Creality S1 Plus Has all the right features - Let's compare it to PRUSA I3

behold the prasa I3 Mark III the orange standard the printer to which all other 3D printers must be compared the internet tells you nothing can beat it if you still think that's true in the year 2022 I've got some Florida swamp land to sell to you because this printer was released five years ago in 2017 when the iPhone 8 was in everybody's pocket who do you know is still using an iPhone 8 why would you use a five-year-old printer why would you think that this is still the Pinnacle of technology and I just keep getting asked which printer I recommend instead of that one so today I'm here to put my stamp of approval on a printer that costs less than that one is more easy to use and gives you more capability this is certainly not your only option coming from China but it looks like a good one the Ender 3 S1 plus let's see how long it takes for me to open this box and build this printer I'm betting it's going to be less than the nine hours it took me to build that one the Assembly of this was pretty par for the course for these Chinese Mendel style frames um this one does look to be higher quality than ones I've touched in the past the extruder has to be bolted on and the ribbon wiring has to be attached and other than that it's uh it's pretty much already built for you you can see it took me 27 minutes now that it's assembled let's do First Impressions starting with the warranty here creality is a pretty reputable brand from China I would say it might be the most reputable brand actually I think they're out of Hong Kong don't quote me on that but uh Hong Kong is a little bit better than mainland China also under the control of the CCP so I don't know what that means but hey I have heard from viewers that Chinese companies are standing behind warranties and especially reality so I think this is uh this is legitimate so if you have any problems with this there's a company standing behind the printer this isn't like the early days where you were on your own if anything went wrong with your Chinese printer comes with a tiny little bit of pla not going to get you very far but it's a start if you don't have anything else there's this plasticized piece of paper that's for I assume leveling the bed we're going to get there in a minute we're going to go through the uh the setup procedure and of course there's the quick start guide which is the instruction manual for how to build the printer it's like five pages long in English and then we get into other languages after that which is just a repeat so hey look at that quick and to the point every question that you could possibly have answered succinctly um you know I figured out how to do most of it just by looking at it it was obvious how it went together but if you have any questions you can read the instructions they are detailed enough that you will not miss any specifics so that is the way an instruction manual should be it's not insulting I skipped right over it I didn't even read most of it but I had one question and I was able to glean all the information that I need the thing comes with a CR touch that's like a kind of a clone or I don't know some sort of a changed up version of a BL touch um so it's a touch probe to touch off the bed and automatically level the bed there's three plugs I snipped off one of the little rubber booties off the Trident here and I've installed it there so that little pieces of plastic or whatnot won't fall into that hole and yeah the printer just overall looks really well designed like this looks like a an industrial designer did his thing or her thing to it and um you know it's an open air sort of like Gantry Mendel style printer but it still looks good there's a touch screen this just looks like modern technology up to date we're going to cover this extruder assembly the whole hot end assembly it's very nicely made but we'll get to that later let's compare though to the prusa I3 Mark III 3D printed bright glowing 1980s colors a 1980s style display this wheel which the prusa Fanboys just love it and they get into this group think and they say this is the greatest thing ever but 8-bit Electronics wheel interfaces hello we live in 2022 touch screen plastic petg can suffer from heat deformation pretty close to a hotbed there also not nearly as strong so if you happen to drop this printer or something or something fell on it in the wrong way it's likely that a part could break they could ship you a new part but you can't print it with a broken part so you wouldn't be able to print your new one unless you had another printer but when you can contrast that with the creality over here everything that matters is metal these adjustment knobs are CNC kind of aluminum we've got metal brackets holding the stepper Motors stepper Motors can get warm stepper Motors can get warm which also would cause that to you know maybe twist around a little bit deform a little bit but it's made out of metal here there is some plastic but it's injection molded plastic and that's going to be stronger in all directions X Y and Z it's going to have isotropic strength characteristics let's talk about the movement system we've got these plastic typically this this looks like duller and it feels like Delrin to me which is a really really great plastic it's better than nylon for this for this uh specific application and we've got the wheel that rides in the groove here of the Extrusion and well that tends to get disparaged online because people think hey plastic wheel on metal the plastic's gonna break down well hey have you looked up prices on these wheels they're super cheap so think of them as tires