Elegoo Neptune 4 Pro Review (after 200+ hours)

hey this is Ben with my review of the elgu Neptune 4 Pro I did an unboxing and setup video a little while back and this is my review of the unit after printing with it for a couple hundred hours this unit was sent to me by BC hobbies in Victoria British Columbia as a review unit and I've yeah printed with a vast array of materials and kind of put it to its limits really tested it and so I want to kind of first just do a quick technical overview and so you know like the actual specs and stuff so starting with the top of the printer we've got our filament spool holder where you can also mount it on the side but I don't necessarily recommend that because the cable doesn't reach so you're limited to this side which is not an issue at all unless you really want it to be on this side uh this is the same as the Neptune 3 Pro what is different compared to the NP 3 Pro is the cable kind of is has like a guide in there which is which is making it a lot easier to build so it's not Tangled in the belts it's also got the banded dual Z axis so there's a band or timing belt across this for higher accuracy coming down the Z axis here we've got our x-axis on the x-axis we've got our belt tensioner here and we've got our limit switch and you'll probably notice unlike the Neptune 3 Pro it uses these metal metal linear rods and these metal pulleys and that means you don't have the the metal or the rubber Wheels wearing down over time but you will have to grease it and then you've also got the regular V wheels for the Z axis which you'll have to tighten and eventually replace you'll also notice this large Park cooling fan this has four Park cooling fans in it uh and you've got an onoff switch here to control that moving on to the tool head you've got your standard tool head it uses a smaller a 14 stepper motor and you've got your you can manually move it and you've got the lever for loading filament and then your uh breakout board with the like the thermister like heater coil and the inductive prob on the side here you've also got your your little hole for adjusting the tension of the gears and you've got just like the Neptune 3 Pro two heart cooling fans that blow air to the sides of the nozzle which is on this printer a stock 0.4 mm nozzle but unlike the Neptune 3 Pro it uses these high flow nozzles because it's going to be printing at higher speeds you need you need a bigger nozzle with more a higher flow Zone and so this gives you that higher flow rate the problem is or what could be a problem is these are not like the standard V6 or Mark 8 nozzle so you can't use your old Mark 8 nozzles with this or your V6 nozzles or even the creality high flow nozzles because it's a proprietary thing and it ships with two it comes with one in the printer and then two extra4 mm brass nozzles and so a problem people were having is they couldn't print a brace of materials because it would wear down your nozzles but I actually managed to get my hands on some aftermarket uh hardened steel nozzles and these ones are also uh CHT style nozzles so you get even faster um higher flow rates so I'm going to be doing a review of these soon but these allow you to print stuff like carbon fiber which I've been doing without having to worry about destroying your your three only nozzles and this because it's got a nema1 14 it's a much lighter hot end so you can that that allows it to move faster moving down we've got the the bed here just like the Neptune 3 Pro and many all the other Neptune printers you've got a spring steel Pei Co Flex sheet with a a b volume of 235x 235 in the X and Y and then 265 in the Z Direction unlike the Neptune 3 Pro the Neptune 4 Pro not the Neptune 4 but the Neptune 4 pro has a segmented heat bed so in the you've got one heat Zone in the middle of the bed and you've got an outer zone which you can change the temperature of so if you're printing a little thing in the middle you don't need to necessarily heat up the corners which take more energy so this will save you time and energy when you're booting up your printer moving down you've got unlike the Neptune 3 Pro you've got four bed tensioning uh bed leveling knobs so you can actually adjust the height of in the levelness of the bed without with you don't you're not relying on software you can also mechanically do it and then you've also got your belt tensioner and just like the x-axis these metal rods which you do have to grease moving over here we've got the I believe 2.4 in touch screen it's a really responsive great screen it's one of the the things I loved about the 3 Pro and I also love about the four Pros it's just an amazing user interface and the Magnetic holder and then we've got new IO which is really nice so you've got a USB 3 port for a USB stick which is amazing you've got a USB type-c port and you've got a Micro SD card slot if you really don't want to use the USB for some reason and then on the side here we've got just like an RJ45 ethernet uh cable which you can plug into and this all ows you to um connect to the Clipper web server and so that's one of the things that's new about this printer compared to every other eleg good printer is it uses Clipper firmware so unlike on the most other 3D printers that aren't that are running Marlin or something it'll be kind of like a Arduino style board it won't have as much processing power but the board in this is more similar to like it's more like a Raspberry Pi like a sing it's a single board computer basically and so what it does is it hosts a Clipper Server Like It host hosts a server which you can connect to there's an IP address in the settings and you connect connect to it on your printer or on your computer so you can control your printer and you can do all send files to it and you connect to it remotely some something like octoprint if you're used to octoprint it's like that but with more