Does the Prusa MK4 have what it takes?

so all I need is for people to keep buying my printers and then we can keep making awesome things wow wow nice presentation I'd like to see this input shaping absolutely will do as soon as I have it you don't have it and if you have the audacity to send out machines anyway and you just expect people to trust you're gonna add it apparently look man the point is there's a lot of new manufacturers out there younger than you hungrier than you younger than you like did you feel out there called dendrocalamus he just shipped two princess with input shaping last year get input shaping working then we'll talk the mark IV now has input shaping but times have changed when the Mark III first came out about five years ago now it was an easy recommendation in a sea of then mediocre Alternatives that then took years to catch up but now the tables have turned and it's on precious machines to catch up but is the classic prusa recipe still enough to make the mark IV worth 1200 euros I'm not convinced yet so let's explore right after message from today's sponsor mintyon the beaglecam V2 is a plug-and-play printer host Wi-Fi add-on and a time lapse camera control and manage your printer Fleet remotely through the Beagle print app or even without an internet connection for the printer access each build cam directly the Beagle cam can automatically create a synchronized time-lapse of your prints or simply serve as a free running time-lapse camera even with no printer attached use the included tripod or create a custom rig with any quarter 20 Mount and the new V2 version also allows you to tweak focus and to create some of that sweet bokeh you can find more info on the beaglecab V2 and the all-new lasercam for laser cutters in the description below even though they've dropped the Pusha Mendel I3 part of the name the prusa mark IV is still a continuation of the Mendel Heritage of prussia's printers and as such the basic design stays the same moving bit and all all and it does feel a lot like the Mark III even though almost every part of the machine has been swapped upgraded or changed in some way right at the front you've now finally got a full color graphic screen it is finally being run by a modern 32-bit St microprocessor the hotend gets an upgrade over the V6 and it's now a custom leak-proof design still made by e3d and sharing some design details with Revo but now you can choose between using quick swappable nozzle brakes or an adapter with standard V6 nozzles it's still an all-metal design that isn't going to eventually fail like Teflon land hardens and it can still print anything from pla to polycarbonate the inductive bet sensor for auto leveling has been replaced by a load cell that directly uses the nozzle to probe the bed so it gets the better offset perfect every time even if you swap bet sheets or you know you want to print on some thicker exotic surface the extruder is an all-new design the mark IV now has Wi-Fi built in it has better stepper Motors it still keeps almost all the features that made the Mark III unique like those magnetic Pi coated beds powerful resume built-in Diagnostics and of course prusa slicer and still in practice it's a printer that ends up feeling very familiar and almost nostalgic but we're getting ahead of ourselves let's unwrap this one by one starting with arguably the most important thing about any 3D printer print quality it's totally fine dimensionality has always been spot on with the pushing machines and this one is no different and overall it maintains the same high level of print quality that we used to from The Mark III the claim is that the new stepper Motors of X and Y particularly have eliminated the vfa artifacts that the Mark III was sometimes showing but that is only partially true the Mark 4 now uses 0.9 degree Motors that have twice the physical resolution as you stand at 1.8 degree stepper but while that seems to have fixed that slight very fine artifact vfa washboarding in some spots it now shows up in other spots as even higher frequency artifacts just like Edge ringing this is mostly a cosmetic blemish but I'm a bit irritated that it's still showing up even though the new Motors were supposed to eliminate it now there was a set of very early Mark 4S that was built with a faulty batch of motor so just to make sure I got in touch with customer support chat they checked my machine's serial number and motor lock codes and told me my photos are fine so I guess this is just how the machine prints out of the box of course at the time of me filming this review you can also opt to switch up that out of the box experience and install the in development Alpha version of the input shaping firmware that's right machine's been out for a couple of months and it's not even done yet and I can see why the input shaping firmware is still in Alpha it's not very good sure you get a significant speed boost and both Corner ringing and any sign of the vfa washboarding is just completely gone but you trade it for this lower frequency warbling and an overall loss of detail sure the classic from it which is actually this one has more ringing but I find the crisp slightly ringy stock prints much more pleasing to look at than this if you allow maybe we should take a quick Excursion into what input shaping even is basically it's a purely softer feature