In 2021 Should You Buy a Creality 3d Printer?

hi this is irv shapiro with the make with tech channel where we teach people how to use desktop technologies to make things to create things to innovate not necessarily to save money but for the joy of making of creating and for even more joy do it with your grandchild or your child or your friend today i'm 6 000 miles over the ocean away from my home workshop and next to me is an ender 3 pro that i shipped here oh about two years ago you see i'm the grandfather that comes for a visit and brings a 3d printer and if i'm going to stay for a long time i bring some studio lights and a camera and a microphone so i can continue making videos today we're going to talk about creality printers i own four of them the first gray only printer i ever purchased was a crealdy5 and i purchased it pretty much the first month it was announced and then did some videos about it then i purchased two crealdy 3 pro models one for here and one for some grandchildren in another location they're all able to use them on their own i helped in both cases and in one case i made a video about it i helped in both cases assemble them with my grandchildren but they're able to use these printers on their own most recently i purchased an ender 3 version 2 for my home workshop so that i could test how that compares with the original ender 3. the question i'm going to ask today is should you still be buying creality printers there are many many manufacturers you can buy printers from today 3d printers at a variety of price points are reality printers still a good value so stay tuned and let's learn something together [Music] if you're new to the make with tech channel it was formerly called the dr vaxx channel then you probably don't know that we do videos on a range of desktop technologies from 3d printing to electronics a little bit of software a little bit of work woodworking with the goal of empowering people to become artisans craft people to make things for themselves if you want to follow the videos we produce please subscribe to the channel click on the bell below and most importantly feel free at any time to share any of our videos anywhere on social media with other people interested in learning about making things our approach is to go slow and with a goal of teaching versus a goal of presenting so some people may actually find our videos uh don't move quickly enough and and that's okay we have our place in the youtube ecosystem today we're going to talk about reality but in fact we're going to talk about creality and in some ways compared to prusa because both of those companies in mid-2000 and teens 2012 2014 began a bit of a revolution in 3d printing and what they did is they made 3d printers that produced good quality at appropriate price points and we'll find define that term in a moment available to people for home or prosumer type of use let's start by looking at a slide creality was founded in 2014 you can see its various milestones on the right-hand side from a slide that i found on the web from a presentation one of the co-founders presented a number of years but ago they've come a long way they now have the capacity in their factory to produce up to about a million 3d printers a year the first 3d printer they produced that really brought them to the attention of the public was the cr-10 and that was an enthusiast printer let me define that term an enthusiast is a hobbyist who also wants to know about the ins and outs of the technology they're using a traditional hobbyist buys a tool they want to use that tool they don't really necessarily care how that tool is manufactured they don't care to take that tool apart and look at the electronics and modify it enthusiasts might want to do all of those things the cr-10 was a very good large format 300 by 300 by 400 3d printer that produced good quality and an appropriate price point and was hackable you could modify it you could work with it and that ability to modify your 3d printer easily is something that has very much stayed with the creality through the majority of their 3d printer line now if we look at prusa which is founded a couple years earlier than creality in terms of number of printers produced they've grown a bit more slowly but a typical prusa printer is built with very high-end components and is targeting the high end of the marketplace so the ender 3 version 2 is a 250 dollar printer the prusa i3 mk3s can be purchased as a kit for 750 or fully assembled for a thousand dollars the creality ender 3 version 2 requires about a half hour of assembly if you can put together an ikea kit you can put together most creality printers the prusa mk3 and the newer version mk3s mk3s plus assembly is ours it took me six hours to assemble my mk3 a couple of years ago and many people report spending a full day or more and one of the reasons is a difference in philosophy the creality printers have a bunch of parts that are traditionally manufactured you have aluminum extrusions you have plastic parts that are injection molded it's assembled in a way that traditional manufacturing the prusa printers have a lot of 3d printed parts because in essence prusa wanted to embrace the spirit of open source 3d printers and they even publicize the models in the open source ecosystem for all of those parts so theoretically you could 3d print the majority of your own prusa 3d printer but because it uses a bunch of small 3d printed parts it's just much more tedious and complex to assemble that also applies to how hackable modifiable it is i've heavily modified many of my creality printers i haven't really touched my prusa printer other than some cosmetic changes in a new spool holder now something that is unfortunately a bit confusing about creality is all their websites or what seems to be their websites so here's the