Ender 3 V3 KE - Final Verdict

all right welcome to part two of the Ender 3v3 K review now if you watched my entire review last time you'll notice I left a few things out um that was kind of on purpose it's an experiment just to see what happens if I stop using creality print it's really easy to just drag and drop your files in here there's a speedy normal preset which could produce this test print in an hour and 20 minutes or so and then there's the highquality preset which takes about 3 hours I opted for the high quality preset just cuz I'm curious to see what kind of print quality I can get out of this machine I know it can do speed based on these speed benry test prints that we did but I'm really curious to see if I turn down the speed a little bit how much print quality can I get out of this thing when you're done slicing your files you get sent to this preview page and then if you go into this devices tab you can manage all of your printers I just used the automatic scan ad button here you just click that and it finds the printer over your Wi-Fi network then you add it and then you've got your printer here and you can manage all aspects of the machine you can click the details button and that will bring you into this Clipper like interface it doesn't have all the same controls as full Clipper but you know you still got a lot of good detail and information about what your printer is doing here I started this job up using the Lan printing button here you can also use the cloud but again I'm not really into Cloud stuff so anyways you go to land Printing and then it you know gives you a little preview of your print hit confirm and then that'll take you over to this menu in general you can select a bunch of printers and click the oneclick printing button that will send the G-Code over and start it for you or you can just send the G-Code over to the machine so I'm actually going to change something here I'll switch it to the normal preset and slice this again and that will show me my faster print speed this is saying it'll take 1 hour and 19 minutes I'm going to land print this object and when I select my Ender 3v3 ke since it's already running a print job I can't do oneclick printing cuz that wouldn't make any sense um it's already doing a print so if I click this button what would it do would it print over the top of the old one so anyways it gets rid of that option in the menu here so I can only send it the G-Code and I'll test that out so I'll click Send G-Code it uploads in about two or 3 seconds then if I go into this printer interface and look at the files I've got that file loaded up so even while I'm running a print job I can still do my file management and overall this thing's just really easy to use over Wi-Fi you can also export the jobs to a USB drive doing the local export option and then you can just plug that in if you don't want to use the Wi-Fi or have any Cloud capabilities on this machine you do have a cloud option with creality from what I've heard it's not quite as good as bamboo lab's Cloud implementation and the app on the phone is better on bamboo lab but for me that doesn't really bother me since since I don't really use that workflow the workflows that I do use mainly printing over USB or printing over Wi-Fi work very well on this machine and I'm very happy with it so let's let this three-hour test print run we'll see what kind of print results we can get out of this machine when we have it slow down a little [Music] bit I used this machine to print two speed benches one in Galaxy black one in this blue color from cality and I printed one test calibration print just to see how it does on overhangs and bridging and that kind of stuff I'll pull up this uh cr10 SE print just to compare these side by side and we'll take a look and uh see which one looks better all right so which one of these do you like more is it this one this one has clean overhanging performance basically all the way up to 80° that's insane it looks like there's some slight discontinuities in inside of here in between these perimeter layers you can see there's a small Gap I'm not sure how well that shows up on camera in terms of bridging performance it looks pretty good not perfect but you know pretty decent performance here the retraction Tower looks nice and clean and these little features are relatively strong for how small they are the text on the front here is legible you can see some slight uh inconsistencies from layer to layer but overall pretty good now let's look at this next print so this is printed on one of the other bed Slingers relatively good print quality all around if we look underneath you can see the overhangs kind of start falling apart up near 60° so not the best overhanging performance but it's not a perfectly Fair test because this first one we were looking at was printed with1 mm layer Heights and I believe this one was printed with2 2 mm layer Heights so that's a benefit that you get to printing smaller layers is you usually get better overhanging performance so it's not a true Apples to Apples comparison but in general I think we're getting better print quality on this first one that we looked at again let's take a look at the second one you can see the issues with consistency from layer to layer are worse on this printer and there's more evidence of under Extrusion throughout this print I forget what the print settings were for this one maybe I had the