Ender 3 V2 Neo: Review, Setup and Things to Know

hello this is irv shapiro with the makotech channel and some of the videos that i've made over the years that have done the very best are videos about creality printers and videos about cura maybe because of their penetration in the marketplace well interestingly the creality printers i've reviewed in the past i either bought myself or they came from a distributor it seems that creality's marketing department has noticed that people like my creality videos or at least they watch them and so they've shown me some love this stuff sitting in front of me was all sent to me directly from creality at no cost to me completely free it's a clearly ender 3v2 neo printer a creality smart kit and a couple reels of creality branded filament now i made very clear to the marketing department and i do this with every marketing department that reaches out to me that i do not guarantee i'll make a video i will not let them watch the video before i publish it and i'm free to say whatever i want good bad or indifferent now you might think though that if creality's sending me goodies i want to say good things about creality so i get more goodies well i have more goodie offers than i can handle at this point i get a request about weekly every single week from someone who wants to send me a 3d printer filament a laser engraver a laser cutter woodworking equipment i even got a request to do a review of a gamer's chair my grandsons were very disappointed i turned that one down so i don't need to say good things about creality so i have things to talk about on this channel with that as a bit of full disclosure and background i'm going to dig into the ender three line of printers i'm going to start by telling you where they fit my perspective on that and then we're going to do an unboxing an initial review and some analysis of the ender 3 v2 neo so stay tuned and let's learn something together [Music] now many of you who have watched the series of videos on this channel know that make with tech is more than just a youtube channel it's a forum a place you can go and to talk about things you've built things you've made you can share pictures you can share actual files called forum.makotec.com you know that it's also models.makewithtech.com a place you can go that's completely different from every other place you go to get 3d models because instead of selecting a model you select a template and then you take that template and you fill in some parameters and it generates for you a custom model every time so the hundreds of templates on models.makotec.com produce thousands and thousands of variations of actual models and all of these things are supported by you and one of the best ways you can support this enterprise in essence the make with tech community not only by participating in the forums and downloading models but you also can just watch videos so thank you very much for watching this video if you like it give me a thumbs up share the video subscribe to the channel click on the bell so you're notified about new videos that come out now to get started here i'm going to put these uh extra goodies from creality aside and i have a list here of the ender 3 printers and i'd like to position where this ender 3v2 neo fits into the ecosystem now creality has really stepped up their game in the last couple years adding a wide range of printers some people think in fact i think too many different models i think it's a bit confusing they've significantly improved their software infrastructure of creality cloud and they're working on but they probably still have some work to do on having consistently released high quality firmware where does this fit into the system within creality well first of all i'm a fan of the ender line of printers i think they're very good price points for value for features the entry level ender printer and you can see this here on the screen i'm looking at it on a printout here is the ender three the original under three it's still made i have one that's probably three years old it might be officially an ender three plus which is a very minor upgrade and it works great these are printers that just work next they came out just a couple years ago maybe less with the ender 3 version 2. and that is a quieter printer with a new 32-bit control board new style of lcd screen which has pluses and minuses in my opinion but the big change much easier to assemble than an ender 3 it's the printer i recommend to a lot of people then they came up with the neo line and we're going to talk about that in a second let's first skip over this neoline because it sort of fits in this tier by itself and go to the ender 3 s1 line the ender 3s1 in my opinion is the professional or semi pro version of the ender 3. i think competes very favorably in particular the ender 3 s1 pro competes very favorably with the prusa mk3 line of 3d printers at a much lower price point now architecturally it's quite different because the way ender creality specifically does auto bed leveling is different than the way prusa does it but for hundreds of dollars less i think an ender 3 s1 pro is the printer i would buy in a semi-professional environment specifically the pro model advantage over the s1 is it can print it up to 300 degrees celsius so i have a video on this channel about using it to print nylon and other exotic materials that are difficult to print the s1 line both the printers are direct extruders the other three the ender 3 the ender 3 version 2 the under 3 version 2 neo that we're going to look at today are all bowden style printers so that's where it fits in the realm i would treat the basic ender threes as good printers i think we have to see i haven't printed with it yet but based on the specs i think the neo line is probably the better level why specifically all of the neo-flagged printers have an auto bed leveling system built in it's the the creality cr touch which is in essence a knockoff of a bl touch but the important part is it's factory integrated that means the firmware has already been upgraded and upgrading firmware is tricky for some people so that's a big plus it has a metal extruder instead of a plastic extruder