Is The Creality Ender 3 V2 Worth It?

in the last few reviews i've done on fdm 3d printers one of the most common questions that i've gotten is how does this printer compare to the ender 3v2 and without popular the original ender 3 was how much i've covered it on this channel in terms of my experience with it and different upgrades it's no wonder that people would want to know about the second version of it and up until recently i haven't had much to say about this because i personally don't like commenting on machines that i haven't actually had hands-on experience with and tested out myself well for those of you that have been patiently waiting i am excited to let you know that i did get an ender 3v2 in and have had some time to play around with it and that is what today's video is going to be all about so in today's video we are going to cover the specs of the ender 3v2 we're going to go over what the assembly and setup looks like and what my overall experience and print quality is look like coming off of this machine we're also going to do a little bit of talking about how this compares to some of the other machines that i have recently covered on this channel there's quite a bit to get through so without further ado let's get right into today's video [Music] in a similar order so like we normally do let's first cover the technical specs of the ender 3v2 similar to the original ender 3 or the ender 3 pro this has the exact same build volume of 220 by 220 by 250 millimeters it's using the same kind of black aluminum extrusions and honestly if you put them side by side they look very very similar to each other the build surface on the v2 is described as a carborundum glass plate which appears to be a glass ultra base style bed although i do prefer a really good flex plate system over this kind of bed i would consider this an upgrade over the original ender threes kind of knock off build sack that comes on the aluminum bed although that stuff does work fairly well as far as adhesion goes it typically doesn't last all that long and normally things stick too well so it's very easy to damage that surface and with this glass surface you're going to have a much more difficult time damaging that as far as bed leveling goes it does use manual bed leveling using four big leveling knobs on the underside of the bed however creality does have a bl touch upgrade kit available for this printer and there are mounting holes on the hot end or x carriage assembly where you can mount a bl touch if you do want to add auto bed leveling the ender 3v2 is a 24 volt system being powered by a meanwhile power supply one thing that this printer did get over the previous versions is an upgrade to a 32-bit board running marlin and it also does have trinamic drivers the board also has a input for that bltouch if you do want to add it as well as a filament run out sensor but both the bltouch and the filament runout sensor are things you would have to add after the fact and they do not come stock on the v2 those trinamic drivers are going to mean that the motion is going to be a lot quieter on the v2 versus the standard ender 3 and because it's got the whole 32 bit with marlin 2.0 one cool thing is that you can upgrade the main board over uh the micro sd card which makes it a lot easier than having to do the whole installing boot loader and then flashing over marlin so if you do decide you want to upgrade or add on the filament run out sensor or the bltouch it shouldn't be so difficult to do so for printing there is power loss recovery and you do have the options to print over a micro usb cable to connect it to a raspberry pi running octoprint or to your computer you've also got the option to print over a micro sd card similar to on the v1 they did upgrade the screen from the standard reprap style to a larger color screen but it still does not have touch screen built into it the v2 uses a bowden style extruder and looks identical to the original ender 3 and although the hot end fan housing is clearly different when i removed the cover and revealed the same non-all-metal hotend design as on the original v1 with the v2 they did add belt tensioners to the x-axis and the y-axis a little storage compartment underneath the printer if you want to add things like spare nozzles or tools or your clippers that i could never seem to find you can store them actually in the printer so they're always there and they did add a little kind of rotary or a knob that you can put on the extruder which is supposed to help you with loading or unloading filament as far as movement goes the v2 is using the same style v-slot wheels and they did stick with the wider y-axis so on the original ender 3 the y-axis was using a thinner 2040 aluminum extrusion profile and then on the ender 3 pro they upgraded that to a 4040 which was supposed to make it a bit stiffer and remove any potential wobble well they stuck with that on this machine as well which is something that i think was a good call and they also moved the power supply from on the original ender 3 from being on the back right of the machine to being under the machine and i actually really like that and it feels like having that weight underneath the machine makes it a bit a bit more sturdier and that the weight distribution is a bit more balanced i did want to pop the hood on this printer so you could take a quick look inside this required removing one screw from the top of the printer and a few screws from the bottom although on the original ender 3 you can access the main board from the top of the machine i feel like i prefer it being on the bottom because once you take that panel off it seems like it's much easier to get your hand in there if you're trying to repair something or upgrade something so i do like the placement of the board being accessible from the bottom more so than actually the top on the original ender threes on the inside you will find the 32-bit main board and aside from that there is one exhaust fan on the housing to help with removing heat the meanwhile power supply was in a separate compartment below the printer which would have required further disassembly as well as cutting some cable ties that were holding cables in place so in this case i opted to call it here as far as the disassembly goes the ender 3v2 did come packed very nicely there was a printed paper guide for how to assemble the printer as well as a pdf version that came on the included microsd card all the screws were individually labeled which was something