QIDI Q1 Pro Review // Print More for Less?

Hey who put that camera there? don't mind me just building my peak physique for the summer but I'm actually glad you're here because I have been wanting to show off these sweet gymnastics rings that I 3D printed and more so the machine I used to make them so let's go ahead and take a look at the QIDI Q1 Pro 3D printer hey friends it's Devin here with Make Anything and I'm here with the Q1 Pro 3D printer by QIDI Tech I've been printing with this machine for many many months now so I'm finally ready to give you my thoughts I like to get a lot of hours on my machines before I share my opinions just to see if they really hold up over time and I've done that with this machine so those of you familiar with my reviews know I don't get too deep into the technical side of things I really just like to share my experience and show off the fun things I've printed on the machines so that's more or less the goal today but I'm thinking I'm just going to give you my main thoughts up front so we're not not beating around the bush and then we'll jump into that stuff for some background I moved here to Sweden about 6 months ago and since then I've been printing mainly with the Q1 Pro here and Bambu Lab's X1-Carbon Combo I started off with the X1-Carbon Combo you can watch my video covering that machine but in short it became my gold standard for what a consumer 3D printer can be Bambu Lab came out of nowhere and really kicked the 3D printing industry in the butt stepped things up and raised the bar for what a consumer 3D printer should be what the experience should be like and since then other companies have been doing their best to catch up I think QIDI Tech has done a commendable job at doing that with the Q1 Pro here they've clearly borrowed some ideas from the X1-Carbon and Bambu Lab printers and they've also incorporated a few of their own things like a heated chamber we'll touch on the little things throughout the video but basically what I want to say is this printer when it comes to print quality it's just as good as the X1 Carbon that is to say they both can pull off essentially flawless prints if you're printing models that are well designed one thing I love about the X1 Carbon is the completeness of the ecosystem I talked a lot about the entire  experience how smooth and seamless it is and with the QIDI Tech Q1 Pro here it's not quite up to that level but it's still a fantastic printer and it's much cheaper throughout the video I'll point out the occasional software glitch some funky things about the machine but you'll come to see that in terms of print quality and reliability this machine matches the X1 Carbon and it costs half as much there are also some ways in which I consider it a little bit better full disclosure QIDI Tech did send me this machine free of charge in exchange for a video like this but as always I'm just doing my best to accurately represent my opinions and experience with this machine as unbiased as I possibly can so let's go ahead and take a look at what this thing is all about okay right off the bat QIDI is imitating Bambu Lab with the scary 'lift the massive printer out by the plastic bag' technique somehow it works something I've always loved about QIDI Tech printers is the minimal assembly resulting in a disappointing timelapse but a painless install we do get a quick start guide along with onscreen instructions for the few steps that are required which is basically unfastening some screws and zip ties that ensured safe shipping and then running initial calibration steps like the automatic 36 point bed leveling and the anxiety inducing input shaping [ furious calibration noises ] it's all quite reminiscent of the X1 Carbon unboxing within 25 minutes the printer was ready for its first test print and I decided to go straight for this fancy coin castle despite a 4 and 1/ half hour print time a lack of refinement became clear as early as the first filament swap with some unfortunate text formatting "butt 😋" then with the 'filament unloading' which is actually the filament loading the printer just froze on this step and I had no choice but to turn the printer off and on and see if the print recovery would work but it was totally misaligned and gave me this unhelpful  error code that was not a promising start but I reset and started the print a new with better  results I will add that this particular filament loading glitch never happened again so I can't say what that was about anyways this time around the print finished without issue and the final result looks very nice there was a bit of stringing here and there but I'll attribute that to using matte PolyTerra PLA which the sample G-Code isn't tuned for but it's still a great print overall and it serves its silly function from there I went straight into trying out different filaments first with this PETG prototype for these ASA parts which didn't warp thanks to a brim and the Q1 Pro's heated chamber that was a replacement part for my sister's refrigerator and then I went on to printing some more PETG parts besides sticking to the build plate a little too well and a somewhat prominent seam this big piece came out very clean this part connects to the end of my laser cutter's exhaust hose so I don't have to open the door quite as much on cold days it didn't work exactly as I hoped but for this video that's besides the point here's another petg hose adapter I made for my table saw and shopvac gotta love me some vacuum adapters I also jumped into some flexible printing with this Bambu Lab 98A TPU filament and the Q1 Pro handled it with no  problems thanks to its direct drive extruder this ring is a simple grip for the bottom of my IKEA waste bin which solved the annoying problem of it sliding on my bathroom floor yes this is why we buy 3D printers from there it was on to some polycarbonate prints and PC is a fairly technical material printing at high temperatures and suffering from similar bed adhesion problems as ABS and ASA that's where the Q1 Pro's heated chamber is especially handy while I was able to print with this filament on my X1-Carbon the 55° heated chamber here really helps prevent warping and thus improves bed adhesion as well here's a VESA mount adapter I made to help mount my PC monitor to my Flexispot monitor arms to free up some more desk space and to start fulfilling my IKEA quota