bottom line let's look at this slide together if you want official creality information go to creality.com if you want to buy directly from creality go to creality3dofficial.com which is the official creality 3d store now creality has warehouses around the world so as an example in the united states when i purchase a creality printer it ships locally in most cases unless i'm buying a brand new product that's just been announced in which case it will ship from china i've received parts from both china and from the united states and even from china they arrive in the united states in two to three weeks relatively quickly there is a what appears to be u.s based reseller called creality3d.shop that's a authorized reseller but it's not part of reality it's not an official creality site and that's confusing to some people because prices will be different the models will often be a little different crealitycloud.com is the backend infrastructure and the website for the new creality cloud we're going to talk about vip.reality.com is a creality branded retail store selling reality components and printers and supplies that creality sells directly but it's not all creatively manufactured sites and they've begun to introduce additional new educational sites like reality 3d print outer space dream which was an initiative with 250 schools in brazil now while prusa really has four models look at this slide look at all the models of printers that creality has this can be quite confusing so i'm going to attempt to simplify it for you the creality 3 is still a great printer you still can buy it and you can buy it for under 200 so if all you want is the least expensive good quality hobbyist style printer and it'll take you 30 to 45 minutes to assemble and if you're not comfortable assembling an ikea piece of furniture then you won't be comfortable assembling this printer but if you are you won't have any problems by assembling it you'll learn a little bit more about that printer that's an advantage for most people the entry-level printer they should consider from creality was released in 2020 and it's the ender 3 v2 now you'll notice the colors on these slides the color is the size of the print volume so blue printers are a box approximately 220 by 220 by 225 as you go to the right green is a little larger yellowish orange is a little larger bright green is larger and purple are the largest printers on this slide the printers in bold are printers that are both current and that i would probably recommend in 2018 creality introduced what is my favorite creality printer and that's the creality ender 5. it's a bit easier to assemble it's a bit larger with a 300 millimeter z height instead of 250 and it uses a rigid box frame i'll show you a picture of this in a minute and explain why that's important they also in 2019 introduced the pro model which is some updated components and electronics a plus model which is even larger at 350 by 350 by 400. in the past if you wanted a really large creality printer you had to buy one of the cr printers the ender 5 plus i think is an outstanding printer that you can use for a long time at very high volumes now in 2020 they introduced some additional printers that use different architectures the first was the cr6se now one of the challenges with 3d printers is you have to level the print bed that means you have to ensure that the print nozzle is the same distance to the bed everywhere for many entry-level printers the way you do that is there's some wheels under the print bed i'll show you a close-up picture of that by turning these wheels you pull the printhead bed down or push it up and you get the four corners level and there are a number of videos on the channel about how to do that but that still means if there are areas of your print surface that aren't perfectly level it's not going to be exactly right now there are some tricks you can use i use a trick of putting a post-it note or a piece of paper under the center sometimes to raise the center of my printer up just a little bit but a more sophisticated way is to use an auto bed leveling system in an auto bed leveling system a nozzle a probe of some type probes the distance from the nozzle to the print bed it saves those offsets and it uses those offsets when producing the print to micro adjust or fine adjust the height the printhead is at when it lays down filament in any particular location for most creality printers the way you add auto bed leveling was you added a third party auto bed leveling probe often people use the probe called a bl touch and i have a video on the channel about adding one of those to an ender 3 version 2. creality now offers their own auto bed leveling probe which you can add to various printers the cr6se attempted a very different approach they attempted to use the actual nozzle to level the printer now a lot of delta style printers those are the round printers with the three sets of wires holding the printhead fascinating printers use a similar approach what they do on the cr6 is the actual nozzle touches is lowered down until it touches the print bed then a sensor in the nozzle hotend mechanism measures the pressure when it touches the print bed the pressure goes up and therefore it knows the distance at that point this is a fairly innovative approach and creality is marketing it as a way to ensure their printer never requires manual adjustment there's a problem with that if from the factory this print bed is not perfectly flat is not perfectly level that auto bed leveling mechanism may not be able to adjust sufficiently and on the cr6se there are no wheels to macro adjust now i don't own a cr6se i've never used one so in full disclosure everything i'm learning about it is from other creators on youtube and the reviews are mixed some people say it works great some people say