now i've generally found the ender extruders to be quite good however on my higher end under printers like the ender 5 that i enhanced significantly and it was my go-to printer before i got an s1 i did upgrade to an all metal extruder the all metal extruders can put a little more pressure on the filament they're a little more consistent they give you a better chance at printing filaments that are more difficult like tpu but if you really want to print tpu you want a direct extruder like the s1 so i'm going to carefully open this up because you don't want to cut what's inside and let me as i was editing this video i realized it had gotten much too long nobody wants to watch a 45 minute or longer video so i'm skipping over the unboxing of this printer i'm sure there will be other videos on youtube where people take it out of the box let me just very quickly tell you what assembly consists of and then recommend that instead of using the instruction manual you go to the creality site and you watch their assembly videos the gantry comes fully assembled i mean fully assembled that means the x-axis is on there this the extruder is on there in fact the cables even connected to the base so it makes it a little tricky to take it out of the box but all you need to do is you take everything out of the box being careful with this cable because it's connected to the base you set the top gantry on the base you slide it off the edge of a table so you can get to the two holes underneath and you put in four bolts that's the hardest part of the assembly next you put the reel on top you attach with three bolts three actually extrusion nuts the lcd and then you plug in a variety of cables that are all labeled so go to the creality site or look in the user's guide i found the user's guide really didn't have good instructions go to the karate site watch the instructions and then you can assemble your printer now you'll notice on this printer i have one addition that is not standard this here is literally a badge holder i recommend you go and you buy the least expensive batch holder you can get because you want the spring to be very loose you attach top of the gantry and to the cable here that will keep it out of the way of your prints you'll notice this printer does have the new v2 style print head mechanism on this printer all of the belts are adjustable both my belts the belt here adjuster and the belt adjuster here were loose you should feel a little tension when you're turning these and the belts should be snug you don't want to over tighten them because it will shorten the life of your belt but you want them to be snug and this should move nice and smooth both these should move nice and smooth likewise there are eccentric bolts on all ender style printers with a bedslinger or with a y-axis like this and an eccentric bolt it just i'll show you a close-up of it but in this case it's a eccentric nut i misspoke the eccentric nut is a nut right here that by tightening or loosening you move this wheel in or out because you'll notice here there are wheels that hold this when you move it in you tighten it you want those to be so that they move smoothly and there's not a lot of give these seem pretty good already so i didn't have to tighten those now the additions here once again are this magnetic print surface that is a sheet of metal it makes it really easy to pop off prints and if you have any trouble getting the print off just stick this whole thing in the freezer for five minutes or so and it will come right off because basically these surfaces release at about 20 degrees celsius so once you get it down to 20 degrees celsius or so your print should release very easily i sometimes will just use a little fan to cool them off more quickly this printer interestingly enough does have spring adjustments on the print bed i like that i like being able to manually adjust it but there is no z access adjustment sensor so they're the only way this printer knows how far the nozzle is from the print surface is based on sensing with this electronic is basically a physical electronic sensor the cable management on this printer is very good it has the nice little drawer the extrusions are nice and clean everything is covered there are caps on everything it's it looks like the best ender 3 i've had to date so now we're ready to turn it on and i'm going to show you the approach i used which is more elaborate than that recommended by creality here's the reason if you read reviews of this printer online or you see comments in various youtube videos you'll see some people will comment if they find the autobed leveling inconsistent i think in many cases that may be because they set it up improperly and they'll comment as an example that the prusa auto bed leveling works great well the first difference the prusa bed is fixed it has no springs on it or things that are sensitive to temperature and maybe good may be bad but it's a design decision these springs will expand or contract a little bit based on temperature so the first print you make every day you need to run auto bed leveling before that first print so this auto bed leveling mechanism can sense the distance to the bed over the different springs that may have expanded or contracted because of temperature now that may seem like extra work the prusa that people use is the gold standard for auto bed leveling it does that before every print so i'm going to plug this in now we'll turn it on for the first time no it's not your imagination i did do have a different shirt on and i've changed the camera view and the reason is that i've already completed now all of my test prints i'll give you a hint they came out really well but while doing that i discovered there was probably a more straightforward way to explain to you how to manually level your print bed so your cr touch auto bed leveling will be reliable so let's get started with that i'm going to start by turning on the printer you're going to hear the fan sounds when i do that and now i'm going to go to the front panel and i'm going to switch over to control click it once go to temperature click it once go to bed temperature click it once increase it to 50 degrees celsius