I decided to mount my ENEBY speaker onto the second arm with another custom polycarbonate adapter there we go nice and sturdy ooookayy all right maybe I overestimated the  strength of polycarbonate I printed a second one with solid infill and that's been holding up much better so far I also made this colorful chunky handle for the ENEBY speaker printed with PLA and PETG and I think it's pretty fun what really impressed me was this very long and narrow polycarbonate part since those tend to suffer the most from shrinkage I still printed with a brim to make sure it's stuck but the fact that the bottom stayed completely flat is definitely thanks to the heated chamber and the reason I keep bringing it up is that heated chambers in consumer 3D printers are still not so common the original patent on heated chambers expired in 2021 and it's awesome to finally see them make their way into more printers as a simple but effective way of improving print reliability for many materials I definitely expect this to become more common with new printers but for now it's still a notable and  distinguishing feature for this printer what you're seeing here is the assembly of my screw-free modification for this IKEA magnetic knife rack I glued in my printed part to create a  better surface for me to apply acrylic tape so that I could hang this up against my tile backsplash instead of using the destructive screw fixture that it usually uses and it worked like a charm continuing down the line of IKEA mods the next thing I printed were these curtain rod holders I accidentally bought the wrong parts for my setup and was short a few brackets so I decided to just print the remainder mostly out of impatience and stubbornness once again I used polycarbonate filament since this part is fairly thin I printed a little screw cover as well and everything went up nicely I definitely wouldn't trust three of my brackets to hold up these heavy double blackout curtains they're obviously not as strong as steel parts but they can replace the middle bracket and work fine for smaller curtains so I managed to save like $2 and a trip to the store and I finally have privacy! clearly I was having a lot of fun printing with polycarbonate and the final print I did with the material was this phone case where I implemented multipass printing to make this two-color design it came out great but in a completely unrelated incident I smashed my phone and side note the printer's heated bed makes a great hot plate for electronic repairs this is all to say I'm very clumsy so I had to print this ridiculously fat TPU case for my phone instead I also printed this phone stand with carbon fiber PLA and aside from this little rough patch it's a fine print all right on to some ABS prints here's a bed full of mechanical parts that came out super clean these are mounts for a quick and dirty lighting setup I made using cheap shop lights one of my favorite frugal photography tricks and it wasn't until a couple weeks later when I was printing these triggers for my Momentus mind camera that I did get some ABS warpage and that's when I realized that the default QIDI slicer setting for ABSdoesn't actually use the heated print chamber what the heck so after I enabled that I was able to  do a full bed of triggers without brims and they all stuck down great as well as as all of these other tiny parts kind of silly but I guess that proves the benefit of the heating chamber I also printed about half of my Momentus prototypes on the Q1 Pro and the other half on my X1 Carbon and now I can't tell which came from which so that's another case for them having essentially equal print quality unsurprisingly PLA prints big and small are no problem for this printer I printed a bunch of these keychain rings and including another polycarbonate print and they all came out very clean speaking of rings here are those beautiful gymnastics rings from the beginning of the video these are super chunky ASA prints while there was a little section of the brim that got messed up the parts did stay in place and didn't warp despite 4 mm thick walls overall the rings are very clean although there was this rough section where the overhang from my design was a bit too much I kind of expected that and in this case it's no problem since I was always planning on smoothing out these parts I did that using 80 grit wet sandpaper and being ASA I could also chemically smooth these parts using acetone vapor but sanding did the job just fine I got pretty lucky and found some nylon straps that are just the right length for my space and I eventually wrapped my mind around looping the rings on as well it's easy to change the orientation depending on your exercise and between the rings straps and my roof I think the printed rings are actually the strongest part so there's a fun addition to my  house and to keep things tidy I also decided to print some ASA hooks that perfectly store these rings out of the way well there's nearly every print I've wanted to share with you today but I do want to make sure I list out any remaining quirks and annoyances and little details I've noticed with this machine but I also want to reiterate that I've printed hundreds of parts on the Q1 Pro and the overwhelming majority have been totally successful I sometimes feel like listing all the problems and showing every slightly fudged print almost paints the wrong picture and makes things look worse than they are but it's definitely also worth sharing since I don't want to hide anything from you guys so that's my disclaimer take it for what it's worth one of the main things that bugs me about the Q1 Pro is how dang slow it can be and I'm not talking about the blazing print speed but rather the navigation of the onboard interface I was going to show the whole boot up here in real time just to prove my point but it takes nearly 45 seconds and I just don't want to waste your time swapping filaments is kind of interesting you need to pull out the PTFE tube and snip the filament which then continues extruding so that you can follow it up with the new filament that's not entirely unlike how Bambu Lab does it except in this case you're manually cutting the filament and removing the excess extrusion while the X1-Carbon does all those things automatically and then we're back to the slow interface which won't let you press any buttons until all the