Ender 3 V3 SE - The Best Printer for Beginners (Under $200!?)

welcome to another episode of Nathan builds robots today I'm excited to review the ender3 V3 SE this might very well be the most important 3D printer to come out in the last two years so let's check it out and the reason why this printer is so important is because it's an Ender 3. Ender threes are just a great entry point into the market for a lot of people and they have an amazing community of modders built around them so it's always fun to see what people are coming up with in terms of Ender 3 mods I mean that's how my channel got started also there's been a trend of 3D printers getting more and more expensive but this printer is coming in at an extremely affordable 200 to 220 dollars so that's undercutting the cost of a lot of the other Ender threes and under three clones on the market while being smaller and lighter and bringing a bunch of new features so this is a really exciting printer from creality as I hinted at in my preview video they've used a different type of aluminum Extrusion here this is actually a huge deal we've been using the same standardized aluminum Extrusion for quite some time and everybody's just like yeah I guess that's just how we build these things but creality has went back to the drawing board and they've designed a new profile that promises to be lighter and more efficient and you can see this whole thing is a little bit Slimmer and more compact thanks to this design choice so let's just put these together I guess this just goes right here then we've just got three screws to install into the bottom of the machine so let's just get those put together and it looks like up here they're actually using a 26 pin connector instead of the old 24 pin connector so my motor boards won't be compatible with this new printer but we can plug it in just like this and now you can see this will slide back and forth just fine we've got our z-axis moving up and down then we've got our y-axis going back and forth just like this so it looks like everything's all put together and ready to rock so let's turn this thing on they provide an extra nozzle and a little strain relief bracket that you can install up here that just holds on to that wire and then we'll plug our little Motors in here and we're all set now it looks like oh that's very interesting so they have two extra wires on the print head they're using a 26 Pin cable instead of a 24-pin cable and the reason they did that is because they've actually relocated the x-axis limit switch onto the print head itself which makes sense because it reduces the amount of wiring that you have to do outside of the hot End plus it just focuses all of your sensors and stuff onto this hot end itself it would have been even better to see sensorless homing but given the price point to this machine I'm sure they had to make some compromises there so we've got our limit switch homing which is fine it's also going to be more reliable than other methods of homing so when you're producing millions of 3D printers that you want them to be as reliable as possible then we've got our screen that will attach onto the side here looks like it's going to take three screws to attach that then the last little bit I'm going to install is the spool holder up top then I've got two leftover screws I'm not exactly sure where they go yet but I'm sure we'll figure it out and I'm I'm just going to load up this included sample of filament and we should be good to go here so all together the setup of this machine took about 10 minutes it was very easy to do everything seems properly tensioned all the wheels are nice and tight I really like this setup with the compact v-groove Wheels on the z-axis and the use of a single stepper motor that's synchronized with a belt here this really seems like it's going to be a worthy successor to the Ender 3. the under 3s1 was kind of going up budget compared to the older nd3 models this one is going rock bottom prices with good build quality and a new more Innovative design so I really like what I'm seeing here let's go over all the features from the outside so it looks like we've got an injection molded plastic base there's a sheet metal steel bottom cover here and it looks like they actually put some little features in there to stiffen up this bottom panel so hopefully it won't be amplifying those vibrations as much as on other 3D printers it's got a thicker stamped sheet metal part that looks like it connects the bottom from here over to this side so that's just stiffening up that frame we'll take a look at the main board in the power supply in a future video I know everyone's excited to learn everything about this machine but we're just going to gloss over that little detail and look at some of the other features on the outside of this machine just because there's so much new stuff to cover so it looks like on the y-axis we've got dual linear rods so these are just stainless steel rods with linear bearings on there those are linear ball bearings they've done away with the bed leveling knobs so you're not going to have to go in here and like manually level things they've just got solid steel spacers or I guess they're nylon spacers by the look of things one really notable feature is that they've got a load cell installed into the bottom right here and that load cell is going to be used for calculating the Z offset automatically so it's going to be able to build up a bed leveling mesh using this CR touch it's still surprising to see it on such a low budget entry into the market having that automatic bed leveling probe but on top of that there doing an automatic Z offset so I assume it's just going to mesh this whole thing using the CR touch then it's going to come down here and touch the bed with the nozzle and it'll be able to sense that contact using the load cell so it knows exactly when the nozzle is touching the bed and you're not going to have to program in that Z offset by yourself that was a manual step that new users found particularly challenging but they've gotten rid of that on this machine and they've just automated it so it should be a better user experience for new users unfortunately it's not using a Pei build sheet it's using one of these polycarbonate ones the polycarbonate build sheet works really well it's not too much of an issue I've just occasionally had issues where prints will stick too well to it and it'll cause problems hopefully