Elegoo Neptune 4 & 4 Pro Review - A printer SO FAST it was rushed to market

okay so I'm going to be brief with this one and I'm sorry but I honestly didn't even want to do these reviews really I'm typically a resin printer but when you get enrolled into the programs by the brand you rarely get to pick and choose what you get they just send you stuff and for months now I've prioritized other printers because they interest me more but when the Neptune 4 Max turned up I figured well I best get on with these but as it turns out waiting was actually a good idea so hi I'm Ross and this is f Hammer videos so let's get into it really simple the Neptune Forza entry level fdm printers well at the price point anyway with a print volume of 225x 225 x 265 mm this is a pretty mid-range size it's half decent to get started printing most things but it's no helmet class printer as you'll soon see for that you'd be better off with the reasonably priced Neptune 4 plus when it comes to set up printers like this are a bit more complex than most because you do need to build them it's not the hardest thing in the world and elu have video guides on the USB drive you get with these printers and they're also online too I found setup quite easy and had both built in about an hour and that includes filming but I've done a few printers now and I'd say it should take about an hour per printer for most people and I know a lot of people are interested in knowing the difference between the Neptune 4 and the Neptune 4 Pro because it's anything but clear on the website well all I can see is the pro has a metal rail for the hotend mechanism to run on that's it and the intent here is clearly to have something that lasts longer than the rubber Wheels on the normal Neptune 4 but practically what this seems to make it do is make more louder grindy squeaky noises which are very annoying and for that alone I'd pick the Neptune 4 over the pro any day of the week I mean I can just replace the wheels when I'd need to rather than put up with the extra noise once it's built though you just load in your filament by putting it in on the Reel holder above the printer and then feed it through the runout detector then into the hot end that's it it is quite simple and straightforward when you do this just pull the latch for the gear release feed it down as deep as it'll go and then use the on display options to heat it up and feed it through the nozzle itself when it comes to leveling printers like this these are semi-automatic so you do need to turn the large cogs under each corner for part of the process then you use automatic compensation for the rest but the way they tell you to do it in the guide is not the best approach in my opinion the the printer shipped with all of these cogs tightened to the one extreme either super loose or super tight so make sure you loosen each one about halfway so it's sat halfway between loose and tight what I then recommend you do is follow it on the onscreen instructions run through the manual leveling sequence with one piece of paper loosen it or tighten it for each Corner as you go when you pull the paper loose but not push it Loose that's tight enough and when you've done this sequence it'll take you on to automatic bed leveling but don't do that trust me go back and do the manual process one more time balancing Each corner and then the center once you've done that then let it do automatic detection but that's it that's the whole setup it's really simple and straightforward so go and print something when it comes to Ports and extra things on this printer we have had an upgrade from the Neptune 3 range gone are the daed old micro SD cards which were well they're daed cuz they're small and fiddly instead now you quite sensibly have a USB port and a USB drive for loading print files on with though just like with resin printers these are cheap and rubbish and I recommend you replace them with some decent ones probably from sandis cuz that's just the brand I've always used and they're fine and do that ASAP because at some point these things will die and it's probably some point soon too but you can also connect this printer to to a local network but that's going to be over ether a and that'll let you access all of the awesome functionality of the Clipper firmware that you could possibly want personally I don't care about any of that information I'm just happy to use USB because it works and it's simple that's what I want from my printers out of the box set up working as for the interface on the printer well this has a lot more options than the Neptune 3 and everything is sensibly laid out on a control pad and this handily is just magnetized to the holder at any point you can just lift this off and use it like any handheld controller which I suppose saves your neck a bit and one of the other functional features I want to talk about is the inclusion of two lights built into the printer's frame you get one above the whole printer's frame which lights up the whole model and print area but then you have another one built into the hot end itself so you can easily see all the filament coming out and that second one is quite a handy addition but when it comes to printing for me well everything started well both printers chucked off a benchy without any problem in 16 minutes which is pretty much the standard now for anyone who claims they've got a fast printer and I couldn't think what to print on these and I wanted something I could compare so I dove into printing off some helmets of Eva unit 3 which I found on Nico Industries website and I couldn't quite get these at 100% scale but with some smart orienting I was able to get them down on the bed at 98% and that's not bad for a small helmet on a small printer but in printing it I got some severe layer shifts before I even got a quarter of the way up so on both printers I made sure to tighten the belts and tried again at a different angle but once again I got exactly the same on the other printer so I dropped the scale down a little bit more and tried again on both printers and I'd actually got them both set up now and started them at the same time and it was then that I realized that the layer shift was in the exact same place from both prints on each of the printers and this suggested to me that the issue was in the slice of the file more than it was in either of the printers themselves now the slice of for these printers is elgu's own version of cura and that's a slicing application that's quickly falling behind the