🔥 Ender 3 v2 Review - The BEST 3D printer for beginners in 2021?

daniel crosslink welcome back to yet another video this is my review of the ender3v2 and we're starting right now [Music] so first i want to welcome you back to 2021 for another video i hope you're ready i hope you're all healthy i think this is important in these times we still can't get haircuts in germany so you have to deal with it and this is the end of 3v2 we're talking about it today i've been using it over the vacation for about 150 hours of test prints all these nice things here i've printed and we're going to talk about the results in this video i also made two other videos previously about this printer the build process and i released a time-lapse video so you can see in detail how these prints look like from the ground up if you're interested in that watch them after if you watch this video as usual if you're just interested in seeing a specific part of this review use the video chapters i've also put them in the description of this video so you can skip to the part that you're interested in mostly first i want to say a few words about the build process as usual and as expected it took about 30 to 40 minutes and the manual that they deliver with the printer is really concise and easy to understand so i think for even beginners this is a printer that everyone can build and there is no questions open now a few words about the build quality the frame is still a very high quality it has a little bit improved over the previous versions but it's still very comparable for example this metal frame here seems to be exactly the one from the ender 3 pro all the parts fit together flush and tightly and i had no issues mounting it there wasn't any skewed parts so i'm really happy with the sturdiness and the quality of that frame the extruder itself is still made from plastic however they did a little design change the inlet where the filament comes in there is now a metal insert that will prevent the extruder inlet from wearing out over time there's also some other design changes that i really appreciate first of all the power supply went into the base frame so everything is now really nice and sleek and nothing is dangling around here on the side of the frame anymore we also have little covers for the y-axis motor for example and that y-axis switch nice design changes also here we also have two belt engineers now for the x and y axis these are additional upgrade parts you can also get for your end of the pro or the v1 but it's really appreciated that they did this for the v2 at the front of the printer we have a little toolbox a dryer where you can keep all your stuff replacement parts tools nozzles anything that you want so it's all in a central place nearby the printer doesn't get lost one thing i wish they would have changed is the design of the spool hoarder this is still the same one as in the v1 still have the same issues large spools sometimes don't fit on that and i always have a little bit of fear that the spool might fall from that but it's not changed so you have to upgrade this to yourself the bowden extrusion system is basically unchanged from the previous versions however in the m3 pro and also here in the v2 you have now a tightening screw so you can increase the pressure of the transporting gear against the filament but that's everything that is different from the v1 and you still will have to upgrade the extruder system either to a metal gear extruder or you will have to apply the upgrade that chap the taunis channel for the extruder to be able to print tpu flexible material reliably otherwise the flex material is going to escape that pass pretty easily so that's an upgrade to apply if you want to go for that now what's also changed in the v2 versus the pro and the v1 is the addition of the glass plate so it's now included by default previously it was an upgrade that you had to purchase from creality separately or you get a glass plate somewhere else now it's included and the adhesion on this glass plate is surprisingly well sometimes actually too good especially if you print larger parts it gets harder to remove things from the glass plate so you have to use the blade that comes with the printer and that is also a little bit of an issue because you're scratching the surface pretty easily so i'm not sure how the long term impacts of scratches on our surface is we're gonna see in the long term but for now i can say it's really surprisingly good i'm not a big fan of glass plates by the way i'm using spring steel bed mostly on all of my printers and if i had to choose between a glass plate and a spring seat bed still i would choose the spring steel surface but this is surprisingly good as i said the surface is really really flat there is no visible bumps or dips and if you do the bed leveling in the corners you're also getting very good results in the middle that tells me that you actually probably don't need a build touch sensor or any kind of bed leveling sensor and so there's no real reason to operate however one little thing about the glass plate you're losing a little bit of print area in the front and in the back because of the clips that hold the glass plate in place so if you really want to go to the maximum extension of the print bed you will have to switch it out for something like a springsteen surface one of the most apparent changes in the v2 is the new screen it's now a vertical screen it's a color screen and it's not a touch screen although you might think it is but from looking at the icons you would might think that you can touch them actually because they are so large but that's not unfortunately a touch screen although i appreciate a color screen as an upgrade it has a few little issues for example the viewing angles if you want to see what's on the screen and you want to use the menu to select something it gets really really hard if you're just a little bit deviating to the side and trying to see what's actually highlighted the contrast is really really low and you can't see what's highlighted so that's one issue another issue is that you can't see what's happening with the printer if you're not printing from the sd card so usually when you print from the sd card you can see the temperature the progress and messages that come to the display but if you're using