for your car if they do ever fail on you you can just replace them very easily but I have never experienced failure now if I over tighten these wheels and you can adjust them and if you over tension them then they do wear out but here's the brilliant part about that they wear out to the point where they're no longer over tensioned so over time they will sort of self-correct and I don't think you need to replace them but again I'm not running a print form so I can't really speak to that all I can say is it's very inexpensive to replace them and it's really not difficult over here on the prusa what we have is these metal rods and inside there there's metal bearings running on metal rods which means that you've got to put grease on the on the rod so if you touch this part here you're going to get grease on your fingers no grease over here people who run print Farms want to say that these will last forever well you do still have to do maintenance you have to take this apart and inject grease inside of the bearing assemblies I don't know how often you're supposed to do that but it's not maintenance free so that's the only thing thing about the longevity of a prusa that might be superior other than that we still have metal z-axis screws with metal nuts or is that a palm nut oh I think that's a palm pom is the type of plastic that lead screw nut there is made out of plastic whereas the lead screw nut on the creality here is brass so hey chalk up one longevity issue to creality and of course both printers have belts for the y-axis on the creality you can adjust the tension with this knob right here so I don't see any glaring issues with longevity on the creality versus the prusa if you're going to run a print Farm which I do not advise you think that you're going to make a bunch of money you better know what you're doing if you're gonna buy a bunch of printers for a print Farm but I see that this printer could serve you just fine in the past there's been the criticism that printers from China have bad cable management but this really isn't too bad you can see this part down here and this part up here well they have to be a little bit floppy because this needs to move to the top of the travel which would take up all of this slop and you're going to see the same thing here on the prusa with this one right there and you've got this one back there so cable management is about the same between the two when the Mark III was released the flexible steel bed with the Pei print surface was just an incredible thing it was Game changing and uh hey look it right over here similar deal we've got a flexible steel bed with some sort of build tack I'm guessing oh look we got raw metal you could easily get a Pei sheet just like this put it on that side but on this side it comes with a build tack type material now here's one area where the prusa actually is better than the creality you can see that there's this rubberized magnet across the entire print surface that's going to be sort of insulating so it's not good for transmitting heat which you want to transmit the heat into the surface of the you know print surface as quickly as you can and having that as an intermediary is not a good idea the aluminum substrate is a decent idea because it spreads the heat out so you're going to have filaments that go through the PCB on the underside of this there's a there's there's filaments there are heater elements right and they're going the heat is going to spread out through the aluminum it's going to transmit really efficiently and it's also going to disperse it so that you get a nice evenly heated surface but that aluminum gives you Mass so does this magnet thing and that means that you have extra weight that you're throwing back and forth as you're printing which means you need to print slower to avoid ghosting or ringing on the prusa they've got this PCB bed heater now it's got some magnets nine of them which increase the mass going back and forth and this is a substantial weighted bit of I think it's because it's got the print surface on both sides so the prusa is doing a better job keeping the y-axis lighter weight and if I remember during installation I weighed the bed assembly and the x-axis assembly and I think they were similar weight which is nicely balanced so at least prusa has that going for it with this printer there's no doubt that the y-axis weighs more so the y-axis will be the limiting factor slowing down the printing and the creality printer has this thermal blanket insulation underneath the bed stuck to the bottom side of the bed so that makes the printer more efficient it's not going to leak as much heat out the bottom there and you're not going to burn as much electricity as you are going to do with the prusa it's kind of an oversight that there is no thermal insulation keeping heat from you know if you have any draft underneath there just blowing your heat away that's uh you know fuel costs and global warming and hey we're in a gas shortage in Europe now so that's a pretty big oversight if you ask me creality actually named this whole extruder assembly as the creality Sprite and it's got some pretty nice intelligence built into the design this is really cool check this out this fancy cnc'd block of aluminum is the heat sink and it's being cooled by this mini blower fan which has its air directed across down the channel so that is a really nice touch and I would call the actual hot end here in all metal hotend personally speaking you will get PTFE tubing butting up against it right here but that is going to be pretty well buried up inside of the heat sink so that PTFE tubing should never be anywhere close to print temperatures