competition and ELO's version has even fewer enhancements than that so as I've done on many other printers now jumping off the back of my bamboo Labs experience I went over to Orca slicer and that is an application generating a ton of Buzz this already had profiles for the Neptune 4S so I'm glad I waited to do these reviews and I've got to say it straight up in most cases I am absolutely loving Orca and I recommend you try it out yourself it's based on bamboo Studio which is based on the prusser slicer which is based on the original slic R SLI c3r program but this is really good and once again if you're interested it will fully integrate into the printer's Clipper firmware when you use the network interface and it'll show you a ton of extra printer details but because I don't care about any of that and I'm just interested in the simple things I liked Orca because it made it very obvious what my problem was whilst my object and its supports fit within the usable area of the print bed the actual hot end would need to travel outside of its limits in order to complete the prints at the top of the head and so I had no choice but to shrink the model down to 80% and have a go again and finally I was able to get some successful Prints but I still had signs of layer shifting and having done a bit of further reading online I've found that I'm not the only one with this issue and whilst I'm not a person to typically mod his printers I did find out that elu have created a proprietary nozzle for the Neptune 4 range and that isn't uncommon lately a lot of 3D printer companies especially in this new generation are making proprietary nozzles but that's usually because it gives us extra benefits such as easily changing them in a quick swap mechanism such as on the flash Forge Adventurer Pro or on Bamboo's X1 Carbon where it's built pretty much to fit directly in the hot end and that hot end comes upon part we're using nothing more than magnet so there are benefits there but here because it's just a normal screw nozzle I don't understand the benefit and I can see that it'll be a bit of a drawback for many people out there one because this style is relatively new and untested but when replacing the nozzles you'll be quite limited to what elu alone offer and that's going to be the case for a good while from what I can see at the point of recording this video you can't even get a 6 mm nozzle for it so yeah now another feature of these new printers is the large Park calling fan and these turbines are quite loud you can turn them off with a switch on the top but when printing on the fastest speeds you really need them on and if you're happy to put volume aside maybe your printers out in another room where you're not there listening to it the biggest issue with these CES is when it comes to maintenance where other brands have made hot ends with more easily removable casing elu have packed all of the key hardware into the least accessible part of the hotend and that's in the back so in order to change anything you need to remove the partk cooling fan just to get access to that and then the screws for mounting the hot end too and its carriage and they're all really awkward and you might be saying this is a minor thing but if you are I'm assuming you are probably new to the World of fdm Printing because hot end and extruder maintenance is something you need to do quite frequently so all in all these printers work and if if you're after your first fdm printer and one that's of a decent size I guess they're okay but honestly they feel a little bit very very rushed where elu have certainly made advancements in this generation to align with their competitors and by that I mean they've made a faster printer that runs on Clipper I must admit that whilst I'm impressed by the enhancements I'm saddened with the output of quality of the prints I mean yeah I'm confident I or you could tweak this PR as to make it better hell just switching to orur is a big enough win alone but elu seemed to have fallen foul of quite a typical misunderstanding that's gotten the better of many brands in the last year since the mid to late 2000s fdm printers got faster and now everyone is focusing on faster printers with Clipper firmware because everyone else is making faster printers with Clipper firmware but with this price point eligo are targeting the beginner crowd of potential printer users and have done nothing to make their onboarding process any easier where many other brands have I mean they haven't even made it easy to get the textured build plate back in its proper place after part removal and trying to align this when the bed's still warm leads to quite a few frequent ouches and I'm sorry if you're an elu fan that's just my view of these printers I'm a fan of elu myself just go and look at my printer comparison video where I've pretty much recommended every single one of their resin printers over the competitors because they've absolutely nailed it with features quality and price point but when it comes to fdm with things like these untested nozzle styles that haven't done much to win over the court of public opinion it's not a far cry to say that they've actually made it worse so look if you know what you're doing and you know how to tweak printers and you know that these offer the dimensions and speeds at the price you want wait in tweak away and get it going and enjoy it but if that's you I'm honestly surprised you're watching my video and wondering about my opinion rather than someone more schooled on this technology if you don't already know what you're doing with fdm 3D printers and you're wondering if this is the best one to get as a beginner if you're happy to do a lot of learning and actually welcome that challenge this will both teach and test you but if you just want to get something that works out of the box maybe keep looking I want to say thanks for watching and even if you decided not to buy this printer but found the video helpful I'd really love it if you could click like and add a comment for the algorithm thanks to our members who are on screen now and get early access to all of our content exclusive videos and more like their name up in lights as you can see now please consider joining them or dropping us a tip in the form of a super thanks comment below this video I want to say thanks again until next time stay frosty F hammer [Music] out [Music]

Channel: FauxHammer

Views: 48,006

Keywords:

Id: E7oCPKrfqJE

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 14 2023