$750 vs $275 FDM Printers, Did I Waste $750 Purchasing A Prusa.

haha the day the day is finally here so i guess if you don't know what's going on this is the prusa mark 3s and i purchased this on 6 10 20 20 and it just showed up today which puts the lead time from when i ordered it to when i received it today at seven weeks on the nose which is quite a long time if you're waiting for something you literally want next day but they're pretty upfront with how long their lead times are given the world it's current situation i have checked their site today and lead times look like they have been moving back towards four or five weeks but since i ordered this i've received the fl sun q5 which is easily become my go-to printer let's be honest i don't really even use the tivo anymore uh the fl sun q5 is just it prints better prints faster it's more reliable it's just an all-around better experience than the tivo uh if i'm going to be honest i guess i use the tivo if i have a project that i need to print more more than one thing at one time and the differences between the prints don't really matter but if i'm printing like a fan for the fan showdown or something that i want a better quality print it's it's the q5 all day long and i know there's a lot of bad juju about getting a delta for your first printer or just deltas in general and i will say i've had none of those experiences this thing literally came out of the box in 45 minutes from box to printing took me 45 minutes and it just works and it works good and that the prints stick and the extruder doesn't slip and it's just a good experience and it looks cool because it's a delta so after having that experience with a 275 dollar printer um the mark 3s am i going to be disappointed because this thing's 750. this is the kit that kits around 750 if you want it fully put together and delivered to your door your luck you're looking at more a thousand dollars but to be honest before i even got into 3d printing i knew about the prusa the mark 3s it's like the gold standard for fdm home printers so i wanted to have one in my you know on the channel for for quality prints that we know are going to be good from a trusted brand with open source you know an open source platform everything prusa does is just good i use their slicer i guess and i have no issues with that but you know is that 750 going to be justifiable i don't know i imagine it is i've heard nothing but good things about prusa but from getting this thing out of the box to printing i assume it's not going to be 45 minutes like this thing so i guess the best thing to do now is to tear this open and start building and find out how long it takes me to get it out of the box and build up and making a print and then we'll compare it to the fl sun because this thing is quite a bit cheaper and the quality is still good in my opinion and its speed is just awesome but maybe i just don't have a good comparison of what a good printer is so let's get her put together [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so first thing definitely not as easy to put together as the q5 this was like 45 minutes if that to uh take it out of the box put it together start printing and that's essentially because it's it's it's called a kit but it's essentially like an assembly that you bolt together there's hardly any pieces per se which i really like but this thing is like all pieces there's there's hardly anything that's already assembled i can't even think of anything that uh now that i'm thinking about it that's already pre-assembled it's literally a box of parts and you're off to the races but i don't wanna don't think that it's actually hard to do if you're considering getting the kit and you're like too many pieces it's pretty easy to put together i mean prusa does a great job of giving this book that has all the pictures and arrows and instructions and even things not to do or to watch out for that i mean the whole process to put together was it was essentially pretty simple but it just takes uh it takes some time so knowing that what i if i was to buy another one of these would i get the kit version or would i get a pre assembled version and i don't know i i like the kits because knowing how everything goes together and interfaces and how it works makes uh shooting it when you have issues which it did easier because you know how to take things apart and how they go back together but now that i've already made one i don't know might be worth it it really depends on how much your time's worth to you but either way the bonus fit of the kit is that you get it for a cheaper price the instructions are very good so putting it together is quite easy to get it already assembled you know that it's going to come already tested working out of the box and you just add a couple couple hundred bucks so either way you're going to be set first thing i did though after it was all put together was do a little test print now i already used the prusa slicer on all my other stuff anyway so i literally just had to select the mark 3s from the drop down menu and then it was good because it already gives you pretty much it's already set up it's got everything configured and i want to just try out of the box configurations and the first thing i tested was of course a calibration cube and it came out pretty much flawlessly i don't see any ghosting hardly any surface surface imperfections to speak of i mean it just did a good job for being completely completely new fresh out of the box just done with this calibration pretty impressed and then i also printed the same cube on the q5 and i took the same speed settings and everything on the q5 to try to make everything as apples to apples as possible i even use the same improvement same temperatures everything like that and the cube came out pretty good uh dimensionally just as good as the uh the prusa cube but when you look at the surface of the cube it's definitely not as pretty you can see some slight ghosting there's some weird lines in some of the layers that might be under extrusion it's hard to tell but definitely when you look at the top you can see that the top there might be some under extrusion error issues on the q5 that need tweaked out which is possible since i just ran the same the same extruder settings for each and they're not the same extruders or the same setup one's a bowden one's a direct drive but regardless of that it actually didn't do