GB RAM, iOS 26.” That is a flagship from the last few years, not the hand-me-down you keep for podcasts. The same article reports that 3D Gaussian Splatting, the photoreal capture format EINSTAR is pitching, is Android only for now.

That fine print has a precedent, and the precedent is the rival. Creality’s Pika is a 260 g, $699 scanner that also leans on a phone, tablet or computer for processing. CNX Software’s review of it is a cautionary tale: on the reviewer’s phone, blue laser mode produced no data and infrared mode crawled along at about 1 FPS. Their conclusion: “you have to make sure your phone is powerful enough before purchasing the Pika 3D scanner.” Calibration also failed over Wi-Fi and worked only over USB. If you want the Pika instead, Amazon has it too.

Nobody has run that test on the EZ GO yet. Every number above is the maker’s, and the 3DPrinting.com piece notes that EINSTAR, a SHINING 3D brand, paid for it to appear on the site. The three-minute unbox-to-first-scan figure is also EINSTAR’s claim, not a stopwatch result. Scanners look identical on spec sheets and different on a black figurine (the Pika reviewer had to dust dark parts with baby powder to get a usable scan).

Which means the discount deadline is doing some work. The $899 price runs until December 11, 2026, and the 14-day trial is the real safety net: your phone either handles it or it does not, and you find out inside two weeks.

The pitch makes sense for a print bench. A part that has to fit an existing object (a bracket, a knob, a broken clip) is the classic scan-to-CAD job, and the EZ GO moves that from a lab setup to something that lives in a drawer. But the price of “it’s just a phone accessory” is that your phone is now part of the scanner’s spec sheet.

	EINSTAR EZ GO	Creality Pika
Price	$999 list, $899 launch until December 11	$699
Weight	288 g (125 g scanner + 163 g grip)	260 g
Light	Blue laser (15 + 15 crossed lines or one line) and infrared VCSEL	7 parallel blue laser lines and near-infrared structured light
Battery	One 5,400 mAh grip, up to 2 hours	Two 3,350 mAh quick-swap batteries
Screen	Your phone over Wi-Fi 6	Built-in touchscreen, plus a phone, tablet or computer for processing
Outputs	STL, OBJ, PLY, 3MF, ASC	Not listed on the maker’s page

My money says the next scanner in this class ships with the host requirements on the box, not buried in a review. A phone-first scanner is only as good as the phone, and buyers are going to learn to ask.

The iPhone gets the scanner and waits on the splats.