and click it so it'll start heating up the bed now i picked 50 degrees celsius because it's going to be warm enough that the surface will expand a little bit but not so hot that i have to worry about getting burned so the first thing i'm going to do is let's go back by clicking on back to the main menu let's go to prepare and we'll say auto home now if i take a post-it note and i'm a fan of using post-it notes for this just because of the right size i fold over the sticky side i can see i can slide this right under here there's no resistance that printhead is not at the surface of the print bed and the reason is that when you auto home it moves the printhead at the end to about 12 millimeters we're going to have to fix that but first i'm going to move this printhead over this spring right here so i'm going to go to move to movex and i'm going to move it back this way manually by rotating this knob okay so that looks good now i'm going to click once and then i can move to move y that looks good once again though we're way off the print bed so i need to now adjust the z height not z off set so i can go to move z and we're going to move z down to and this time i have to look at the console i'm going to move it down until it's exactly at zero click once to lock it in place now depending on how your printer came from the factory this might be pretty close or it might have a big gap here it doesn't really matter but once we adjust these wheels we want there to be resistance on the paper but you want to still be able to move it so hear how it's a little bit gritty there that's the sound you want now when you turn these wheels counterclockwise what you're in essence doing is tightening the spring that's going to move the bed down when you turn the wheel clockwise you're loosening the spring that's going to move the bed up so we have this in the right position now let's go over and say movex and move it to the other corner if you chose to you could take and move the z height up a little bit so you don't scratch the bed but if your bed's pretty level to start you're not going to scratch it we slide a piece of paper under it and we make sure it's about the same as the other corner was now we want to do that for all four corners and we want to do it twice because if you have a plane here when you move one corner it moves the other corner so we have to do it a couple times until the corners are all relatively close and then we're ready for the next step for the next step go back to the prepare menu and click on auto home and remember now you're going to be well off the print surface so now i'm going to go to move move z and once again move it down to zero oh very interesting i can just turn it rapidly because zero is where it'll stop click there put a piece of paper underneath now it may be that you're perfect in our case we're perfect because i've already adjusted it but in all likelihood you're going to be a little bit off the print surface still and the way you fix that is you go back to the prepare menu you select z offset and you change that number if you make that number more negative you're going to lower the printhead if you make that number more positive you're going to raise it up in my case minus 2.32 is the perfect position hear that sound that's absolutely perfect now that i've manually leveled the print bed i'm almost ready for my first print but first i need to run auto bed leveling that's going to check 16 points across the bed store the minor variations between the probe and the bed and use those to adjust the print so i'm going to show you that in high speed then we'll continue with testing some prints on the front panel i'm going to level and i'm clicking level [Music] and now we're ready for our first print okay i've spent a few days with the printer now and i've printed a bunch of samples let me tell you what i've learned well first i'll cut sort of to the bottom line this is a really good printer with one major flaw and the major flaw that i saw was that the procedure i had to go through to manually level the bed to ensure the auto bed leveling would be consistent was unacceptable there's a standard feature in marlin 2.0 which is what the firmware is loosely based on and that feature is called manual bed leveling on other ender printers the ender 3 s1 as an example i believe they called auxiliary bed leveling and it's a feature where from the front panel you just run that manual procedure and it automatically moves the printhead to the proper positions and it moves the printhead to the zero offset something i did manually that should be standard in this printer and i think that's an oversight bike reality that said let's take a look at the print sample so the first print sample i printed was this rabbit from the sd card it's an excellent print sample there's almost no stringing at all one little string here between the ears the layer lines are are very very nice there is a noticeable seam that's really a result of the slicer but it worked very well and it's stuck to the print surface very well i really like this print surface the ability to take the print surface off and flex it to get a print off is very good that said it sticks really well you don't want your print head to be too close to the surface when you're adjusting your z offset don't crank it down so you can't move that piece of paper you should be able to move the piece of paper if you do crank it down you won't be able to get your prints off and in fact i probably had a little too tight because i had to use my favorite print removal tool which is a single blade razor blade and a holder to get just under the corners if you use this nice and flat on the surface it makes it really easy to get prints off and doesn't damage the surface so the first print very nice second print was a print from models that make with tech.com this is a print of a soap dish that you can make whatever size you want because at models that maketech.com you're not downloading models you're selecting a template and then you're customizing it i made it this particular size this sticks with a piece of permanent double stick tape onto the side of your shower or onto a glass mirror for your soap once