Speed turned up a little bit higher so that could explain some of the differences we're seeing here and I've got two more bed Slingers to represent here you know you got this one over here you can see the layers stack pretty cleanly that's one of the strengths of the printer that made this um you can see some ringing and overshooting on these letters the overhang performance wasn't super great on this machine you can see even all the way down to 40° or 30° we've got a couple issues with the way it printed these overhangs so not super good part cooling on this machine and these small features were printed pretty well I'll take a look at this other one here another pretty good print result I mean both of these look quite excellent this one has a little bit more fuzz on it so you know a little bit more stringing during retraction and travel moves but still quite good this one I broke one of the little things off I'm not sure if that's just from handling it too roughly or if that was a print quality issue I'll just break all those off we'll see how it feels on this one this one felt a little bit stronger than this one this one felt a little weaker yeah I believe this one was printed on the prusa MK4 with their input shaper turned turned off so this one was printed slower but and without input shaping and then this one was printed faster and with input shaping and I think the one with input shaping has a little bit of kind of issues it's not super good at going around corners at high speed but overall in general the print quality is about the same it's just there's some issues especially with sharp Corners when you're printing with input shaper also even on the slower non-input shaper print that I did on the prusa MK4 there are some issues on this corner with insufficient part Cooling and I think that's where it's in kind of the wind shadow where you know the air is coming from this direction to cool it off and this is kind of on the backside so it didn't get cooled very well so overall what would I say had the best print quality out of these three printers that we were testing well I think the prusa MK4 had the best overall print quality with the exception of the part cooling being kind of really insufficient like that's really bad part cooling results and I think they need to do some modification or upgrading of that par cooling fan on these two prints we have the uh creality cr10 SE which kind of didn't have the best part cooling performance either despite that being a very loud machine with a very loud fan on it and then the Ender 3 V3 ke this one had really good print results was quite happy with this I would say you can safely print up to maybe 50° of overhang and even all the way up to 880 for some features where surface finish isn't super important you can get away with it if you're printing at that .1 mm layer height so quite good print quality off of this Ender 3 V3 ke what else do we have here I guess we have the Benes in my right hand I have the Beni that was printed in the cr10 SE and in my left hand I have the Beni that was printed on the ender3 V3 ke so let's take a closer look at these as well so here's the Ender 3 V3 ke you can see there's a little bit of inconsistencies on on this bow I think you know that's really an issue with printing super fast on a machine that isn't quite sturdy enough or stable enough to support those speeds but overall it looks pretty good you can see the input shaper in action here though this is actually really crazy I mean you can really see the input shaper at work here though so if you take a look at these little parts of the bow kind of the Caps here these are supposed to be square lines like Square tool paths in the G-Code but input shaper has completely smoothed those out so it looks like it's drawing a slot outline like the edges are completely rounded over and that helps the printer achieve higher print speeds but obviously you're sacrificing the ability to produce super sharp Corners I think it worked out just fine on this example though but it's crazy to just see those radiused Corners there that's all the input shaper in action pretty good print quality though this is the ender3 V3 ke now let's switch over to looking at the cr10 SE this one's got a little bit better print quality I would say if you take a look at the um where it's printing this bow you can see it requires a lot less smoothing of that printing profile so I'll put these side by side on the Ender 3v3 ke you can see everything's really round it off and on the cr10 SE since it's got a stiffer frame it doesn't have to round things off as much but you have slightly worse issues with like uh vertical fine artifacts I'll see if you can spot them here You' just got these kind of ripples running through the part vertically it's not that big of a problem people make a big deal about him but really I mean on practical prints nobody cares so yeah I mean pretty similar print quality between the two I like the way this one that came off the ender3 V3 ke looks a little bit better just because I don't mind if things are rounded out a little bit as long as I don't have those weird vertical uh ringing artifacts like I have here I'll go over a couple more things about this ender3 V3 ke I know this video is a little bit jumbled up but just consider it in ender3 V3 ke second look video with some random thoughts about print quality of the compettition ition in terms of the ender3 SE