they can't get it to work reliably so overall the printers in this grid the cr6se the cr6 max the cr-10 smart that have the new smart abl system i would say are still early in their release cycle and i wouldn't recommend them yet until creality stabilizes that system which is probably potentially hardware changes but more likely firmware exchanges now another innovation in the recent years is the innovation of the ender 6 and the ender 7 because those are core xy printers let's explain the difference now between the ender 3 the ender 5 and a core xy printer in this picture here you see the architecture of an ender 3. the print bed itself moves back and forth along the y-axis you need to be able to move back and forth y side-by-side x and up and down z now the fact is that you're going to have many more movements of your head back and forth and side by side within a layer then up and down up and down you basically need to move when you switch layers or if you have z-hop enabled as part of retraction you may move up a little bit for a z hop but the majority of the movements on the majority of prints are on the x and the y axis so the fact that the whole print bed moves back and forth a lot that's going to impact the quality of your prints on the ender 3 the x-axis is the printhead moving on the gantry and the z-axis is the gantry moving up and down now addition on the ender 3 architecture you have a stepper motor on the gantry for the x-axis you have a stepper motor on the gantry for the extruder now the fact that the extruder moves with the hot end means you can have a very short bowden tube that's a good thing because the longer this tube between your extruder and your hot end the more retraction you need for your prints but the ender 5 uses a very different architecture let me show you that here's a picture of the ender 5 on the right and the ender 5 architecture the print bed only moves up and down so the smaller number of movements the x-axis is handled the same way side-by-side but the whole gantry moves back and forward on a rigid box frame that makes the overall amount of vibration in the printer much less in addition the extruder stepper motor is not on the frame you'll see it's just to the left above the reel of filament so i really like the ender 5 architecture but there's a third architecture that's even perhaps better this is called a core xy architecture in a core xy architecture the print bed moves up and down like the ender5 but all of the stepper motors are fixed to the actual frame and using a complex set of belts you'll see that on the right hand side here the printhead is able to move back and forth and side by side on the ender 7 it is a bowden style printer and so the printhead is very very light and there are no stepper motors on the gantry or on the printhead because of that the ender 7 is marketed as the fastest fdm printer that creality ships they've not only updated the movements to core xy but they've also improved the capacity of the hot end so you can pump more filament through it more quickly now i haven't tested an ender 7 yet so i don't know for sure but i hope to test one in the near future creality today is more than 3d printers let's talk about creality cloud creality cloud is really the innovation that may change the nature of creality for many consumers let's first talk about the architecture crowley cloud is a way to interface your 3d printer via some type of mechanism a box or a board to a cloud environment where there's a repository of models an online slicer and an interface for both a website and a mobile app and you can use that mobile app to start and stop prints to your printer so the blue box here on the screen represents creality printers the red ovals represent the various interfaces available the easiest interface to use is this twenty five dollar crayola box you buy from creality now this is a very simple device this is not a replacement for octoprint octoprint is a very sophisticated open source project that i'm a big fan of that runs on a raspberry pi but most people are going to be pretty comfortable buying a box like this plugging it in loading an app on their phone and starting to print they may not be as comfortable loading software on a raspberry pi mounting it in a case finding all of the components you need so creality is attempting to make it so easy to print that you buy your 3d printer maybe you buy one of these boxes you load an app and you go now in addition to using the creality box you can load creality supplied software onto a raspberry pi i wouldn't recommend that there's no reason to do that instead i'd use the third alternative which is an octoprint plug-in if you're already going to use a raspberry pi it might not have all of the power of octoprint available to you and use the plug-in to interface octoprint to the creality cloud the final way you can interface to creolity cloud is by using a cr-10 smart or other future printers from creality then in essence have the same board that's in this box mounted inside the printer to interface the printer to the cloud so you start with a creality printer and then you use an interface box to interface it to the cloud now there's an interesting requirement when using creality cloud and the requirement is that the only models that can be printed through an interface box are models that you've uploaded and sliced on creality cloud so the workflow is you upload a model from a browser from the creality cloud application from thingiverse then you slice it in the creality cloud you initiate that slice from your phone or from a browser and then you print it by initiating the print from your phone from your mobile device in the future you will be able to initiate prints from a web browser that option is already there on the screen when you click on it it says coming in the future