that allows the printer to sort of anticipate how the X and Y axes are going to actually move with the inherent mechanical properties of a movement axis like it's motor and belt elasticity like springiness and damping and the axis is weight because the machine already knows how one axis should ideally move and it can now also approximate how it's most likely actually going to move it can introduce small counter movements to compensate for a part of that unwanted slop or bounce but for this to work input shaping requires the Fermi to know exactly how a specific axis is going to behave and the standard approach to that is to add an accelerometer to the tool head that can measure how the tooler is going to respond to inputs from the motors with a moving bed of course you would need to add one to the tool head and to the moving bit but the Mark 4 doesn't have any way to measure the Dynamics of its axes the main board does have a connector for an accelerometer but it doesn't ship with one and as far as I can tell the firmware currently doesn't support it instead prusa trusts their consistency with assemble printers so much that they ship one universal pre-made tuning for all printers and on mine that tune makes prints turn out arguably worse than without input shaping which is odd because one of the main points about input shaping on the mark IV was that it wasn't going to boost print speeds into the Realms of a quad slot machine but instead focus on improving quality while providing just a little bit of a speed boost too now again this is still a pre-release Alpha preview of input shaping on the mark IV so it's not finished yet but you know this is a printer that is shipping and that you can buy right now so I can only assess what's already available so either we look at it as if it doesn't have input shaping or you know we look at what's already there but if we do want to take a look into the crystal ball you know there are ways to tune input shaping without an accelerometer physically present namely sets of test prints that the machine could do itself and then you look at the prints and you tell the machine hey this section looked better than this one still an accelerometer would have been way easier and then not that expensive I know this was a concern from the beginning but I wanted to see how well it would actually work before I jump into conclusions and yeah as it turns out with this machine and the current pre-release firmware it very much is a problem the mark IV also runs completely new electronics and it's part of a unified Hardware platform first introduced with the mini and now also used in the Excel print farm and of course this Mark IV there's no Raspberry Pi or anything running in here the entire printer including input shaping is handled by an stm32 and Wi-Fi is added with an esp-01 at the back of the machine where is it right here the input shaping code from what I know is based on Clipper's code but of course without requiring a separate Linux board I do appreciate the physical ethernet ports right down here that tends to be a lot more reliable than Wi-Fi and is also heaps easier to set up plug-in and you're ready to go especially since the Wi-Fi setup on the mark IV is pretty inelegant typically you just connect to Wi-Fi directly from the machine screen or if you use one touch WPS or you connect to the machine's Hotspot with your phone and then you don't you use that to set up the network on the machine itself on the mark IV you instead open the help article with your phone then tell the Mark 4 to generate a config file in the USB drive you take that drive over to computer edit the file with your Wi-Fi name and password and plug it back into the mark IV I mean it works but the rest of the user interface and user experience feels done in a similar vein it's highly functional and you can tell the folks making this know their way around 3D print as well and the way they're designing the user interface does have some intent behind it both are things that you can't really take for granted though both the display on the machine and pushes lights on the desktop have that distinct Eastern European brutalisk padillac style it gets you exactly what you want very effectively but it definitely does not have that apple-esque smoothness to it the screen on the printer is a touch screen you can enable a touch-based interface if you prefer that but I like the physical click wheel that the printer gives you and since the UI is built with that physical input in mind it does work really well speaking of Prussia slicer it's incredibly good I already made a video about the changes that the current 2.6 version introduced and as I've always said aside from the printer itself functioning the slicer will make the biggest difference in how much you're going to enjoy using any particular 3D printer now the rest of the plan is simple I design a cheap 3D printer that people can build I sell a better version of that 3D printer I hire people and build a company I give away my soft and designs to my competition rate what but because crucial slicer is open source you now can get the exact same precious lifestyle experience with an any cubic research or bamboo Labs machine too instead of publishing as open source Pusher could have spent their time on developing a closed Source UI that would at first still use the open