that i was very appreciative of and overall assembling this machine felt very similar to any of the installs i've done on the original ender 3s with just some slight changes for whatever reasoning the only part that actually stumped me was adding the x-axis belt tensioner looking at the illustration and looking at what was in front of me i don't know if i was tired or what the cause was but i just couldn't figure out what it was trying to say or which screw needed to go through so when i plugged in the micro sd card i was really happy to see that creality had actually included a pretty good video install guide or video assembly guide and so i only use that to reference the x-axis belt tensioner and kind of how to pop the screw through and the belt through it but that was something that was much like very appreciated as well and it's something that i've seen a couple manufacturers start to do and i do think that that is great that yes you know there are individuals like myself and many others out there that do make install guides for these printers or how to assemble but having the manufacturer provide you with a paper copy a pdf copy and a video really checks all the boxes and is awesome for someone that hasn't assembled a 3d printer before i would say that you can expect the assembly of the v2 to take anywhere between 45 minutes to an hour roughly once the assembly was complete i grabbed a piece of paper and went around and leveled the four corners of the bed to make sure that it was ready to go and like many other 3d printers in the budget sector that don't come with any material to print with the ender 3v2 is really no exception they give you a tiny little strand of some white pla but it's really not enough to do much of anything except for maybe the test file that comes on the micro sd card so definitely make sure to order a spool of filament or you might be really disappointed when you build the printer and don't really have enough filament to print so i loaded up the orange matterhackers build c's build series pla that i've been using and i browsed the micro sd card and discovered there was a file called cat in a file called dog i opted to print the cat file which was the kind of standard lucky cat and that's been on creality printers as a test file for as long as i can remember it was definitely sliced at a very fine resolution of probably around 100 microns and it did take a few hours to complete but the end result was a really nice looking print and again i was able to see that everything on this machine was working and working as it should be once the test print was done i was ready to slice my own files i hopped over to cura and went to add the ender3v2 printer to the printer options and saw that they didn't actually have it baked in so i took the included microsd card plugged it in installed it it was essentially cura as well but it was branded as creality cura and when i went to add printers i also saw that even with the micro sd card included with this machine there was no ender3v2 profile luckily since the extrusion and the hot end are again the identical as far as i can tell identical to each other and the build volume is the exact same i was able to just hop over to cura then and create a uh add add the ender 3 as a printer to the slicer and then just name it v2 for the v2 but i do think that for someone that is new to 3d printing that doesn't know this and just buys this printer and says hey like i have the v2 and there's no profile for the v2 that could be a bit confusing so i do think that it would be cool if creality could add a v2 profile even if it is the same as the v1 or at least put ender 3 you know dash v2 just i can see this being confusing for someone getting started but again if you do get the ender 3v2 just use the under 3 standard profile because it's essentially the same machine as far as extrusion hotend and build volume goes once i had that profile set up i actually used the ender3v2 for last week's video on adaptive layers where i printed out these four different vacuum hose attachments using variable layer height based off of the parameters that i said if you didn't see that video maybe you want to check that out i'll place links in the description to that but those were about an hour and a half to two hours a piece and again i printed four of them they all turned out great and i did end up adding a little bit of glue stick to the glass bed with pla in that kind of ultra base style bed you don't necessarily have to but it helps give it a little extra bite and so in my opinion you might as well just add a thin layer of glue stick to the bed for that extra adhesion once completed i turned my attention to something much more detailed and much bigger chelsea over at chaos core tech announced that they had released their godzilla model which i had seen for some time over on thanks 3d for free for everyone to be able to download not just their patreon supporters or i don't know if they had it as a paid model as well they might have but i was stoked because i'd seen that model and when i was testing out this machine i wasn't exactly sure what i wanted to print so i saw that and was like yes this is a awesome model it's a large model it's a detailed model so i went ahead and downloaded that and again links to all the things i talk about or print will be in the description if you want to check them out as well so i downloaded that i imported it into cura i sliced it at 200 microns the default profile had a printing speed of 50 millimeters a second which is pretty conservative but i decided to just stick with that to allow the printer to run you know kind of how it was optimized within the slicer and i hit go and this was a 30 hour print that took a it took a long time i mean that was a pretty dang big print to go from an hour and a half to two hours to a 30 hour print but i figured what the hell let's just go with it and it turned out awesome the only two issues that this print had were not uh not due to the machine itself but i was printing from a i think it was a two and a half kilogram roll of material and twice throughout the printing the little filament spool holder that i had for this spool actually locked up and so the spool fell off and one time it scared the crap out of me it was pretty late at night but both both of the times where it fell off there is a little bit of either like shift slash under extrusion on that layer unfortunately but because the model is so detailed you can't really see it all that