without doing the actual testing I can't speak to how hot you can get this part of it so maybe this heatsink isn't very good at stripping away heat but I don't think that's going to be the case this looks like a really smart design so I suspect that 300 degrees shouldn't be a problem for this extruder add to that the fact that this is geared and it's just really compact holding it up to the first show we can get an idea what I'm talking about just see how much more Compact and lighter weight this is going to be with this sort of more pancake style stepper motor versus the full size Neema 17 here so yeah total win for creality on this portion of the printer it's pretty clear that there isn't a lot of thought that went into the fan duct design here at least it doesn't appear to be that way it's off center and that might be by Design you get more velocity of air kind of coming straight off of those blades there but um all in all this could be improved upon I think quite a lot I'm not going to spend the time I don't think to come up with a split part cooling design for this even though that's you know something I typically do I just don't think there's a lot of people buying Sprite extruders who want me to spend the hours to make one of those but as bad as this is and I don't really like it at all the prusa design is worse you can see daylight through the through the the opening there the bulk of the air is going to come from this hole which is going to kind of blow down at about a 45 degree angle across the nozzle and then there's these two little ears and those look like split part cooling but given how little pressure buildup there is up here there's not going to be much airflow going around for the split part cooling so this does not function well I've shown it previously I'll show it again in this video but really the performance from the prusa part cooling is not good but there is a significantly larger fan on the prusa so it'll be interesting to compare the park holding between these two printers I'm guessing we're going to get similar performance I've loaded the drawer full of all the tools that came with the printer so if I need to do any maintenance there we go and they pack away quite nicely I'm sure you can find some 3D printed geometry drawer that sits in here or something for the prusa lots of people have made upgrades for this but again you've already spent nine hours to build this thing and now you have to do even more it's uh no here's an aspect where prusa totally dominates when you turn the printer on it's silent and even with all the fans running it is still not very loud I like that feature a lot and let's contrast that by turning this machine on sounds like a jet engine is taking off now the more cooling you're gonna have the louder it's gonna be but that tiny little blower fan here which is cooling the hot end is not going to help things out and this smaller part cooling fan as well so it's just going to have a lot of fan noise that's one that you have to live with so come on China for the umpteenth time I'm telling you please please make your printers more quiet when it comes to Fan noise this does have silent stepper motor operation so you're not getting that wine that you used to get out of old 3D printers it is quite quiet with the motion taking a look under the hood here we can see the main control board that's going to be a 32-bit processor there's going to be trinamic cloned trinamic stepper motor drivers underneath the heat sinks here I highly doubt that those are actual trinamic coming from Germany chips although I don't know maybe creality wants to release a statement saying that they're paying the big bucks for the genuine article this is going to be a separate control board for that touch screen and all of that and it's going to send G-Code commands to the main control board here but all of this you might be able to work with it like you can read the chip numbers off of the chips that's not potted and all that so it's somewhat open but it's still proprietary nobody in their right mind is going to try to work with this I say that and then watch in a year or you know four months or something somebody's got a port Clipper to this or something like that but no I'm not going to do it it's going to be duet 3D control boards for me if I'm going to come up with anything custom for this printer and other people would probably put something like a maker base control board under here to run Clipper with but yeah I don't think anybody's going to be using the stock control board and doing something custom to it but that is exactly how this printer is meant to be it's meant to work well straight out of the box and be no hassles for the end User it's not supposed to be something that you customize or that's easy to tweak let's talk about calibration so that you don't have to worry about that first layer it just lays down perfectly on the bed every time with the prusa you've got this wizard that automatically runs when you first turn the prusa on and I'm going to run it again right now so it's going to do all this mumbo jumbo to the printer most of which doesn't really need to be done it's just sort of an idiot check to make sure that you're not an idiot when you built this but that's because you had to build it yourself this printer came calibrated from the factory I didn't need to run the calibration but I'm going to do it anyway you can hear the sort of frame vibrations that you get on a prusa and yeah look at it's calibrating that um sensorless homing but yeah all that vibration is coming from this tiny bit of looseness with the bearings on the rods here so it's less quiet with the movement so this