and the ender3 KE from creality I think they're delivering exactly what they claimed to deliver it's a Next Generation Ender 3 that sacrifices a little bit of modability but has significantly lower costs and a better overall design and construction they're able to print faster and offer better features than the previous editions of the Ender 3 and the price drop is hugely welcomed I mean it was getting kind of ridiculous at one point ender3 S1 Pros were like close to $400 and it's like are you really going to pay that much for an Ender 3 I think the new prices of these machines are much more competitive and much more in line with what we'd expect for a printer of this quality the ender3 V3 SE has an MSRP of $199 so sub $200 and you'll often be able to find this thing on sale for even less uh just recently it was on sale for $180 and that includes free shipping which is like another big thing that creality does to help give the price down then you have this ender3 V3 K I think you're really hitting the sweet with this ender3 V3 ke it's got all of the important upgrades that you would want over this ender3 V3 SE you've got Clipper you've got better part cooling you've got a better hotend and extruder setup so one thing that I really like about these two machines is they're using the older version of creality sprite hot end and these Sprite hot ends are absolute beasts so everybody's moving to smaller stepper Motors I have a bamboo lab over here I guess I can show you here's one of my P1 PS if you take a look at the stepper motor M on this thing I don't know if you can see it through here it's one of these tiny little pancake stepper Motors let's see can you see it that's really small and they're using a smaller print head because they want to reach higher uh tool head speeds and push higher accelerations on the machine but if you look on this ender3 V3 SE you've got a big beefy kind of standard size stepper motor this is much larger and much more power and can produce more torque so it holds up a lot better when you're trying to push insane flow rates for example the bamboo lab extruder system it generally extrudes at about 22 mm cubed per second that's what most people run it at when they're kind of pushing the speeds if you want to buy a better nozzle that can push higher speeds like whatever the e3d mumbo jumbo is or uh one of those offbrand CHT nozzles you might be able to push that up to like 30 cubic millim m/s when I took a very similar setup which consisted of City's classic Sprite extruder and a volcano length CHT nozzle I was able to push 75 cubic mm/s and I probably could have pushed it to 100 cubic mm/s if only I could turn the temperature up higher the machine I was testing that on is actually right here it's my Ender 2 S1 Pro um it's basically an Ender 2 Pro but I put the S1 type hot end on here and put a big old you know big old nozzle on there and was printing very high flow rates but anyways that's just to say that you are kind of making a Sacrifice by using this larger heavier motor I mean that's what's causing the ringing issues and limiting the ultimate speed of the print head but it allows you to print really high flow rates if you want to do that kind of thing and I have a lot of fun doing high volumetric flow rate printing printing like really fat layers like this trash can that I printed a while ago this is roughly 4 kg of pla it's like really strong you could probably bash someone over the head with it and the uh the print would be fine I don't know about the person that you hit with it that they'd probably sustain some damage but this is a really cool example of what you can do with 3D printing I mean I feel like 3D printing gets a bad wrap that you know 3D printed parts are weak and whatever but the problem is that people aren't printing things thick enough so what do you need you need a high volumetric flow nozzle so that's the thing about these Ender 3s is they've always kind of been modable and I think this platform is going to still be modable and for those of you who are mboard fans I might just have something for you coming up but you might just have to hold your breath on that a little bit so anyways these printers don't have the ultimate highest levels of print quality if you want really good print quality you should be looking at corxy machines or some high quality bed slingers and as far as I'm aware of there aren't really that many that I would consider highquality bed Slingers that get good print quality you're kind of always left with some kind of print issues when you use bed Slingers the one company that might stand a chance of shaking up this Paradigm is bamboo lab so they're coming out with their A1 Mini and A1 3D printers the A1 is going to be like the standard A1 Mini that's a little bit bigger I would expect those to have pretty good print quality and we'll see some reviews about those coming out next week unfortunately I don't have one because I have no credibility in the 3D printing Community but um remember to like And subscribe if you haven't subscribed you really need to subscribe because my subscriber count is too low and uh please subscribe please subscribe to my channel if you haven't already please okay so now that that begging is out of the way and you've all subscribed to the channel let's get on with my thoughts the capability of this to be upgraded to an extremely high flow hot end I think that's one of the upgrade paths