now let's look for a minute at the creality application you'll see here four screenshots as i mentioned it's a very well polished well-designed application on the left-hand side you'll see an opening screen where i go to the printing screen you'll see that my ender three connected with the creality box is listed in the middle you'll see examples of some of the tutorials and tips that are in the application it's clear that creality is making the application interface a primary stop for information about their printers fine-tuning their printers and their ecosystem the third image is what it looks like when you're printing a print from a phone from a mobile device through one of the interface boxes to a 3d printer and the fourth box you'll see i've added a raspberry pi running octoprint and both those devices are displayed in my application now of all of the components in the creality ecosystem the mobile application is the most finished the backend cloud appears to be well done and relatively robust the slicer works well the web interface to the creality cloud feels partially done with a number of missing features and i couldn't really figure out how to interface my mobile environment to my web browser cloud environment it's clear that the underpinnings for that are there i just couldn't figure it out so i'll be reaching out to reality because i want to cover this a bit more in the future let's talk for a minute about the creality web repository this is a bit controversial and the controversy is that when they first made this environment available it was very clear that a lot of the models had just been scraped taken off of thingiverse now legally the models on thingiverse most of them are publicly licensed licensed in such a way that anybody can use them and so i guess legally maybe that's not a problem i'm not sure that's not my expertise but it didn't feel right creality has realized this is a problem and right on both the website and in the app they've published a notice that they're going to require anyone uploading models to their ecosystem or who has uploaded in the past to select a created commons attribution license now you can only do that if you have the right to that model and that moving forward they will be removing models that are not properly licensed this is really good news they've also been very honest that the current environment is a mixed environment and there are probably models up there that are not properly licensed and you should be careful in how you use them they called and it looks like a translation you can see here on the screen they call it a lazy lawn that the environment right now is like a lazy lawn it seems to me that would mean like an unmanicured garden a bit messy and they're in the process of cleaning it up so what's my conclusion should you buy a creality printer well the short answer is yes but not everybody it depends on your needs there are a wealth of good 3d printer manufacturers out there for a lot of people i think that creality printers are an excellent choice for hobbyists who are willing to assemble a printer who have the ability to assemble something like ikea furniture the ender 3 family is a really good family of printers for someone who wants a little larger printer and wants the ability to tune it to print at higher speeds the ender 5 family is a excellent printer in fact for pretty much anyone if you can afford the under 5 which is a bit more expensive and you have the space for it because the nice thing about the end ear 3 is it's really small then i think the ender 5 is an excellent printer i think the ender 5 plus printer the large format printer that's the printer of choice for me with an upgrade to the hot end to a direct extruder which i would acquire today from a third party the ender 7 looks like it will be very interesting i might stay away from the cr6se for a while until creality has some time to refine that auto bed leveling system and i personally am not crazy about 3d printers where i can't macro adjust the leveling of the print bed in terms of reality cloud wow it's an ambitious effort i think reality is moving the right place as i mentioned the phone the mobile applications are really maturing more quickly than the web browser environment once they get the web browser environment completed it will be interesting to compare that with octoprint now the way it will operate will be different in the case of creality this box has to do very little all it has to do is act as an interface to the cloud and all of the heavy lifting takes place in the cloud in the case of octoprint the heavy lifting actually takes place in your raspberry cloud box now finally some people have a concern about connecting a creality device to the internet from their home network i'm not overly concerned about that because this reality box reaches out to the remote creality site that's really no different than using a browser and going to corality.com so corality doesn't reach into your network this box reaches out now i understand some people will be concerned with that i respect that in my personal opinion i think reality is handling this white right and i know they're working with the eu i emailed them they mentioned they're working with the eu to make sure they adhere to all the european union privacy requirements so with that i thank you for watching the video i hope you learned something if you did subscribe click on the bell go to forum.makewithtech.com to discuss this to upload prints examples of things you're doing to upload photographs feel free to comment below and most importantly let's continue to learn together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 11,652

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Id: EHnGFnOeYao

Length: 30min 33sec (1833 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021