with that automatic offset calculation using the load cell it'll be more consistent and it won't over attach to the build tray but we'll see how that works out soon enough this more compact aluminum Extrusion is really interesting so it looks like it's like a one by one aluminum Extrusion on the back here and then they've got a solid flat face attached to the front to just help stiffen everything up and make it look better I think they did a great job with this machine the top is injection molded and then we've got our spool holder up top then along the back we've got a single stepper motor for controlling the z-axis height and it's synchronized with a belt up top here this belt tension is nice and tight that's what we like to see and on the second z-axis lead screw they there's no stepper motor it's just driven by this belt up top which helps them reduce the number of stepper Motors required to build this thing ultimately driving the price down oh I see where those last two screws go there's two screws that go in right there so let me just install those I really like the compact setup for these little wheels it helps make everything more Compact and that ties into some of the changes that they've done to the x-axis Gantry you can see the stepper motor whoops you can see the stepper motor is right here instead of hanging off to the side like it has been on a lot of other Ender threes and under three clones tucking it into this little unused space helps make everything more compact it makes this thing a little bit Slimmer on your desk and also saves room and packaging the Box this came in is one of the smallest boxes that I've ever received the 3D printer in and it's also a pre-assembled machine so the magic that they've done with the packaging on this thing is really impressive then we've got a little screen here and by little I do mean little this is a very small screen let's just build that plastic off and we'll see how that user interface goes so a lot of really Innovative stuff here I really like what I'm seeing so far let's get this thing fired up and see how well it prints but before we do that let's just take one little peek under the hood I want to see what's going on with this hot end they kind of went with this newer medieval armor styling on the base of the machine and on the hot end itself so let's just take off the plastic cover and see what's going on under here because I am curious about that all right so here we have the Sprite extruder the breakout board looks like a completely new design so if I'm going to make a motor board for this thing I'm probably going to have to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to make a new version of that so let me know in the comments below if you think I should make a new version of the modern board you can see there's a bunch of extra connectors in here unfortunately they're using the same tiny little Pico blade connectors not my favorite design overall it looks like they're using an absolutely massive heat sink and then a little fan attached to it so you're definitely not going to have any heat creep issues on this machine and the other potentially disappointing bit of news here is it looks like they're using yeah it looks like they're using a PTFE lined hot end you can see inside of here the heat break is a little bit too thick to be an all metal hot end so there's probably some kind of PTFE lining in there and that's just more Noob friendly it lets you mess things up and not damage things so much however it limits you to printing with PLA and petg so not my favorite Choice there and then on this large shroud it looks like we're using a 24 volt 100 milliamp and this is a 40 by 10 blower fan so I was really hoping they stepped up the part cooling on this printer and it even looks like they're using a 3D printed shroud so it's going to be interesting to see what other people can come up with one of the cheapest and easiest ways to upgrade a 3D printer is to put a better part cooling fan on there because that just helps you with print quality in general so I think it'll be interesting see what people can come up with in terms of adding a new fan duct design onto this thing so it's still an Ender 3 and it's not perfect out of the box and you might need to do a little bit of modding to get the most out of it but overall this looks like a very nice design and I'm sure it's going to print wonderfully the closest thing to this design would be the Ender 3s1 which was retailing for around 300 last I checked so with creality releasing this printer having it with a lower price with more features is really going to cannibalize those Ender 3s1 sales so it's going to be interesting to see how all that plays out but one thing is for sure is that this is probably going to be one of the best deals on the market moving forward I think there's definitely some room for improvement on this hot end I would probably like to put an upgraded part cooling fan on here as well as a different hot end and heat break combination I really like the Sprite extruder I've been able to push insane flow rates out of these things so I'll probably leave the Sprite extruder on there just because it's faster than a lot of the more expensive extruder upgrades on the market a lot of extruder upgrades focus on being lightweight and all that but the Sprite hot end is just designed to be chunky and strong and it does a great job of pushing high flow rates and just being a reliable extruder for my purposes so let's get this all put back together and we'll fire this thing up and see how it prints everything seems to fire up just fine the interesting thing is that these blocks on the left and right side of the x-axis Gantry are injection molded plastic so you'd probably be able to 3D print your own versions of these out if you wanted to do some crazy mods but for now I think it's just going to work fine the way it is this seems like a really nice design so let's just put it through its Paces so for setup we're going to set it to English and we're ready to print right away there's no Cloud set up there's no account creation or Wi-Fi attachment like this is just a Bare Bones printer that you should be able to get up and running pretty much instantly as soon as you get it built plug in our little SD card here and one thing to note it's using a full sized SD card so we can plug that in just like this and then we've got a USBC Port I assume you can plug in some kind