Creality Pika review - An affordable, portable 3D scanner with infrared and blue laser modes

Creality has sent us a sample of the Pika portable 3D scanner for review. In some ways, it shares some of the features of the high-end Sermoon S1 3D scanner, like blue laser and NIR structured light scanning modes, but it’s more affordable and compact, works out of the box through USB or WiFi, and is offered in a design and form factor similar to an action or point-and-shoot camera.

In this review, I’ll start by listing the specifications, then go through an unboxing, and test the Pika with an (underpowered) Android phone, before spending more time testing the portable 3D scanner on a powerful mini PC connected to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB GPU dock.

Pika 3D scanner specifications and host requirements

Pika (CRS15CPK) specifications:

SoC – Unnamed octa-core processor clocked at 2.0 GHz
Display – 3-inch touchscreen display
Scanning Modes
- 7 Parallel Blue Laser Lines
  - Working distance – 160 to 400mm
  - Outdoor Scanning – Below 110,000 lux
  - Accuracy – Up to 0.03mm; note: evaluated in laboratory conditions, and actual results may be affected by operating environments such as vibration, temperature, and other factors.
  - 3D Resolution – 0.1 – 2mm
  - Scanning Speed – Phone: up to 40fps; PC: up to 110 FPS
  - Min. scan volume – 10 x 10 x 10mm
  - Single Capture Range
    - 101 x 107mm at 160mm
    - 344 × 268mm at 400mm
  - Alignment mode – Marker / Global Marker
- NIR structured light
  - Working distance – 200 to 1200mm
  - Outdoor Scanning – Below 80,000 lux with NIR filter
  - Accuracy – Up to 0.1mm
  - 3D Resolution – 0.15 – 2mm
  - Scanning Speed – Phone: up to 20fps; PC: up to 30 FPS
  - Min. scan volume – 150 x 150 x 150mm
  - Max. scan volume – 2000 x 2000 x 2000mm (multiple passes required)
  - Single Capture Range
    - 144 × 134mm at 200mm
    - 764 × 670mm at 1000mm
  - Alignment mode – Marker / Global / Geometry / Texture
Color Mapping supported
Laser Safety – Class I (eye safe)
Color Supplemental Light – 4x Blue/White LEDs + 4x Infrared LEDs
Calibration board – High-precision glass calibration board
Host interface (selected in the user interface)
- USB 3.0 Type-C port for charging and data
- WiFi 6
Power Supply
- Battery compartment – 2x 3350 mAh rechargeable batteries provided
- Charging via USB-C cable
Dimensions – 100 x 60 x 35mm
Weight – 260 grams with battery
Temperature Range – -10°C to 40°C
Humidity – 10-90% RH

It’s much more compact and cheaper than the Sermoon S1 3D scanner, and it works with phones out of the box without an additional accessory. However, the downsides are a lower number of blue laser and NIR structured light scanning modes, lower accuracy (0.03 vs 0.02mm in laser mode, and 0.1 vs 0.075 mm in NIR mode), a smaller maximum volume (2000 x 2000 x 2000 mm vs 4000 x 4000 x 4000 mm), fewer supplemental lights, and so on.

3D scanning requires a host that’s powerful enough. Here are the recommended software and hardware specifications for acceptable performance using the Pika 3D scanner:

Android OS – Android 10.0+; SoC: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen4 or above; RAM: 12GB+
iPhone iOS – iOS 15+; SoC: A17 or above; RAM: 8GB+
PC – Windows 10/11 64-bit, CPU: Intel i7 Gen13 or above; GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3060 or above; RAM: 32GB
mac – macOS 14 or above; CPU: Apple M3/M4/M5; RAM: 32GB

We own two Android phones: an OPPO A98 5G (Qualcomm Snapdragon 695 @ 2.21 GHz, 8 GB RAM) and a Redmi Note 14 Pro 5G (Mediatek Dimensity 7300 Ultra @ 2.5 GHz, 12 GB RAM). The OPPO phone is not ideal due to a weak processor and not enough RAM, and the Redmi model could be used in theory, but Creality doesn’t appear to have optimized the app for MediaTek SoC. So I’ll probably have a quick try with the OPPO A98 5G smartphone to go through the onboarding process and show why you shouldn’t use an underpowered smartphone with the Pika 3D scanner, and spend most of the review using a Khadas Mind 2 mini PC connected to the Mind Graphics 2 dock with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB GPU, which I previously used with the Sermoon S1.