that I would really encourage people to explore if they get one of these ender3 V3 printers the extruder isn't the only standout feature on this machine if you opt for the ender3 V3 K uh you actually get upgraded to the same type of hot end that's on the creality K1 so it's a volcano length ceramic heater with uh 300° C capabilities and it should be able to push some really good flow rates especially when it's paired with that uh classic Sprite extruder I haven't done any flow rate testing yet on this thing I might get around to it I probably will but right now uh you know suffice to say I expect this thing to be able to push you like 100 cubic mm/s if upgraded to the correct nozzle you get an upgrade to a linear rail on the x-axis here so that means both the X and the Y AIS have been upgraded from v-groove Wheels to something a little bit more reliable and lower maintenance I think these all metallic linear guides tend to impart a little bit more print artifacts into your prints like if you take a look at um a lot of this stuff it just resonates a little bit more easily versus when you have rubber wheels these uh delin Wheels they tend to absorb some of the vibrations of the bearings and all the stuff that's happening on the printer and it dampens those out versus when everything's all metal like this and very rigid you get higher frequency vibrations that show up in the prints so you know there's trade-offs but in general I think it's a good thing because it means it's lower maintenance and it's going to require less adjustment and tinkering over time I think the park cooling Solution on this is quite good as we saw on our overhang test it was able to print up to 80° with relatively good print quality who needs non- planer printing when you can print overhangs this well so this thing is really good at printing those overhangs apparently uh at least in my experience here and all of that is achieved with some relatively quiet blower fans now when I start really increasing the flow rates on this machine I'll probably need to upgrade the part cooling but for printing in its stock configuration using A4 mm nozzle I think what you've got here is very sufficient and I think it's a great solution overall all of the previous Ender 3s that I've tested including this ender3 V3 SE I felt like the part cooling was okay but not great this one I think it's very good part cooling I still don't think it's great but it's it's very good and it's not going to need upgrading right out of the box like a lot of the previous Ender 3s did the h huge upgrade that I think makes this printer worth buying over the ender3 SE is this Pei sheet I don't know why creality is so addicted to these polycarbonate sheets and why they ship them on so many printers I really hate this polycarbonate stuff it just falls apart for me versus these Pi sheets everything sticks just perfectly and you pop your prints off and it's super satisfying they'll just come loose when the part cools down naturally after a print is done so I mean pii sheets are definitely the way to go and I'm glad to see it on this Ender 3 V3 ke probably the best feature on this machine I guess is the headline feature and that's the Clipper Edition that's running on here so K stands for Clipper Edition and it's running Clipper on this little screen here I just unplugged it accidentally but anyways yeah as we saw in the previous episode where I took this thing apart it's got a little computer inside of this touchs screen that runs Clipper and has the Wi-Fi and all that kind of stuff so very cool stuff here Clipper is what unlocks all those networking functionalities if you wanted to run a print farm for example having those wi-fi options to be able to manage all your printers over your network would be super handy I think City's implementation of print Farm software is super good you just can see all your printers and see how they're doing and click and send your print jobs to them really easily also that Clipper unlocks the ability to do upgrades later on down the line like let's say you want to plug a camera into this thing and you just plug the camera in there and you can watch your parts print over the network we'll see how long it takes for creality to unlock the full version of clipper I mean they're running like creality OS which isn't full Clipper some people might want the stock vanilla Clipper experience and creality has always unlocked that option eventually it's just when they first release products it's not really the first thing on their mind for some reason also the touchscreen interface versus the knob and dial setup that you have here is a little bit easier to use I don't mind using this older School interface paired with some SD cards um but you know I'm old school like that then I guess in the future creality is going to be offer offering their own multicolor solution like the bamboo lab AMS I don't have a whole lot of information for you on that except that it should be coming sometime next year in 2024 hopefully early 2024 overall this new line of Ender 3 v3s from creality is really nice this is just a great example of them doubling down on their strengths and producing a printer that you know fulfills what the original Ender 3 kind of did it brought the price of 3D printing down to a level where it was more affordable to more people and they're just making it easier and easier to use I mean this automatic Z offset calibration