of removable media like a USB flash drive into that port or maybe plug in like an octoprint or something to send G-Code over that Port I'm not sure exactly what you can do with that but it's good to see those kind of activity options if you look at the side profile of this thing it's actually quite slim front to back as well on a lot of the Ender threes and Ender 3 clones they have the y-axis stepper motor just hanging off the back here and they've got a bunch of extra stuff coming out the front like the belt tensioning knobs and stuff on this ender3 V3 SE they've made sure to compact everything as much as possible so one of the most interesting new features on this machine is going to be that automatic z-axis offset so let's go through our bed leveling options well one thing I'm noticing right away is this isn't a touch screen it's this wheelie knob screen but they're actually using a quite high quality LCD panel so I've got great viewing angles on this thing I know on some of the older 3D printers if you look at it off access by like 10 degrees it starts changing colors and it's hard to read things but this is a very nice LCD panel it's a little bit smaller but it's a very high quality panel that's easy to read so let's go to leveling so it's just going to go through all of that leveling automatically I mean normally it brings up the sub menu with all these options and you have to be like a 3D printer expert to figure out how to do it but this one you just go to bed leveling and it looks like it's going to do it all automatically so right now it's deployed the bed leveling probe it's going to go ahead and touch the bed and then I'm really curious how it uses this load cell so let's get some close-ups on that as it's happening all right so now we've got a great view underneath this machine you can see there's no bed leveling Springs or knobs down here for you to mess around with this is supposed to be a super easy experience where you're not having to go through and do things manually so we'll see how this works right now the nozzle is heating up and overall this is a pretty quiet machine it's making a little bit of noise but it's really not that bad all right so the nozzle is still heating up but I don't have any readout as to the nozzle temperature so I'm just trusting that everything is going according to plan we'll do some uh audio tests here so so we'll put the mic up next to the printer and you can listen to it all right so now it's doing the nozzle cleaning operation so I'm not sure what that entails exactly but we're about to find out all right so that's the auto Z offset calibration it just goes and uses the BL touch and that calculates a certain Z height and then it goes and touches the nozzle to the bed which calculates a different Z height and the difference between those two numbers is your Z offset and that should be much more accurate than a manual calibration all right it looks like our bed leveling just finished up if we take a look at the mesh that it generated the values are ranging from negative 0.53 to positive 0.7 so overall that's a pretty flat bed looks like the front left corner here is elevated a little bit High and the back right is a little bit low but overall it's pretty flat and we should be able to get good results off of it especially since it's created that automatic bed leveling mesh and it should be adapting to that first layer being a little crooked everything's going to come out just fine so let's hit confirm this is like really nice and snappy firmware I don't know if this is a new version of clipper but everything here looks really nice if we go into our motion settings it looks like we can set our Max accelerations looks like the default values are four thousand so that's going to be a pretty fast machine and our Max speeds are set to 500 millimeters per second so this is going to be quite a speedy little machine here I'm excited to put it through its pieces looks like we've got one print job on here called cat so let's just fire that up and see what we get i'll hit confirm and now that's going to heat everything up and get the print started so let's see how this turns out now if this printer doesn't deliver excellent print quality then there's not going to be much of a place for it in the market because that's just a given every printer has to have amazing print quality these days overall I really like how creality went back to the drawing board and just kind of re-optimize this design and improved a bunch of various aspects of it this has almost no parts in common with the old Ender 3s1 other than the extruder maybe it's using some of the same stepper Motors but everything's been just kind of reconfigured a little bit and optimized to be cheaper nicer looking and more efficient so let's see how it goes while this print is getting started I'll do some sound tests so I'm just going to use my decibel meter app I go in arm's length away and we'll measure the sound levels so it looks like at idle with the part cooling fan off and the hotend and cooling fan on we're looking at like 42 to 43 decibels which is pretty quiet when all is said and done all right we've got our first print going I didn't have to do any manual bed leveling at all I just put it together and hit go and we'll see how this turns out and you can see what I mean about this screen I'm viewing this at an off angle and we've got excellent colors and contrast so this is a much better screen than we see on most 3D printers and especially on a budget entry level machine like this that's really nice to see so uh let's just let this print go it's just going to do its thing first layer looks like it's going down pretty well but you know we'll have to see how it turns out once we start the second layer it should ramp up in speed a little bit so it'll be exciting to see how fast the Sprinter can go it looks like the acceleration and speeds are quite good on this machine but I know how the Sprite hot ends work it can go faster than this I'll try turning it up in a little minute here but overall this looks like excellent print quality at a very good speed so you know this is awesome that entry level printers are getting this good this is quite fast and impressive but I'm going to see if we can turn the speed up even more so I'm going to go to printing speed we'll set that to 150 percent and it's keeping up just fine this is impressive to see Let's uh turn it up to 200 percent just listen