quite a bad job after that it was everybody's favorite the old benchy and again this is the second print that the the prusa mark 3s did out of the box slicing with whatever settings come from prusa themselves and this thing is like literally perfect if i do say so myself i mean from all the benches i've done i guess i haven't done too many in my life but i think this is about as good as you can get then i printed that same benchy on the q5 and although it printed and it doesn't look too bad you can definitely see that there's some issues the biggest one being right here on the front or the the bow i believe of the ship you got some cooling problems and that is the biggest issue with this machine is that the cooling fan or the cooling duck duct is hot garbage and even the one i printed so this is a 3d printed one that i made to try to get better air flow it just doesn't do a great job cooling the filament especially when i was printing it a little hotter than i normally do because i wanted to match what prusa was recommended from their software you can definitely see it we got some we got some cooling problems i need i could probably fix this by doing a better better shroud design but the prusa i mean one the cooling fan for the parts or the filament is bigger and the the duct that's designed for it is a lot better so in and of itself the proof is just going to print better every time until i get that figured out myself which is just a step that you got to take when you buy a cheaper piece of equipment you just and everything's not everything's going to be as dialed in as something that's going to cost a little bit more money but had some more r d put into a design and build next up actually i printed this one first on the q5 was this little octopus and this is one of those prints where no support or anything is needed and all the links just print in one and you pop it off and they all just work and the the q5 did a really good job everything stuck well when it was done after i let the build plate cool down everything popped up pretty easily no damage done and the detail is pretty good everything looks pretty pretty decent then i want to try it on the prusa because i got this new so this is the new style build plate that's shipping now it's the textured uh flexible build plate and i wanted to print on it hopefully with no additives no adhesion or nothing to aid in adhesion and i will say that this little octopus drove me insane because i could not get this thing to stick at all on this build plate it would either not stick at all to begin with and i'd get the blob of death on the extruder or it would seem like it was going to stick it would start printing i would walk away for five seconds and i would come back and spaghetti explosion was going on and that was pretty frustrating i probably spent a good a good day or so trying to get this to print without using anything on the build plate try and recalibrate the machine try and tune my z offset making sure i had a good first layer a thicker first layer a hotter first layer hotter build plate i tried everything under the sun couldn't get this guy to stick to this build plate until i used the glue stick that prusa sends with the machine probably that's the reason for it is that because this octopus has such a little surface the the actual part of the octopus that's touching the boat plate is such a tiny little surface area that it just doesn't get a good adhesion to the deck or to the plate until you apply a little glue put a little glue on there print it out no problem and when compared to the one that came off the q5 i mean they're both good but uh let's be honest the one from the prusa is better there's less surface imperfections less zits or whatever those little bumps are called um everything worked on both all the ligaments worked all the links worked but the prusa just printed a better version of it i don't think i'm shocking anybody out there being like oh look the prusa mark 3s it does good prints i think we all knew that we all knew that it prints well but it's always fun to compare so print wise yes this machine does print better than one that costs 275 is that a shocker i doubt it but it does a good job and i like it quite a bit and it's going to make printing things on the channel just that much better and this thing is just going to be good because when i need something printed that it doesn't matter how beautiful it looks i know that at least prints it at least prints within specifications like measurements still still measure out they might not look as good but dimensionally it's on board then i want to test out some of the little things that come with the prusa one of them being the filament sensor so when i was putting it together the big thing that i noticed especially like in the head or in the hot end of this thing is the time and effort and design time and trial and error time all the things that prusa has done to to optimize this machine to run with these parts is pretty impressive everything is designed to the tee like it's just so as somebody that does design work a lot it's just so beautiful how perfect everything looks everything's designed to be as small as possible but function in a way that is useful it's just it's just great but at this at the same time i think they over did it on some stuff they over engineered some things like the filament sensor and this is funny because when i first seen it when i was putting together i was like this is awesome but then after i started using i was like this is not so awesome and what i mean is it's so intricate you gotta you got a little arm in there that's tinged with the bolt that has two magnets on either side one in the arm and one on the back wall that repel each other to reset it and it pushes up against the ball bearing that touches the filament and the ball bearing is supposed to always want to slide forward which is pushed by the arm and the magnet so when the filament is pulled out the ball bearing slides forward the little arm is no longer in between the ir sensor and it says hey no filament turn off and in theory that works great but i didn't have such a great experience with it because the first thing i want to do is obviously start a print cut the filament and see if it kicked off and after the filament disappeared into the hot end i was like something doesn't seem right and after a little tap on the motor everything shut off so then of