well and then the second thing is is when i was getting footage of uh for recording or for this video i was moving godzilla and i might have dropped godzilla and taken off one of his toes um both of those things were not the fault of the printer both of those things were my fault or the situation surrounding it but this this printer did an absolutely awesome awesome job and again had i not dropped it had i used a spool that wasn't so big that had fallen over it would have been perfect and so regardless i still think this was a very successful print and i was incredibly pleased with it and while i was printing godzilla out chelsea chaos cortech had to announce that she had printed or had modeled a vision uh vision model so i just finished watching uh one division like a week ago or maybe two weeks ago now whenever the last friday was and uh me and aaron loved that show we we were every single friday super excited to see it and so i saw this awesome bus division and i hadn't printed out a bus in a long time so i said absolutely we're gonna print this and there was two pieces one part was the actual character model the character bust and the second piece was a stand and for this i actually busted out my poly poly alchemy elixir filament which i got from my birthday like a year and a half ago and i only take it out for a special prints so uh this print in total i think the bust itself was somewhere around eight to twelve hours and the base was maybe six or six ish hours but man did it turn out awesome and aaron told me that this is probably one of her top prints that i've done i just it turned out amazing chelsea did such a great job of modeling this and the ender3v2 did a fantastic job of capturing all the details i used the exact same settings as on nope that's not true i didn't use the exact same settings i lowered the speed because for elixir since it is a silky material and it kind of extrudes strangely um i did lower the speeds down to either 30 or 40 millimeters a second so it was a pretty slow print but other than that as far as the cooling and the temps go i believe i left those all the same but regardless i mean this print turned out absolutely awesome and the v2 i was so stoked on how the pla parts were turning out once done with those prints i decided to swap out for some petg i found a coin car cup organizer thing over on thingiverse that i thought would be a great functional print a great use of ptg so that way it won't melt in the car and a pretty big print at i think roughly 20ish hours to really show um you know how how it handles ptg so i brought that over to kira i sliced it up i kept most of the settings the same but i i changed the hot in to 240 celsius bed to 70c the cooling the fan cooling was at uh 50 and i think that was all that i changed and the print turned out great um there was a little bit of stringiness that i think i can adjust or i can correct if i want to spend some time tweaking the retraction or even possibly slightly lowering the printing temperature or even possibly drying out this material this ptge is probably a year old and yes i'm in southern california where it's quite dry but i'd be lying if i said that i stored it in a closed bag so that certainly could have an effect on it but for the sake of testing out this machine's ability to print ptg it did a great job this model is awesome and i think that there's i don't think anyone would say that it's not a good print that came off of it so in all honesty because of the fact that the ender3v2 is essentially using the same hotend extruder setup as the ender 3 original that i've got you know thousands of hours of print time with this point and i've used them stock a lot i i wasn't really uh i wasn't really concerned about the quality of what this machine was gonna be able to output yes it's running a 32-bit board which is different than the 8-bit but my ender 3s have also been running a 32-bit board for a while so i wasn't surprised to see that the android 3v2 was able to output some really awesome looking prints even just stock assembled out of the box all right now that we've covered the technical specs kind of the setup and what some of the prints have looked like coming off of this i wanted to talk about some of the things that i really like about the under 3b2 and as well as some of the things that i am not so crazy about so the things that i really like are the 32-bit board with the trinamic drivers i think that is a great upgrade as well as the new bed uh the glass or the i can think of the name they call but the ultra base style glass bed i think is a big upgrade or at least a upgrade over what was previously coming on the original ender 3 and the ender 3 pro as far as the x and y belt tensioner the storage underneath and the little knob these are all things that actually the community had made available over on thingiverse for you to download and easily install yourself but with that being said i'm not disappointed to see them implemented a lot of companies take things that the community likes and do implement them into their machine so clearly there was a demand for these these different things and they decided hey instead of you having to do these upgrades we'll just we'll just have it well you know we'll do them for you so i do like that they implemented those things having especially the x and y belt tensioner i would describe is probably the most useful but even the storage is nice and the knob so those are all positive things that crowley did with the ender3 v2 so with the under 3v2 there's really only two things that i'm just not a fan of and the first one is and i feel like i talked about this one all the time with different machines but it's the fans so with the v2 they added a 32-bit board in trinamic drivers and the motion is definitely a lot quieter i can hardly hear i don't know if i can hear really any of the motion or movement of the machine like i could on the original ender 3 before upgrading it but the fans are just too loud and it actually sounds like i'm almost positive that the fans on the v2 are louder than the fans that came on the original ender 3 which is just it's disappointing to me that you know again this machine has the potential to be really quiet yet they have these fans that are either you know low cost or i don't know if they're just running too high or the bearings are you know again not good bearings or what the real issue is but it's just loud it's it's definitely one of the louder fan setups that i've heard on a