octoprint like i'm doing with basically all of my printers there's no way to see the status and any messages that occupant sends to the printer that is hidden and that's a little bit unfortunate one of the most important and interesting upgrades on the v2 is the 32-bit mainboard so every creality endo printer is gonna get a 32-bit main bird now but they are slightly different and on the v2 we get the new 32-bit main with the 2 208 silent drivers so this is supposed to make the print process more silent we're going to talk about noise levels in a bit but besides having silent drivers and having the 32-bit processor it also has two additional upgrade ports one is for the build touch sensor where you can just plug in the cable for the bl touch right in here it's a nice upgrade and there's a second additional plug for a filament run out sensor so this is things that i'm gonna test out in the future adding the build touch and a filament runout sensor another plus of a 32-bit main board is having more program memory because on the old main boards we had all kinds of issues fitting all the features that we wanted into that a little tiny space of program memory now with the 32-bit mainboard you have enough memory for all the features that you ever wanted on this printer another really big plus for the 32-bit main boards if you're still on a v1 or a pro version of the ender 3 you can get this upgrade board now as a separate part it's then the 427 version and we're gonna talk about installing this new mainboard on the nfv pro in another video so if you want to buy this as a separate upgrade part i've linked it in the description of this video when i built this printer for the first time the firmware that was on the mainboard was a pretty outdated version so i upgraded it to the latest version however i was hoping for some features and there's some very basic features missing in that formula unfortunately first one i expected to have level back corners this is a function if you don't know it that makes it very easy to do the corner leveling so the print nozzle moves around the print surface just moving in the corners and then you can adjust the tightening of that surface against the nozzle and that is missing although you can do this manually but there is always a problem that you either have to move it through the menu that's a very tedious process or you have to disable the steppers and then we're running into the danger that you're moving actually does that access up and down unintendedly so i wish they had included this little feature another thing that's missing in my opinion an important menu item from marlin is the filament change this can be added in mar and pretty easily and the last thing that's missing it's also basically a free upgrade if you enable it in marlin is the 9 point mesh bed living i wish they would have included all these features there is no harm in doing that but they didn't so watch out for my marlin 2-0 upgrade video for the end of 3v2 mainboard so as i said in the beginning i did about 150 hours of prints on this printer already and we're going to talk about the print quality now so the first test print was the benchy let's have a look at the close-up here the benchy came out pretty well i didn't do any tweaking and changing of settings in cura i just used the default setting for the nf3 pro actually because there isn't yet a v2 profile in cura and that print came out really really nice without any visible issues any ringing or any stringing the second test print i did was this christmas ornaments these are printed in vase mode turned out really nice then i've printed this weird ways from geekyfay two times actually because in the first run i ran into some issues specifically in the higher parts of that print and i realized that i had some layers shifting and layer skipping and i wanted to find out why and it turned out that i had to enable set hop on retract to get rid of these issues and doing the second one with the set top enabled it really turned out beautiful and it's a really challenging print on any printer don't get me wrong this is gonna put any printer to a really hard test you also have to do this very slow so you can't print it at 50 or 60 millimeters you have to go down to 25 or 15 millimeters per second to really get a good result then we have two more parts one was the pen holder this turned out really nice no visible issues no layer issues no ringing issues that shows me that the default setup of the sprinter and also the sterniness of the frame and having belt tensioners improves the first time results very much so you don't have to do any kind of tweaking in the software anymore everything runs really really smooth i also wanted to test printing very small parts and this is an example this is the mandalorian figure and it's just 2.5 centimeters high default for any kind of miniature prints the quality turned out i would say average some of you mentioned in the comments of that video that i released showing the time-lapse video so it looks like crap i think for an fdm printer the result is okay of course you will get better results on sla printers we're gonna see some sla printing on this channel this year but for the fdm printer this is a pretty nice result i would say still can be improved of course last one of my test print is this battery dispenser and this one turned out very very nice why is this specifically good for seeing problems because it has this large curved area and normally you see in these large curved area issues with ringing and belt tangenting issues and it turns out that this came out perfectly so there's not any issue at all now let's talk about print speed the print speed on this printer is pretty average compared to the previous models you can go for 50 to 60 millimeter per second for the best results of course you can print faster like printing on 100 or 120 millimeter per second but this will also degrade the quality of your prints but that is expected i say the print speed on this printer is good enough a few words on noise levels so by default this printer is not really silent although you might think that because it has silent drivers in general this printer is a pretty noisy one so if you're in the same room when this printer is running this is going to be a disturbing noise after 150 hours