The Creality K1C 3D Printer Review - Cheaper & Better Than The P1S

this is the k1c 3D printer from creality it is an upgraded version of the original K1 and that c in the name stands for carbon fiber because this printer has an upgraded extruder and hot end which means it now can print abrasive filaments alongside that though creality have made a number of other changes that fix many of the issues that people have had on their original K1 and really things that make this the printer we all wish that the K1 would have been now today I'm going to walk you through its features and capabilities I'm going to explain what has changed between this and the original K1 I'll show you what it can actually do with regards to printing on standard filaments as well as these carbon fibers and then at the end I'm going to share with you my thoughts now just to be clear reality did reach out and send me this printer over to review for free however they have not not paid me to make this video they have had no input into this video's editorial content and as always my thoughts are entirely my own anyway let's get on with it and let's take a look at what this new k1c is all about the k1c is externally identical to the K1 coming in at 355 by 355 by 482 mm the overall external construction is exactly the same so we have a glass front door PL plastic side panels as well as a plastic removable lid the back is made again of a plastic panel and features a built-in filament holder as well as a filament runout sensor like the original K1 it features a build volume of 220x 220x 250 and has a sprung removable magnetic build plate something new for the k1c though is that they've now built in an integrated nozzle cleaning pad the biggest changes on the k1c are found in the extruder cuz it Now features an all metal gear set as well as a new Tri metal hot end the overall main running gear and Gantry on this printer is largely the same it is still core XY still steel rods and bearings although they have made a few tweaks here and there which I will highlight later on in the end it is still capable of printing up to 600 mm a second accelerations are the same and the overall main spec of the printer is the same apart from that all new metal extruder and hot end looking around the rest of the printer we still have that 4.3in color touchcreen that gives you the main controls and functionality for the printer the built-in auxiliary cooling fan as well as the built-in exhaust fan on the back however with the k1c they have now included this little carbon pushon filter that goes onto the back just to help remove unwanted smells as standard they now include their AI camera which is not only ideal for time-lapse video but it does peer with their new onboard software allowing it to detect objects for instance in the print area and one final little change is the fact that they've now included the larger rubber feet as standard on this printer when you get the printer you'll find it comes in this rather large box and when you open the lid you'll find everything held in place with foam packaging just be careful as you're unboxing the printer creality do have a habit of hiding things amongst the foam so do make sure you have a good rummage around it's also worth looking in the Box as well cuz I did find an additional build plate in the bottom of mine the printer does come largely assembled although there are a few things you need to do first of all you're going to need to remove the copious amounts of packaging that hold the door closed and theack packaging on the sides of the plastic panels once that's done you're then going to need to fit the display it comes in this box here with some additional accessories this will contain the display itself you'll have a little box with some additional Parts in as well as a small spool of the fast pla filament there are also a couple of other little odds and ends as well which we'll look at in a minute fitting the display is fairly straightforward you simply plug the connector into the back latch it onto the slots and then press down to lock it in place the next thing you'll need to do is remove the screws inside that hold the bill plate there are three of these located inside two at the front on each side and one at the back you'll simply need to unscrew these to allow the build plate to release ready for the setup then is simply a task of fitting the front door handle fitting the spool holder onto the rear with a push and twist and then installing the carbon filter then the final task is simply take the lid and drop it in place on the top once all of this is done you can then power up the printer follow the onscreen instructions for the setup the Wi-Fi connectivity and then allow it to perform its calibrations and you're ready for your first print now as I've said this is an upgraded version of the K1 so it's the same chassis still capable of printing up to 600 mm a second up to 300° temperature on the hot end and 100° on the bed it is still based on Clipper and you can root this printer and play with the software yourself giving you full customization via that open- Source rout the big changes on this printer are largely under the hood and theor as you can't see there are some little changes that are very visible like that new metal plate on the front of the bed and obviously that AI camera the bigger changes though are less obvious to visually see for instance we now have that all metal extruder it has been completely redesigned and it's also going to be compatible with those more abrasive difficult filaments like carbon fiber there is a new Tri metal what they're calling unicorn hot end which is a steel tipped copper nozzle with a built-in titanium alloy heat brake and this is easily swappable on this model as well there is also a number of less obvious changes to the main running gear and whilst it's still got metal rods bearings and there nothing like carbon fiber here they have reduced the size of the py on the two stepper Motors at the back and tweaked the alignment of the belts and this should help improve the overall vfa performance on this printer and we'll talk about the likes of ringing and ghosting a little bit more later on one of the nice features about this printer is that it does have that nice color touchcreen it gives you all of the main functionality and whilst you can't do everything here it does give you enough controls to get yourself up and running and there isn't really too many things that aren't here compared to what you'd expect to find in the main settings really though this printer is designed