thumbnail previews have finished loading and sometimes the USB drive isn't registered so you need to unplug and replug it and then continue waiting for those slow loading previews and if you're too impatient it might just cause some weird glitch like this broken info screen the Q1 Pro also takes its sweet time thoroughly cleaning the nozzle before every print and by default runs the full mesh bed leveling procedure as well but those are things that actually improve the reliability of the prints so I can accept those now those slow interface problems really only plague the onboard touchcreen and can be avoided by using the wireless network printing through the Fluidd interface that's built into the QIDI slicer I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I just completely forgot that the Q1 Pro does have a built-in  camera so I was avoiding the network printing for the longest time and that was a mistake because it's actually quite nice you can do just about everything from this interface sending and starting prints straight from the slicer without having to be near the printer you can modify all the different printer parameters access storage nerd stuff excluding failed parts from a batch mid print which is pretty neat except in this case it didn't show all the parts for some reason that's the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say this is less polished than the Bambu Lab ecosystem but this is all open source so it's  likely to continue improving and gaining features over time I did also make the mistake of clicking this mesh calibration macro which apparently just assumes the printer was already homed because it just missed the build plate and melted a hole into the side of my platform and there's also a beta phone app where I proceeded to make the same mistake so I guess you just kind of have to  learn what to avoid now onto the spool holder the standard holder mounts onto the back of the printer which works fine for my setup but it annoys enough people that QIDI also includes this extended holder that moves the spool to the side of the machine it's not the sturdiest thing ever but it gets the job done for larger spools you'll need to come up with your own solution I found that my Fixdry filament dryer works pretty well at holding these honkin' 5 kg spools well except that one time it didn't but that happens to be the perfect test for the Q1 pr filament tangle detection this printer not only detects an empty spool but it will also pause if there's too much resistance which is a really nice feature and in this case after fixing my spool the print did actually resume successfully and as cleanly as I could imagine by the way this last print is a bin I designed last minute just so I could sneak in a full print volume model into this video and I did have to shrink it down ever so slightly from the advertised 240 mm printing height down to 234 mm but other than that this big vase mode print turned out wonderfully finally I did encounter a single filament jam which was kind of my fault for loading a mystery filament which apparently required a higher nozzle temperature and that led to me having to disassemble the extruder the hot end is connected in a similar fashion to my X1-Carbon which generally makes for easy maintenance in this case the filament was really stuck in there so I had to go a bit bit further the extruder is also fixed in place with two screws and then there are four more to remove the back plate I snipped the filament and pulled it out with some tweezers and there's that nasty bit of filament ultimately that wasn't the trickiest repair which is great because that's probably something you'll deal with at some point with any printer so there is my showcase of the QIDI Tech Q1 Pro 3D printer I think I've said what I need to say and I've shown off the prints as you can see this thing holds up really well against the gold standard Bambu Lab X1-Carbon printer and the fact that this is $500 is just incredible I've got to say because just 10 years ago I paid four times as much for my MakerBot Replicator 2 that was my first 3D printer and and I am just so excited about how far 3D printing has come in the consumer space since then things seemed pretty stagnant in 3D printing for a long time but now it seems like things are moving again and printers are getting better and better and this is among the best I've tried I've been comparing this machine to the X1-Carbon all along the way and while I still think the Bambu Lab ecosystem is a little more polished it's just a little bit more foolproof this is certainly a fantastic printer and if you're just going for great prints and reliability this machine can do it so considering it's half the cost of the X1-Carbon I think I might go for two of these over one of those now the AMS system on the X1-Carbon really elevates it a lot the fact that it's one less thing to worry about switching filaments constantly is really nice and convenient with that machine but including the AMS the X1-Carbon Combo costs three times what this machine does so thinking about it that way if I had three of these machines I wouldn't have to do much filament swapping either and idea of having three Q1 Pros sounds pretty awesome too so there's some things to think about it definitely comes down to your individual needs your space your budget but I'd say both of these printers are pretty awesome so take my opinion for what it's worth I'm just one person here and I've shared my opinion with this machine as honestly and truthfully as I can so there you go if you do decide that you want to pick up one of these machines and you want to support the channel along the way you can use the links in the video description to give me a little affiliate commission at no cost to you that's always super appreciated and I also appreciate you just for watching this video and I hope you enjoyed it so that's going to be it for today thanks as always take care out there and of course stay inspired

Channel: Make Anything

Views: 33,994

Keywords: 3D printed, 3d printing, 3D print, 3d printer, make anything, Devin Montes, QIDI, QIDI TECH, Q1, Q1 Pro, review, unboxing, overview, test, testing, 3D printer, Q1 pro, Q1pro, BambuLab, Bambu Lab, X1-C, comparison, X1 carbon, X1-carbon, AMS

Id: 3rWruG6BPxQ

Length: 23min 6sec (1386 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 17 2024