customizability so you can view like the mesh of the bed how it's level you can also tune things so there's a config file which has all the printer specs and all the different like for the an example be the extruder speed or the number steps per Evolution so you can tune your printer to get even better print quality so one of the things about printer or Clipper is when you're doing it you've something called input shaping and so input shaping it basically it it has the actual vibration of the printer and it compensates by that like noise cancelling headphones and so you get really fast prints because it can adjust for the slop or the vibration in the printer and stuff like pressure advance and all kinds of other features that you just need that extra horsepower to to do on the main board and so with this it has a very good stock profile but you can also attach an accelerometer onto the tool head or something connect it to the main board so you can tune those those input shaping or you can also do input shaping through a series of test prints and like a ruler or calipers to make sure and you can input it like that and so that is a that is one of the biggest features about this is the new firmware because that'll give you the higher speeds that you need that for getting fast print times and for print times it's fast it's wicked fast this Darth Vader here took just over 6 and 1 half hours to do and it's at 20% infill in2 mm layer height that's stupid fast like compared to the Neptune 3 Pro which I normally run at 80 mm per second I printed this at 250 mm/ second and the print quality is still pretty good um for something like this this headphone stand it took again like 6 and a half hours uh to2 mm layer height and there are some artifacts on this it's not the print quality is not like perfect but considering the time and considering it's a functional print I'm completely okay with it then something like this Beni this is like a 25-minute I printed or yeah 25 minutes is a slightly modified uh I don't the 28 mm layer height but it still looks amazing and I you can't really tell that it was printed that fast um for functional prints like this battery holder is what this printer is great at this printer is amazing for functional prints just because when you're printing at really high speeds there's a trade-off for print quality because you just when you're moving that fast you're going to get some ringing and stuff like that but you can also turn the print speed down a bit and then you'll get really really good print quality even better than the three Pro if they're both printing 80 mm/ second because it has input shaping and pressure advance and stuff like that you're still going to get superb print quality so that is really nice another thing that kind of bugged me was the fans because I sleep with this printer in my bedroom kind of next to my bed um these I just couldn't run it with these Park cooling fans cuz they are quite loud but if I was going to school or or something and I was just putting on a print Crank It To The Max and then let it go because this really does allow you to do really good overhangs but it will be loud and even with it off it is a louder printer because it's with the input shaping and stuff it's a it's it's louder and that's the trade-off for the faster and higher quality Prints but that being said something that would take 12 hours getting it done in six hours if you don't mind the noise if you can shave off six hours of print time thatan I mean it it's worth it in a lot of cases um yeah I I think the the print speed is it's really nice even with considering the the noise of the machine one other thing I found was the um the user interface it takes much longer to boot up compared to the Neptune 3 Pro and that's because has to host the server unlike on the neptun 3 pro has to actually turn it on and stuff like that and another that people had was there's no Wi-fi it's an ethernet connection but because there's that USB port I've seen people modifying it so you can put in like a little USB Wi-Fi dongle and then it's um it's you can get Wi-Fi that's and that's pretty much it it's I would say it's probably on my my number one budget printer for people it's when you look at the features and the price it is probably the best budget printer out there there because you can do very if you're an advanced if you're very Advanced and you're doing stuff like that then you can take full advantage of the config file and the Clipper and all that but if you've never done Clipper and you don't want have to deal with a Raspberry Pi then you can also just not deal with that you can just unbox it and print cuz the unboxing it was super easy I just took it out of the box put it together I haven't had a single problem with it since no mechanical failures I haven't had to disassemble the hot end and do a clog like on some of the Ender printers like the Ender 3 B2 I've worked on like it's just very as out of the box printing as I've ever done and sure there's there's printers that are better but the bang for your buck on this machine is really good and I used to recommend the Neptune 3 Pro Devon but from now on I think if you can deal with a bit louder noise then Neptune 4 Pro is where I would buy just the print times is kind of the the bane of 3D printing it's the super long waiting wait time for something about this and these new faster printers being able to get prints that much faster is making it much better for rapid prototyping or if you're just printing large things being able to shave sometimes like six hours off a print let's say that's a that's a big deal so yeah that's that's pretty much all I have to say about the Neptune 4 Pro um hope you enjoyed the video uh yeah

Channel: Ben Myhill-Jones

Views: 37,379

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Id: z3fNB5PNJCQ

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 16 2023