source click throughout project in the background and then eventually replace that too with something proprietary so that they would end up with their own lockdown software suite instead they decided to keep publishing as open source and to keep adding two open source projects which is laudable but ultimately means that in the current market push the slicer just isn't a distinguishing fact anymore because every manufacturer can and is using it again great for users but not so great for making the mark IV more desirable than the Alternatives but for thought on that in the last video moving on there's also prusa connect and prusa Link now uh Pusha link is the network local option that runs on the machine itself which is great because it doesn't depend on anyone else's server staying online for it to function of course you can only connect to it into the machine as long as you're in the same network and it gives you a separate web interface for every machine if you have more than one if you want a Consolidated print Farm interface then crucial connect is the Cloud solution for that I've briefly tried both but I think what you'll end up using most is prusalink with the option to send files to the mark IV directly from prusa slicer that is just the most convenient feature but of course aside from temperatures and print progress the mark IV lacks the option to actually check in and see your prints remotely there's no webcam on the Mark 4 yet but there are talks about eventually supporting an ESP camera module for the time being though you can hook up an old phone and use that as an integrated webcam in the web interface device now with the pushing machines what makes them unique and even worth looking at at all at this point is not the headlining features because let's face it the things that are new about the mark IV versus The Mark III aren't things that are never before seen instead and this is something that the Mark 4 still does very well is that the stuff that is there usually is pretty well thought out and the way it's being done is ultimately well iterated and fine-tuned and that is something that's hard to formulate into a review or advertise as a feature on a product web page sure there's also stuff that you can list out like They carried over trinamic drivers flexible magnetic Pei powder coated print bed now in even more option one even for PA for nylon specifically the filament sensor that's built in you have built-in Diagnostics you have crash detection though that doesn't work together with input shaping you have power forward resume a good slicer those are all things that add to the overall experience but the rest of the market is catching up very quickly and I'm not sure if 1200 Euros is still justifiable for this machine especially considering that you know looking at the comments under these videos people don't seem to care much for things like sustainability or prusa publish an audit report for their machines and the fact that it's made and developed locally here in the EU which does add cost with the way that the mark IV is specked it does have its applications where it's going to be a perfect fit and for me because I already have it it's probably going to become my main Workhorse too as with basically any review on the internet these days yes this machine was provided free of charge but I have never and will never allow payment or editorial input from manufacturers for these reviews prusa is actually first seeing this review at the same time that you are otherwise you know these sort of things just wouldn't be reviews but the question is would I personally buy a mark IV at this point probably not with a lot of things I'm a bit of a cheapskate and I would probably get some sort of Ender civil or eligue machine throw some core upgrades on there like a proper hot and at the very least and I just deal with whatever little issues or annoyances that machine might then have in the long run yes I'd occasionally get annoyed with it probably but I think that would be very bearable for having spent a third of the money up front for situations where you have to have a machine that just keeps on working the mark IV honestly you know even still a Mark III Canon does make sense but that's the sort of buyer who would also consider spending for an ultimaker but for DIY tinkerers like me or probably you as you're watching this video the mark IV just doesn't seem to provide the the oomph the excitement the bragging rights that you would expect to get at this price point in 2023. two years ago this would have been an absolute ball of machine today it's still conventionally good but only conventionally good just isn't that special anymore I hope they figure out input shaping on the mark IV because this just this just doesn't look good if you do have a mark IV and if you've tried the alpha firmware please do leave a comment below with how well it has been working out for you as always thank you to my supporters on patreon and YouTube memberships to make it possible for me to do this to everyone thank you for watching keep on making and I'll see you in the next one after a bit of a summer break

Channel: Thomas Sanladerer

Views: 86,369

Keywords: 3D printing, Tom's, 3D printer, RepRap, Prusa, MK4, Review

Id: 05Ye9cTXvME

Length: 16min 44sec (1004 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 10 2023