I have had my Creality Ender 3 Pro for a while now and I have upgraded it quite a lot. Lately I have been thinking about wether I should put in some more money (better hotend, maybe new steppers, maybe enclosure, maybe part cooling fan) or if I should buy a new printer that is a more of complete package. A bit more build volume would be nice as well.
I am intrigued by the Bambu Labs printers but I don’t like their somewhat proprietary approach. So I have been looking around for competitors and I saw that Creality has shown their new K2 Plus with an AMS. I wonder if it’s worth waiting for that. The specs sound good. Is the K1 good now? I heard it had some problems in the beginning.
Honestly, I don’t think there are any creality printers that “just work”.
I know you threw Bambu out as an option, but man, I love my P1P. The thing just prints with no drama, fuss, or headaches.
Print 24/7 for a week? 100% success rate.
Don’t print for 3 months? Printer levels the bed and immediately makes a successful print.
Yes, closed source bad, and propritary bad, and cloud bad, but in terms of pushing a button and a thing gets printed without even thinking about having to fuck with it? Pretty much unbeatable. (Or, at least, light years ahead of any of the other printers I’ve ever had.) It’s so good and reliable I don’t even sit there watching the first layer to make sure it’s going to print successfully because of course it is.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am very impressed by the performance of the Bambu printers. They really gave the established brands a kick in the butt price and performance wise.
Still it makes me uneasy to have a closed source system. I don’t mind butting some effort into my printer if it is more open. I mean my ender 3 is a lot of work. I’d assume it gets better than that.
Oh I fully understand and appreciate your position. I’m pro open-source-everything, but I made the pragmatic choice in this case because, well, years of fiddling with cheap printers made me realize that I really am not into this for the fiddling but more the end product, and if nothing else, the Bambu printers are really good at damn near being appliances.
Hell, my 2d printers are more of a pain to keep working than this thing is, heh.
If open source is a big deal for you I would look into Prusa, they have a great track record and a lot of other companies are using forked versions of their slicer. I have a Prusa MK3s and absolutely love it. I had a self sourced RepRap before this and compared to that it absolutely “just works”. I bought the multi color add on and was expecting it to be very finicky, but other than some initial filament loading issues (have to make sure the end of the filament goes to a point) I absolutely love it.
I think the idea of prusa is cool but I feel like they are a bit behind. Especially regarding price to performance. That is what I gathered from the reviews at least. They are pretty reliable but not the latest and greatest tech.
The Mk4 made up a lot of ground, but I agree they are a pricey option. Personally I was able to justify the price by the benefits of open source, if the company disappears tomorrow I’m confident the open source community could continue issuing firmware/slicer updates.