Creality Pika unboxing

I received the Creality Pika 3D scanner in a retail box reading “portable AI Blue Laser & NIR 3D scanner”.

The package contains the camera-looking 3D scanner (center in the photo below), a quick start guide with a QR code and link to the wiki, a turntable, an after-sales service card, a calibration board, a lanyard, a 2-meter USB-C cable for data and charging, a cleaning cloth, a foldable tripod, six marker towers, two 3,350 mAh rechargeable Li-Ion batteries, a plastic box with two NIR filters, and two packs of reflective markers of different sizes (6mm and 3mm).

The front of the camera features two 3D scanning cameras on the left and right, each with two blue and white fill lights and two infrared lights, and the center camera features a DOE (Diffractive Optical Element) projector, a parallel laser, and an RGB camera. The top comes with a start and stop button and a power button, as well as a ventilation grid, since the scanner is cooled by a fan.

One of the sides features a lockable USB-C port for data and power, and an opening to install the lanyard.

The other side comes with a USB/WLAN mode switch and the cover for the battery compartment.

We’ll also find a mounting thread on the back along with another ventilation grid (that’s easy to block by mistake when holding the camera).

I took a photo showing the Creality Pika and Sermoon S1 3D scanner together to show the differences in size and features.

First test with an underpowered Android smartphone

The first step is to insert one of the 3350 mAh batteries into the ~~camera~~ 3D scanner.

I then turned on the camera, but I was quickly informed about the battery charge level( 1%), and I could barely go past language selection. So instead I connected it to my smartphone charger to charge the battery first… After that, I could go through the setup wizard. There are plenty of languages to select, not only English and simplified Chinese, as even Thai is in there!

After selecting English, a 3-step connection guide was started. First, I had to select between USB or WLAN mode. Wi-Fi connection mode was already selected, so I didn’t change anything here.

The second step is where the user selects between phone or PC host.

After selecting “Connect phone”, the scanner will start a “Hotspot” (enter AP mode), and the display will show the ESSID and a password to connect.

I did that on an OPPO A98 5G phone, and the message on the display changed to let me install the Creality Scan app (for Android).

Once I started the Creality Scan, it automatically connected to the Pika scanner and started a performance test, which, as expected, my phone failed with the message “Performance result: Not recommended”. I still tapped on Continue to carry on and have a quick check.

The display on the 3D scanner now shows “+ Start Scanning”.

It defaults to Blue laser mode. But I got the same results as when I tried using an underpowered laptop with the Sermoon S1, and I didn’t get any data in this mode. So I switched to NIR mode, and it “worked”, but only captured data at about 1 FPS, so basically unusable.

The 3D scanner display shows a range bar to help the user scan at the right distance (green color), the live capture, and buttons to pause, cancel, and stop/complete the scan. The Android app shows pretty much the same, plus the output from the RGB and depth cameras.

If I were more patient, I could probably have completed the scan with the phone in 30 minutes or so, but knowing that it will probably take 2 to 3 minutes with a proper machine, I didn’t even try. Interestingly, I was never asked to calibrate the scanner with the Android app, and it was just a plug-and-play experience that didn’t turn out well because my phone is just too slow. The takeaway here is that you have to make sure your phone is powerful enough before purchasing the Pika 3D scanner.

Creality Pika NIR and Blue laser 3D scanning using a mini PC with an NVIDIA GPU

I’ll now reproduce the setup I used in the last part of the Creality Sermoon S1 review, namely an Intel Core Ultra 7 258H-powered Khadas Mind 2 running Creality Scan 4, and connected to the Khadas Mind Graphics 2 dock with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB that’s shown excellent 3D scanning performance. I’ll perform NIR scanning of a Mickey Mouse “toy” and blue line (parallel) scanning of a comb using some of the markers.

You’ll need to download Creality Scan 4 from the company’s website for Windows or macOS (still no Linux program, and it doesn’t look like there’s any plan for it). I had Creality Scan 4.2.2 installed from the Sermoon S1 review, but I had to update to 4.3.0 since it adds support for the Pika scanner.

I connected the 3D scanner over Wi-Fi. It’s basically the same process as on Android.