again a beautiful print now in addition to the printer i'm doing something else new here i'm using creality filament for the first time i'm impressed uh this gray corality filament almost makes the layer lines invisible and this was printed at a point two millimeter layer line which is relatively coarse beautiful print so then i wanted to make sure the extruder was extruding properly and dimensions were correct so i printed a calibration cap these calibration cats are exactly 20 millimeters on a side so let's take our caliper here i'm going to turn it on hit the zero key to make sure it's currently at zero and then we will check a slot side of this cat 20.01 i don't know if you can see that 20.01 that's quite good let's check the other dimension and this is 19.98 19.98 so we're off at most 0.3 millimeters that's a excellent print so the extruder is very very consistent it's working very well but it's also telling us that the belts and the eccentric nuts the eccentric nuts that adjust the wheels that hold the printhead on the gantry they adjust the wheels that hold the print bed um and the belts have been tightened appropriately so they're firm those are all tightened properly so good extruder well tightened belts not over tightened because that will wear them out more quickly well tightened belts snug and i've checked the eccentric nuts so nothing is wobbling about this printer produced a very reliable print now i wanted to try something a little different so i printed a vase and i tested two things on about this face i pure tested speed and i tested quality overall this ender 3 is like every other ender 3 except for the s1 and that is it's relatively slow the recommended print speed in the slicer is 50 millimeters per second you can push that up to a hundred depending on your print it may not make as much difference as you think because when you increase the top line print speed in a cure based slicer it doesn't necessarily double the speed of every parameter it's a complex set of parameters and it doesn't impact the jerk and acceleration settings settings about how quickly your printer can change direction so it may not actually double the speed what will double the speed is going to the front panel of your printer and going under tune to speed and making it 200 so for most of this phase which is basically perfect i had it at the default speed then i moved it up to 200 percent and you can see in the close-up here that there are lots of bumps on this print so what's happening well the faster you print the more accurate the extruder needs to be and the ability of the nozzle to extrude just the right amount of filament has to be fine-tuned you also have to fine-tune retraction because what's happening is when you're printing a circle it's not actually a circle it's a bunch of straight lines and the smaller those straight lines the more it looks like a circle so if you want a really good looking circle use a lot of little tiny lines and if you're printing very fast you're making those moves very very quickly and when you're making those moves very quickly when you pause for a second de-accelerate to change direction some filament may ooze out of your nozzle that's called a bump so how can you reduce the number of bumps make those line segments longer that also makes it easier for the printer to control the flow of filament because it's extruding a longer segment how do you do that well you go into your cura based slicer and you look at an advanced option that means you have to go to the hamburger menu click on that little bar menu and set advanced then you go down to mesh features or you search for maximum deviation and the maximum i'm sorry maximum resolution and the maximum resolution was set at .25 i changed it to one millimeter so i said to the printer never print a line less than a millimeter long now that will make this much smoother and in fact i'll show you an example of that in a minute but it will affect your it will impact your ability to print very very tiny details so generally that's set below your nozzle size i set it bigger because i knew i was printing a vase and i wanted it to just look beautiful so i set it to one millimeter now there is one other offsetting factor when you're making that circle the difference between the actual line and the circle and i'll show you a picture here you can see is called the maximum deviation if by going to a longer segment i'm going to end up with a maximum deviation that's over a certain amount it won't do it so maximum deviation was set to 0.025 a very small number i increased that to 0.1 by making those changes and then printing another vase now ideally i should have probably printed the same vase but another vase this one comes off models that make with tech.com and you can set the dimensions you can set the number of sides you can make it bigger on the top or smaller on the top actually a quite a nice template i ended up with an absolutely perfect print so let me wrap this all up this is a very good printer is it the right printer for you well a basic ender three this is assuming right now we're talking creality printers because there are other printers in this price range a basic ender 3 is 200 the ender 3v2 not neo is fifty dollars this is three hundred dollars so basically when compared to the ender three v two this is fifty dollars more for that fifty dollars you get auto bed leveling you get this really nice print surface you get the ability to see images in your lcd theoretically they could add that to the other printer by just upgrading the firmware you get uh an all metal extruder i think it is well worth the money the parts a lot loan would be probably more i haven't priced them out but probably more so i think this is the printer i'm going to recommend to most new hobbyists looking for their first thanks so much if you enjoyed this video give me a thumbs up recommend it to other people click on the bell so you're notified and let's continue to learn things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 54,800

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Id: M4JFJ9SL-So

Length: 32min 33sec (1953 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 30 2022