of almost uninterrupted printing i didn't turn off the printer in that whole time by the way i turned it off for just a few hours and then i turned it on again and the fans started to make these creepy noises hearing this noise tells me that the bearings of those fans are already wearing down pretty fast so these are probably the first parts that you need to replace on the sprinter if you want to get rid of that noise however about two minutes later the fans started turning normally but i think the problem is going to increase over time in general i would say if you want to make this printer really silent and if you've seen my v1 upgrade video where i did all the fan upgrades it's going to require a lot of changes in terms of replacing the hotend fan the cooling fan the electronics case fan all these things need to be changed to really get a silent printer and i'm not sure if that is worth the effort on this printer you better put it in a room where it's running alone and not run it in your bedroom i was also interested to see how fast this printer can heat up the hot end and also the print bed to the desired print temperatures and heating up to 200 degrees celsius on the hot end at at the same time heating up the hotbed to 60 degrees celsius took about three minutes and 14 seconds just alone the hot and heating up time was 2 minutes and 8 seconds compared to the previous versions the pro and the v1 this isn't much different i think because of the glass bed it's a little bit longer just a few seconds so not a big change i also ran into two issues during my test prints the first one being that the extruder gear that transports the filament into the tube over time it made its way up on that motor shaft because it wasn't tight enough this actually happened two times until i managed to get it so tight that it didn't move up anymore so this is something to watch out for if you built the printer to get those little grub screws really tight and so this doesn't happen to you the second issue that i see already happening here is that the rubber wheels on the x and y axis are already degrading pretty fast i can only imagine that this has to do with them being too tight against the extrusions from factory i didn't change the tightening of these rubber wheels against the extrusion in the build i might have done it if i knew that they were too tight i was expecting this to happen at some point but not so soon anyways this is normal about that kind of printer and over time you will have to exchange those rubber wheels maybe after a year or so this is quite normal now looking at those results there's a few things that i would change on this printer some are more important and some less so i would start with the more important things i would add a filament sensor to this printer because i print a lot and i run into filament run out problems all the time because spools get empty and then you are happy to have that kind of sensor another upgrade might be a better spool holder because i have different kind of spools they are smaller and larger and specifically the wide ones are prone to fall from that holder so you have to place them on the side of the printer in that case and i will change this filament spool holder for a better one another thing to change is a following guide because filament runs down to the extrusion system here and if it's a little bit older and gets brittle it's also prone to crack because of the tension that's generated by the the extruder pulling down on that filament that's another change to do i think and we need to enable some of the missing features in the firmware i can also imagine a few upgrades that are not necessarily important but also nice to have for example a metal gear extrusion system either a single gear or a dual drive that might improve results with tpu for example if you want to have a touch screen instead of this non-touch screen you will probably have to change also the main word for something like a big tree tag mainboard i'm not sure if this is an upgrade that's really necessary i'm pretty happy with the results from this screen still although it doesn't have the best contrast but i'm using octoprint so i'm not using the printer display all the time so it's not really important then on the cooling system side i would say better filament cooling is an upgrade that's worth looking into either a modified version of the hiromi or any other previous upgrade that i did on the v1 adapted to the v2 might be an improvement in terms of filament cooling and then if you want to get rid of the bowen system because you want to do faster printing or tpu printing with higher speeds it might be worth looking into the hammer direct drive extrusion system or the bike you h2 system which i'm gonna test in the future final conclusion i would say for a printer at that price this is probably the printer for 2021 for beginners and people who don't have a previous model already but if you have the pro version specifically the pro version i would say you would better upgrade that pro version with a few changes like the bear tensioning system and a different main board and a touch screen instead of getting the v2 but if you're just starting new then i think the v2 is the perfect start into the 3d printing hobby it still has the same great community around it for upgrades most of the previous versions parts that you find on thingiverse and other places can be adapted to the v2 pretty much unchanged most of the time you can get the ender 3v2 already for about 200 us dollars or a little bit more depending on where you look and when you look for it i've also put some links in the description for you to buy it thanks for using those links if you like this video maybe you want to watch two of my other videos that i've linked up here for you and i see you in the next one bye you

Channel: Crosslink

Views: 165,841

Keywords: crosslink, 3dprinting, 3dprinter, additivemanufacturing, 3d printer, howto, tutorial, daniel kreuzhofer, daniel crosslink, creality, creality ender 3 v2, ender 3 v2 assembly, ender 3 v2 bed leveling, ender 3 v2 vs ender 3 pro, ender 3 v2 review, ender 3 v2 printing, ender 3 v2 firmware update, ender 3 v2 first print, ender 3 v2 leveling

Id: I6LHam6m3g4

Length: 19min 37sec (1177 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 23 2021