to this thing in action the park cooling fan is a little bit loud and it does make a little bit of mechanical noise from the printhead moving back and forth but overall it's really not too bad I've heard much worse [Music] let's turn the print speed up to 300 percent even at this 300 print speed the it's coming out quite nice but I think if you want great quality you won't want to push it too much faster than 200 percent let's get you some close-ups so you can see what's going on here all right so this is the standard print profile running at 200 print speed it's probably acceleration limited for a lot of these moves to uh 4 000 millimeters per second squared which is still not a small amount of acceleration I mean bamboo lab printers are known for being quite fast but even those will typically only be printing between 2500 and 5000 millimeters per second squared so the fact that this cheap entry-level budget bed Slinger can go up to four thousand millimeters per second squared is actually extremely impressive and if we take a look at our little control screen here you can see that Z offset was automatically calculated it's set to negative 2.32 I did not set that up that just automatically calculated itself and it's running with that and it looks like it's doing a great job so so that's a super nice and convenient features for beginners and experts alike I'm going to do another decibel reading an arm's length away again and we'll look at my little meter here so it looks like it's varying between 50 and 57 decibels and that's just depending on whether it's making those travel moves which make a little bit of a scratchy noise that can Elevate those decibel readings but at the Baseline it's only about 50 decibels even with this part cooling fan on and when those linear bearings are making some noise it's really only going up to about 57 in short Peaks so overall it's a really nice and quiet machine and we'll just let you listen to it while it finishes up this print thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] testing testing testing testing testing all right so that wraps up our first print let's see how it did that first layer came out really nice thanks to that automatic Z offset detection and you can see there's a couple issues here because this Tangled filament thing was not printing very well I don't know why they still bother sending you this kind of filament with a brand new 3D printer I guess it's forgivable given the price point to this machine but overall I'm not seeing a whole lot of issues with this print it looks like there's some cat hair texture baked into this model overall pretty nice there's a little bit of under Extrusion there because it got caught and stopped printing for a minute so that was a weak layer but so I think the this printer delivers what it promised it's a cheap ender3 style printer with a lot of design improvements to just make everything more streamlined and more premium feeling the thing that's really crazy about this printer is it's got a nicer LCD screen than what you get on the bamboo lab p1p and p1s despite that being a what a 600 700 printer on this you get a pretty decent LCD screen just you know a good printer overall decently fast as I said before there's still some room for improvement on this machine there's some changes to the hot end and the part cooling fan that I could see as adding a little bit of value to this printer but overall it's an incredibly competent package immediately out of the box given the numbers that I'm seeing on this machine I would imagine a benchy will print out in about 25 minutes so pretty fast printer not the fastest in the world but really good for entry level machine especially one that requires as little setup as this one does and if I were setting up a print Farm today a and I was printing mostly pla or petg parts I would definitely consider this as the top of my list in terms of 3D printers I would want to buy up for a print Farm because it's so inexpensive you can start up so many print jobs and get everything running super easily there's very minimal tuning and setup that you need to do for each machine so it's just going to be a great machine if you need to buy multiple printers or if you just want a cheap entry level printer and you're curious about the 3D printing hobby alright so thanks for watching this episode of Nathan builds robots this was just kind of a first look at this reality ender3v3se I'm pretty excited about it and we'll do a deeper dive into it in a future video we'll really tear this thing apart and run some more print tests but for now it delivers what it's supposed to and at face value it appears to be a great machine so thanks for watching and I'll see in the next video also keep in mind that creality sent this machine over to me to review I didn't have to buy this machine but you know I don't need another bedslinger I'm just giving you my honest opinions about whether or not that I think this is a good machine and overall it seems to deliver and it looks pretty nice so that is my opinion on this matter remember to subscribe like the video and I'll see in the next episode oh it looks like they ran some TPU through this machine to test it before sending it out so this is a stretchy filament it's like very stretchy so being able to print flexibles on this would be pretty nice too well I guess there's not a whole lot more to talk about with this machine in the next video I'll really tear this thing apart and do some more in-depth analysis but for now it looks like it's delivering what it promises and at face value it appears to be a great printer for beginners people that want to set up a print Farm or you know let's just say you want an extra printer that you want to mod this is a really cheap entry level machine that you'll be able to take Parts off of it and change things around pretty easily the only downside I can see to the modders is going to be this proprietary breakout board that's using tiny little connectors I solved that problem on previous versions of the Ender 3 using my motor board but on this one it's not going to be compatible so it looks like I'm going to have to go back to the drawing board for the modern board and come out with a new version of that

Channel: Nathan Builds Robots

Views: 121,682

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Id: 6860A_H2hIY

Length: 26min 28sec (1588 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 19 2023