to be driven from the creality software and they've done a great job of giving you lots of options for instance you have the C reality slicer that does a decent job of slicing your prints and getting them onto the bed it's not the most feature Rich but it's not the most difficult either about my only complaint on the creality slicer is the fact that it is quite limited with the number of filament profiles you also though have the creality app which allows you to not only view the printer but send prints direct via the creality cloud platform what's really good though about the way creality do things is they don't force you down any specific route this printer with this built-in Wi-Fi allows you to print via the creality cloud but also via your local network as well when printing via the creality slicer you can choose whether you wish to send your file to the cloud or send it directly to the printer via local land Printing and avoid sending it to creality at all you do also have that USB port on the front as well so you can choose to keep the printer offline if you wanted to and upload your prints direct there is also the web interface for this printer you simply type in its IP address on your browser and you'll then gain access to the web view you can look at your camera the settings and again it gives you all of the control that you'd expect to find in a Clipper based printer on top of that as I have mentioned already this printer is based on Clipper and it is a creality modified version however they do allow for full rotting on this printer that allows you to completely free it from creality hands and modify the software yourself a community has built up around this side of things and whilst for me I don't personally see the need or benefit for me to root this printer it is something that creality allowance support and there is an option for it directly in the menu of this printer and there are no restrictions around how long you're going to be able to do that you can simply choose to root the printer and then crack on with the open-source software now in this video I'm not going to give you a step by step on how to use this printer but I am going to do a start to finish with one print and then we'll take a look at the quality of the other prints that I have had now in this one we're going to use this rose print that I have this is a nice test print you do it in vas mode and it gives a nice indication of the print's capability and quality and it's also just one of my favorite test prints now I've got it on the bed the first thing we're going to need to do is select the filament now we're going to do this one a little bit different we're going to do it in plaf now as I mentioned earlier one of my complaints on this printer is the fact that there aren't that many profiles in the slicer but it does have all of the basics and it does have a generic plaf available as well so you can see it there plaf 1.75 the actual filament that I'm using here today is a bamboo filament it is their plaf and that's what we're going to use for this print next we're going to need to just modify this profile a little bit we're going to need to go into special modes and we're going to turn on spiral I already had it on there but you're going to want that on to give us that vase mode print and then if we click slice you will then see that it will take out the main bulk of this print in the middle and leave us just the outline of it and it's going to then print that in vase mode if I then just scroll down you can see it'll print the bottom plate and then as I move up you will see it will simply print the outer shells all the way up to the finished print now as I've said the real great thing about the way creality do this is we have lots of options with regards to getting it on our printer we have upload to creality Cloud export to local so that will be USB or we have landan printing if we click on Lan click confirm we then can see our k1c is shown we can select that printer we then have some options so we can say if we want it to do bed calibration and we then got the option of either sending the G-Code to the printer down the bottom here or one click printing one click will simply send it to the printer and begin if you do one click you do just need to be careful that there isn't anything already on the bed what I'm going to do though is send the G-Code to the printer and then when I go over we'll see it's ready to go so if I now come over to the printer if I go into the prints you can see that it's there I can then click on it and click print now the next thing I want to do is walk you through the results of my print test we're going to take a look at some pla as well as carbon fiber filaments and then we will move over to the flexibles so looking at some pla prints first of all now I'm going to put b-roll up as I'm going through this to just give you a closer look at some of these because it's really hard to show it under the light this was the very first print I did this is done with the pla they include you can see there in the bottom we got a bit of black off whatever they use at the factory to actually test these printers I've seen this before on the Cali they clearly do a test print unusually black filament and that can come out in the bottom of your first print especially on their fast white because it is semi-translucent now overall it's come out quite nice there is a few issues around the bow area here but it is very minimal overall I have to say the Beni does look very tidy but this filament is very hard to really give any opinions on now I did print a red one on again this is their super fast pla going to be hard to show you it under the camera we've got some slight sort of ridges here on the bow this is actually quite normal for these fast benches these are not designed to come out perfect I'll try and put the b-roll up just so you guys can have a look over it overall the bottom looks good it is a little squished in but there was a brim on this one where there wasn't on this one so there is a little bit of elephant foot on the bottom there but nothing terrible now the next print that I did was this now this is a baby Yoda or Gru depending on who you are and who wants to argue with me over it again I did this in the creality white pla I'm going to need to remove the supports I left them on to this point again you can still see a little bit of black coming through here and there in the base it takes a bit of time to actually get all of the old filament out of the nozzles on this I think I did this one and then straight away