one's got louder fans and Silent movement this one's got louder movement and Silent fans fancy as this appears to be I think it's kind of Showmanship I really don't see this as being necessary I can just put my hand on the bed to know that yes it's heating up but hey it's got to check it itself and I can do something similar for the hot end I have to babysit the printer for this step yeah you can get an idea for just how noisy the movement on the prusa is listening to this test this Auto calibration routine is kind of where this notion of it just works comes from that the printer can kind of do this and then function well but again I think this is a lot of Showmanship and how much of this is really needed it's more just there to impress you the purchaser of this printer I do have to say that I don't mind the kitschy look and the 1980s Tech technology I'm a child of the 80s so this does Feel Like Home to me I like neon colors but the fact that this is the more expensive printer why are you paying more for a kitschy retro crappier thing even with a quote unquote it just works prusa you still have to set the sensor offset manually so this is the process that they've set up you kind of have to go through this a few times it took me three tries to get to this level and it's still not quite perfect but I'm gonna leave it there with the creality S1 plus you have to do a similar sensor offset manual procedure but it functions a lot differently you actually do the good old tried and true paper feeler gauge test to set the offset between the CR touch and the nozzle and once you've got that locked in you actually manually level the four corners of the bed using the screws so very much the classic technique here it's taking me so long to complete this review that I've grown a Gray beard but let's do some test prints you can see here I have two instances of super slicer open on the right is the version for the proof and on the left is the version for the creality ender3 S1 plus and the reason I can't just do this in a single instance is because the G-Code required for a prusa is slightly different than the G-Code for the Ender 3s plus S1 plus but what's interesting is most Chinese printers the vast majority of them you can just exchange G-Code files from one to the other you can literally just take that G-Code file and plug it into the next printer if the beds are different sizes then the location of the print will typically fall somewhere else on the bed but it's not really an issue so what I'm doing here is I'm using the Ender 3 profile in super slicer and I've changed it up so that the settings match pretty much the stock settings for the prusa over here on the right now it's worth noting that the prusa is going to take 1 hour and 59 minutes whereas the Ender 3s1 plus will be two hours and five minutes and that extra six minutes comes from differences in the jerk and acceleration settings which I don't really control but speaking of settings I'm going to run through these really quick you can pause if you really want to compare I've done my best to make this Apples to Apples as far as the comparison goes and some of the settings I can't change for instance this Max print speed here is grayed out and I can't I can't do anything about that also I think some of these acceleration control jerk settings all this are baked into the firmware and even if the slicer tells the printer to change it I don't know if that's going to happen but I've done my best to make everything match up you can see 500 millimeters per second squared for the default acceleration on the creality versus a thousand so it's twice as fast for the acceleration and that's where that difference in estimated print time is coming from the time lapse footage here is at exactly the same speed for both printers which should give you an idea how much slower the Ender 3s1 plus is printing and once again that slowness is just due to the increased inertial mass of the bed that needs to get thrown back and forth so you have to slow the printer down in order to maintain the same print quality but I didn't run the prints strictly as dictated by the G-Code when the prusa had reached 15 completion of the print I increased the speed to 250 percent on the prusa but with the creality printer I was trying to do the same thing however the way that the creality printer reads percent complete of the print is different from the prusa I believe the prusa is telling you how many layers have passed whereas the creality is telling you how many lines of G-Code have passed and in the case of this print the circular Spire at the top means that there's a whole lot more G-Code at the very top of the print than the straight walls at the bottom so it said that we were about three percent done with the print even though it was by the prusa estimate more like 30 so I couldn't do quite Apples to Apples there the timing is off this slowed down the creality printer even more so but yeah the reality is going to print slower regardless prusa has just finished it took one hour and six minutes so now I'm going to take this roll of filament and stick it onto this printer right here all right the Ender 3 S1 plus has finished Printing and it took 1 hour and 23 minutes to do that job the prusa makes great Prints but the result is definitely inferior to what the creality is making here the most noticeable difference is this um artifacting on the surface here with the angled wall you can see the artifact becomes like salmon skin but when the walls are all square and perpendicular to the X Y plane then we get sort of a vertical lines slight angle to them but they're very much more consistent than they are with