machine in the last couple machines that i've reviewed and for a lot of people that might not be a big deal especially if you've got the printer in a separate space for me with it being so essentially located this is something i take into consideration and again i do think it's quite loud yes you can certainly upgrade to noctua fans and um that is something that a lot of people do but you know again that is a mod and that's something that not everybody does want to do so worth noting the fans on this thing are definitely louder than i'd like the second thing is related to the screen on it so i don't necessarily think that the screen on it is is worse per se than the original reprap style screen that you know a lot of us are so used to but i'm just i wish they had added a touch screen as well i understand not everybody likes touch screens and you know they could do something similar to like bq has with their tft screens where it's got a rotary knob so you can you know use that if that's what you prefer or you can use a touch screen but even the interface on this this screen looks like it's a touch screen like the buttons are kind of big like there'd be a touch screen so uh i really wish they had added that i hope that they do add that but if they don't add that the thing i noticed that i wasn't crazy about as well was when you're actually browsing through the print menu if you've got things that are starting off with the same name you can only see because of the rectangle shape how it's like taller versus wider on this screen you can only see the very beginning kind of of what you're going to be printing and i couldn't find any way to have it where you know where if you highlight something you're going to maybe be printing that it scrolls you can read the whole name of the file so when i was testing out the adaptive layers i had named the files all the same thing with just the difference being at the end of the file name you know based off the the parameters i set and i couldn't tell them apart i had to basically transfer them back over the computer and name them you know one two three four so that way i can see what that meant but to me that's not a good user experience and it's certainly something that can be easily updated with just a firmware update that makes it where again the text is scrolling but worth noticing or worth mentioning because to me that was a bit of an annoyance was again interfacing with that screen not crazy about it overall i had a really great experience with the ender 3v2 and i do plan on doing quite a bit more printing with it over the coming weeks and months my main concern really is when you've got other printers that we've covered recently on the channel like the bqb1 or the elugu neptune 2 that you're able to get either the same specs or in some instances better specs for less money that is what is my biggest concern for the success of the creality under 3b2 if creality is able to shave some of the cost off of this machine right now i think i saw it going for 260 to 280 dollars if they're somehow able to drop that down to 220 i think that they will be much better off and find themselves in a much more competitive position for people that are wanting to get another budget 3d printer or newcomers that are looking at some of the lower cost 3d printers that are available if you're currently running a primarily creality 3d print farm i can definitely see the appeal of wanting to get the ender 3v2 especially because the hot end and the extruder setup and a lot of the machine is using the same components on the ender 3 original or the ender 3 pro having all those things be swappable is something that's really nice to have also if you've been looking at the creality ender 3 but maybe the original one and maybe you want 32 bit you want the trinamic drivers you know you want the belt tensioners and yes you can certainly upgrade those things i've done it i've showed most of those things how to do them on the channel but maybe you don't feel comfortable tinkering or you don't want to do that well then the industry v2 is a really solid option for you as well since the ender 3v2 is using so many of the same components as the original crowdy ender 3 i feel confident in its ability to continue to work like i did my ender three i've just talked about you know my experience with it two or three years later i think it was two years later maybe three times flown by but it is a machine that i have grown to depend upon and it has proven itself time and time again so again if you are looking to get a printer and you want to get something that's in the very kind of starting out budget realm whether you go with the regular ender 3 whether you go with the ender 3v2 you're going to be happy and it just depends on again do you want to save a little extra money or do some of these features are some of these features like the board and the glass bed attractive enough that you want to spend the additional money to go with the ender 3v2 and this has been my experience with the crowley ender 3v2 i do plan on doing quite a bit more printing over the following weeks and months so i may end up doing an update video uh if there is enough interest in that and i also did get a bl touch kit for the creality ender 3v2 if you guys are interested in me recording that and showing you guys the process of converting it using the creality upgrade kit for the under 3v2 let me know in the comments down below and i will end up making a video on that for you guys don't forget to like and subscribe for more great videos i make a video every single week so there is always fresh content coming your way and if you did want to support the channel furthermore i will place links down below in the description to my patreon where there are some really awesome rewards huge thank you to all of my current patreon supporters you guys are awesome and i really appreciate each and every one of you allowing me to spend more time doing what i love which is making content for you guys all to enjoy on that note this has been dana from modbot and i look forward to seeing you guys in my next video peace guys

Channel: ModBot

Views: 28,124

Rating: 4.9134617 out of 5

Keywords: creality, ender 3, ender 3 v2, creality ender 3, creality ender 3 v2, ender 2 vs ender 3 v2, ender 3 v2 review, best budget 3d printer 2021, budget 3d printer 2021, ender 3 3d printer, ender 3 v2 3d printer

Id: Q6hT5lqHhM4

Length: 23min 2sec (1382 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 27 2021