course i do what everybody does i tore it apart to see if i installed something incorrectly which i didn't i did tighten everything up and make sure everything functioned the way it's supposed to put it all together and it it worked and it doesn't and then after that i went to the the old google verse or back to the internet and seen that a lot of people have this problem where essentially the arm either doesn't fully come out of the the c channel that the ir sensor is in because eventually you get you essentially got you got to see and there's an ir beam going between it and when something blocks it that's how the tripped the problem i have is that there's a little flag on the arm and the arm doesn't always the flag doesn't always come out of the sea so it doesn't always trip and i i do i did see some instructions from prusa or somebody out there giving instructions on what to trim and whatnot to make things work better essentially what i did is i took everything apart and i tried to find any little dangly bits from the 3d printed parts that were interfering with anything and try to clean everything up to make it work better and it does but the problem is i just don't trust it and that's the whole purpose of the filament sensor is to trust that when your filament runs out your printer is going to shut off and i'm not there maybe after after it it works a couple times but for the time being i'm just going to have to make sure that if i'm running low on filament i stand by to uh do a change out because i'm pretty sure that if it does run the filament out it's at least gonna run for a while what i did like though is how easy it is to change filament so this is a little one of these uh essentially the same same thing as this little octopus but it's a shark and i wanted to print it out and test how it is for changing filaments because the best thing about a direct drive at least in my opinion you can do it on a bowden but the filament is so close to the hot end that you can change it out relatively quickly and the prusa is so well optimized that there's functions within the software be it it's a little 8-bit screen that's kind of a bummer but you can just select change filament machine comes over ejects the filament you got in there you add new stuff and it just purges itself and goes right back to where it was printed and it does such a good job of it so you can see this little shark here is got a white line all the way down the middle of it and essentially all i did was get to a point where i was like well i want a white line to start here ask the machine to switch filament it jogs over ejects what's on there you put the new filament in there and you just tell it to go off and start again and it just does it very well and the print quality on this little shark is just so good compared to what i'm used to i'm obviously i haven't seen all the printers in the world but it did a great job in the little shark the little jaw works good all the little hinges and links work great the fins all work just good so then i want to obviously make a benchy that changed filament a whole bunch of times this is a red white and blue america benchy it came out perfect and although these are different filament brands so the the white and red are both hatchbox uh the blue one is this mcp from mississippi chemical they're all different they all have slightly different uh temperatures they all printed very well even though they probably weren't in their optimal printing temperature zone and that just really impressed me that's probably my favorite bench in the whole wide world i think that brings us back to my original query did i waste 750 and the idea behind that was i had purchased this before i ever owned anything like the fl sun q5 so i was basing my ideas of what a printer was based on the tivo transfer pro which is like 200 i paid for it and it came like this one did tons of pieces i had to put all together minus this awesome assembly book i didn't get one of those uh but i had to put it together and then afterwards together it didn't really work that good i had issues with the build plate adhesion i had issues with the extruder being hot garbage and it just wasn't a good experience i learned a lot because i had to fix all those things or figure out why it was happening but if i would have bought something like the fl7q5 right out of the gate i think i would have had a much different mindset on how how 3d printing was uh but both of these machines are good they're obviously not the same price point they don't need to be because this is aimed at somebody that's just getting into it or wants to try it out or just maybe wants a delta printer it's aimed at somebody that doesn't want to spend a lot of money but they want to have good prints and this does a good job it doesn't do as good a job as the prusa but it's close dimensionally it's in there and you're going to have a good time if you get the q5 but for the but for the money i mean your the money is well spent in the prusa because everything is designed to a tee for me personally i love having actual guide rods and linear bearings and dual ball screws and a hard steel backbone over you know stuff like track rollers on some extrusion for me it's just better now in the industrial setting that's going to last a much longer time than these are but for a home printer probably not much of a difference but for me personally i do enjoy it and i really just appreciate all the effort and time spent designing and changing and tweaking the mark 3s and i'm sure that there ever comes a mark iv i actually hope prussia makes a delta because that'd be sweet but when the mark iv comes out everything that they've learned through this whole process will just get you know repeated and it just becomes a better and better piece of equipment and not to mention it just prints so good for a machine that only costs 750 dollars which isn't cheap but just for some context i at work the printer that we use for prototyping we print abs but uh that machine is 25 000 and the prints that come off of it don't actually look too much different than the ones that come off this one which is impressive now i think it's time to start printing some fans for the fan showdown with the prusa until next time

Channel: Major Hardware

Views: 405,814

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Id: 6yvPifdYuGg

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 01 2020