After the update and connecting the Pika scanner, I noticed a calibration was recommended. However, when I tried to do the calibration, I was told it only works over USB.

Oh well… after I switched the mode from WLAN to USB using the switch on the device, it rebooted into USB mode and was detected in the program. But instead of doing the calibration, I was invited to upgrade the firmware…

Once completed, I could finally start the calibration process with the provided calibration board. At first, nothing seemed to work, and I was repeatedly told to adjust the position of the 3D scanner. I eventually figured out that the USB-C port on the 3D scanner must be oriented in the direction of the bottom side of the calibration board. So I rotated the scanner by 180 degrees, and it went smoothly. The calibration process is the same as on the Sermoon S1.

At this point, I could finally start a scan. I used the same Mickey Mouse figurine as with the Android test, and selected Infrared mode, normal scan, small size, and texture tracking mode in the Creality Scan 4 program.

Scanning the black parts is tricky since black absorbs light instead of reflecting it. The raw scan had quite a few holes in the black parts like the ears despite my best efforts and some exposure adjustments.

Creality Scan 4 Infrared mode Mickey Mouse raw scan — Raw scan

I thought that Fusion and Mesh processing might automatically fix that, but the final result was underwhelming…

I further manually increased the exposure for the RGB and infrared cameras, and black sections were better detected, but this also picked up a lot of artifacts along the way. I eventually decided to cover the figurine with baby powder and gave it another try.

The scan was much easier and faster to complete, and the result was vastly superior. The image below is the raw scan of the figurine with baby powder, before any cleanup. The artifacts around the scan are normal and can be easily removed automatically or manually within the Creality Scan interface, as demonstrated in the Sermoon S1 review.

Here’s the final result after meshing.

However, it’s not ideal for color mapping, done with the “One-click Process” option, since the baby powder also shows up in the final version.

To have a complete figurine scan, I should have made a second scan under the figurine. I’ll skip it for that part, since I’ll perform two scans and alignment with the next test: a comb scan with parallel laser blue light.

I started using the turntable, but I eventually moved the comb on top of the white desk. Blue laser scanning requires markers, but instead of placing sticky markers on the desk as I did during the Sermoon S1 review, I used four of the marker towers provided with the Creality Pika 3D scanner.

The screenshot shows what the raw scan looks like. It looks like a headache to clean, but it’s not that difficult after orienting the scan, since the desk is not at the same level as the comb. I didn’t clean the raw scan, and only after it was fused (Fusion step). Now that we have one side of the comb, we need to start a new scan in the same project for the other side of the comb, then fuse the scan and clean it up.

At this point, we can click Alignment in the top bar of the interface, select Feature Alignment->Manual, add three strategically placed points on the left (top side) scan, and repeat the same on the right (bottom side) scan, before clicking Preview and applying our alignment options.

After that, I could click on Meshing to complete the design.

Here’s the “final” result.

Since there are some small issues with some of the fins, I further cleaned it up in Mesh mode. However, this will create some holes (shown in yellow). I could fill the holes automatically by going to the Mesh Processing tab and selecting the “Hole Filling” option.

Update July 27. I’ve decided to 3D print the comb to demonstrate the scan is usable.

Conclusion

I have to say I quite like the Creality Pika 3D scanner. It’s small and portable, supports both WiFi 6 and USB connection to the host without hardware add-ons, and infrared and blue laser scan modes. It’s a better option for beginners than the Sermoon S1, and for the tests I did, the scans were quite similar between the two devices. Having said that, as the scan requirements and skills of the users improve, there are benefits from getting a Sermoon S1.

One downside is that the 3D scanner doesn’t work with Linux, so you’d need a Windows PC or a Mac computer, an Android smartphone, or an iPhone/iPad. It’s really important to check the hardware requirements to have a decent user experience, or the 3D scanner will be hard or impossible to use. As noted in the Sermoon S1 review, 3D scanning has a learning curve, but after a few days, you should be able to get fairly good scans.

I’d like to thank Creality for sending the Pika portable 3D scanner for review. As noted above, it’s much cheaper than the $2,000+ Sermoon S1 scanner, and is now up for pre-orders for $629 on the Creality store until August 12, 2026, after which the regular price should be $699. It’s also listed on the company’s Amazon store for $899.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.