I think that's a huge deal because you can just unbox this thing plug it in and start running your prints basically there's no getting a piece of paper out and shimming things and adjusting a bunch of screws is just get it out of the box and start printing and really when you think about it this is offering the same user experience that you get on a bamboo lab p1s or p1p or x1c you're getting similar prints speeds slightly smaller print volume no enclosure which the p1p doesn't have an enclosure but one of the standout features that bamboo lab really tackled was making the new user experience really easy you could just pull that printer out of the box undo a couple of screws put a couple of things together and then it would calibrate and set itself up and you didn't have to do any shimming or anything like that you just loaded up the first file that you wanted to print hit print and it did it all of that's taken care of for you on this machine and I think that's actually a really big innovation and a really big step for creality to make their products more easy to use and more accessible to even beginners who have never touched 3D printing and for me I mean I run 3D printers all the time I know how to do bed leveling it's just annoying and I'd rather not have to do it and with these printers you don't have to do it so if I had to set up 10 printers I would definitely want to pick something like this arguably even over something like the elu Neptune 4 which in my experience has better print quality you know has slightly better build quality but I have to do a round of manual bed leveling and then I have to do the z-axis offset calibration creality just removes that step and makes that user experience that much easier and it's not just about the initial setup it's about whenever you take the printer apart or do anything or maybe you bump it having that bed come out of calibration I mean that's just adding extra work because then you have to recalibrate it manually and you're talking about spending half an hour here half an hour there I mean the hours really add up versus on this you if you ever need to recalibrate it you just push a button and then it recalibrates itself now at this point I feel like I should say something negative about the printer but you know it's disappointing that the Ender 3 V3 SE is so paired back like it's got a PTF El lined hot end it's got v-groove wheels for the xaxis and it's got this polycarbonate bed you know there's a lot of stuff on this printer that I feel like I wish it was upgraded but then again they're hitting a price point that nobody else on the market is touching name another company on the market that's selling a printer between $180 and $200 that has all of these features a fully automated setup and uh calibration procedure in this standardized format from a well-known company there's just nothing like that out there and creality really had to be strategic in the features that they added to this machine to help keep the cost down as low as possible and another thing you might not realize is a lot of the cost of these machines is in the shipping this thing has a base cost that it has to cost because they have to put it in a box and send it overseas and then have someone deliver it to you and that could be as much as like $60 subtract $60 from that $180 price tag you're left with $120 I don't want to get into a whole analysis of the costs of shipping and building these machines but suffice to say that building a machine of this size and shipping it and delivering it to customers for under $200 is really difficult to do so whatever sacrifices they had to make to this machine to get it to work for that price point I think we're probably worth it on this Ender 3v3 ke I mean I don't really have a whole lot to complain about there either I mean sure the print quality isn't quite perfect but this is a really budget entry-level machine and I think I'd be really happy with this if this was my first printer I started out with an Ender 3 V2 which required a bunch of upgrades it had a bow and Tube system arguably it actually did have better print quality on this somehow those things just printed amazingly and these ones have a little bit of issues with inconsistent stacking of the layers I don't know what's causing that but overall you're able to print much faster it's a lot easier to set up um you've got Wi-Fi functionality that's really powerful on this machine so uh yeah I mean it basically does what it advertises that it will do so you can't really fault a product for that are Ender 3s the greatest printers on the planet not really but a lot of the times they're the best printer that you can afford so I think what creality is doing is really just doubling down on their strengths producing printers that come in at a very low price point but they still offer a lot of features and power and functionality to people even if they can't afford the latest and greatest $1,00 printer so that's about all I had for this video thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one and please subscribe if you haven't already please all right I hope that begging worked I'll be looking forward to seeing more subscribers when I check in on this video later

Channel: Nathan Builds Robots

Views: 50,702

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Id: UsFmnMZtsZc

Length: 26min 55sec (1615 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 10 2023