this uh with this angled wall so mihai design another YouTube channel Link in the description has a great explanation for this where he thinks it's caused by the meshing of the teeth for the Dual feed mechanism here inside the extruder but I think it might be caused by the cogging of the extruder itself this is a direct drive meaning that shaft coming out of the extruder directly drives a gear that then feeds the filament and we all know that stepper Motors get weaker in between steps so there's a point in there where the magnets don't quite align they're halfway between and they just don't pull as strongly so they they pull a lot stronger when the magnets are aligned and I think that's a possible explanation but it's usually pretty complicated so I'm gonna guess it's a combination of cogging along with the uh the meshing in there and that is why this does not look as good as the print which was made with the creality Sprite extruder this is a fantastic extruder design and it produces some really great prints here if we use a really bright flashlight to get some pretty directional top lighting here we can see that that surface artifacting is more than Skin Deep there is a texture to it all right let's talk about part cooling the Spire here is pretty rough but it doesn't change its roughness it look at that it's it's pretty much consistent all the way up to the top now that is a double wall Spire there's a little bit of support material down here but for the most part it's just two walls with nothing in in the middle that's the same here on the prusa print and it is still kind of rough all the way up the Spire but then you get up here near the top and it gets just really ugly so even though the prusa has a much larger cooling fan and a wraparound duct compared to the smaller fan here with the single nozzle I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that the creality is doing a better job with part cooling I also noticed that the creality print here has these wispy hairs don't really know what's causing that but I'm gonna suspect it has something to do with whatever is causing the texture here on the Spire I've done a lot of spire test prints and I've never seen this kind of artifacting before you can see it's present on both of the spiers but it's definitely more pronounced here on the creality spire and this is some fault of the G-Code that I don't understand I rarely use super slicer so that's where the problem is originating and I'm sure that if I played with settings for a while I could make this problem go away but you can't make this part pooling problem go away without substantial modification to the actual fan duct all right using another slicer program I was able to get this spy are printed up and it is pretty gorgeous I think the problem I was having with this one here is retraction I was using the Ender 3 profile and the stock ender3 comes with a Bowden tube whereas this is very much a direct drive but gorgeous says this looks let's put some uh nice soft Lighting on it from the side make it look real pretty here and then let's change that lighting to up on above and we can see that it's not absolutely perfect but darn if that's not one of the best spiers that I've ever printed I just looked it up the prusa went up in price to 799 dollars almost 800 and you have to wait two to three weeks to get delivery on the kit that takes you nine hours to build whereas this one takes you 30 minutes to build you can order it today for 425 dollars and there's inventory ready to ship to your door in a reasonable amount of time so I don't know what the shipping costs are on these things but it's basically half the price for all the better performance over that one so it's crazy it just boggles my mind how there are still prusa Fanboys in the year 2022 or even 2023 into next year there's gonna be them look in the comments and just see this this Insanity of these people who think that nothing can be a prusa it's just it isn't true all right I need to tell you guys about creality filament that's the stuff right here that I was supposed to use in the review hey if you're gonna buy a creality printer get some creality printer filament to go along with it this is some pla stuff I'm assuming it's basically the same stuff that came in the Box as a sample and I use this stuff for a little test and realized that the white color wasn't going to show the defects of the prints on camera so I opted to use this dark green stuff instead so that's why that happened but hey check it out reality filament now available and in case you don't know I don't usually say this but I don't pay for these printers none of us do that do printer reviews the the companies send them to us so that we'll make videos for them and get the word out to all of you guys I don't accept payment and everything that I've said here is words that I chose to say of my own volition so there's that thank you so much to These Guys these are my patreon supporters and I love you guys you're the reason that I'm still here making videos see in the next one thank you for watching have a great day bye I'm the YouTube algorithm you should subscribe to design prototype test ring the all Bell and become a fiscal supporter by clicking on the links as your benevolent overlord I'm telling you that it will make your life better rather than allowing me to keep force-feeding UMass audience vacuous content you will actually be shown the interesting stuff that most people miss

Channel: Design Prototype Test

Views: 35,956

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Id: geEm8mn6sbg

Length: 28min 37sec (1717 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 30 2022