I did this one but the bottom layer is fairly good no complaints no issues there's a little Mark there but I didn't clean the bottom plate before for printing but there's no real gaps in the filament let me just try and show you that and again it looks okay around the supports as well so what we're going to do is get the supports off this live because they need to come off and I can then show you how easily they do remove from the print wow they are quite strong I will say that they are either side of the ears there we go that one came off nice and easily then that gives an idea of how the overhangs look bottom of the ears are really nice that is really quite clean no complaints there at all we'll then start looking at this front now we're going to be careful with this side I always break the hand on this side so I'm going to do that one last um we've then got our fingers on this side here so what we're going to do is again carefully it can be better to cut away the supports and and it's because this was done done probably two weeks ago now this one i' I've just left it here um obviously the the filament is completely hardened now there we go moving away from that hand there we go fingers have printed absolutely perfectly looking good overhangs are clean happy with that now this is the one I always struggle with we always break a finger on this one every time I try to do this one I tend to break a finger so we're going to take take it slowly and see what we can [Music] achieve even when using tree supports on this one I tend to have some problems I'm going to cut in right ah again every single time I've got to change the way I do the supports on this print I can't knock the printer the fingers are in there it's the filament and the way you can see the the two fingers there every single time I date one of these out but I do it overall though I have to say another uh disfigured Gru but the overall print quality looks really really clean now the next print we did was this now this is in Sparkle pla this is actually prant and I have to say this has come out cleaner than any other version of this that I've done on any printer I've printed this on every printer I've got the bamboos the K1 and this is printed with no supports it is printed as it comes here and this one is the cleanest I have seen period it was printed with that standard pla profile the generic and where it really shows this is under the arms the overhangs are just perfect there's no issues at all I do print it with a brim and I tend to leave a bit on I need to clean that up that's nothing to do with the printing that's just me but the areas on this where it would usually struggle is under these arms here and I have to say this has come out just incredible the best one that I have had now the next two prints will be familiar we have a test print as well as our Spaceman unfortunately though this one failed it wasn't actually a fault of the printer when I printed this one and I'll put the time lapse up on the screen I didn't use a brim and the print came loose at that point there on the bed which obviously caused it to fail however don't worry I have done another one and this one was with a brim and this one was successful that's why you can see a little whiteness around the foot down there because I have removed the brim off it now overall it's come out really quite clean quite hard to show you it under this light so I'm going to spend some time doing some b-roll on these in a minute and again looks fairly good no complaints whatsoever all of the detail has come out quite tidy again there are always little imperfections that you can pick up on but overall I'm really pleased with the end results now with regards to the printing clearance test the 35 is absolutely fine the. 3 is fine the. 25 is absolutely fine but the20 the 20 is locked up as is the 15 and 10 if I just put a bit of pressure on the 20 no I can't release it this was obviously printed at 020 layer height to show you the bottom of the print there overall has come out very nice but yeah just from a tolerance test yeah it it it's I'm yeah he just tight there just just I could probably break it free if I forced it but yeah going to struggle on that one now the final one I want to show you was what we started this segment with and that was that print and this is that pla carbon fiber Rose now this is just sucking up all of the light here in the workshop it has come out stunning little issue on the first layer I did notice that when it was laying down um it didn't quite get 100% there on the first layer however the overall print has come out beautiful again put B- roll up so you guys can see it very very minimal ringing here but this has just come out absolutely stunning in that pla carbon fiber filament just if you wanted a black rose it has come out just it's it's one of my favorite prints this it really is and uh yeah it's come out absolutely fantastic what's really great about these carbon fiber filaments as well is it just hides the layers this was printed at 020 and you just cannot see the you can just see them down there at the bottom right where it starts and then the rest of it you just can't see it you really can't there's just nothing to see there at all all the way up and even when you look on the inside it's got like that silky look to it absolutely fantastic now obviously as I predominantly talk about fpv we need to talk about TPU now what we're going to do is a quick test print just to make sure that it behaves as expected for this we're going to use some blue TPU we're going to need tree supports on this one as well we're going to select the generic TPU profile we're going to go in we're going to make sure that we've got the spiral outter Contour mode tuned off we're going to want to enable supports and what we're going to want to do is use tree support probably tree strong and we're going to take a look at how that looks before we adjust anything else just to see what kind of outcome that gives that looks pretty good if I'm honest I think that should do what we want it to do so about the only thing I will adjust is I want to just add a little bit more to the infill just to step it up a little bit I'm going to go to 25% that way it will just make the GoPro bracket around here a little bit stiffer and this area around here a little bit stiffer as well that way it's not going to flop around too much in use and then if we just take a look at the slice overall that looks nice and tidy it says that's going to take 1 hour and 57 to print so let's get it [Music] going okay now this is the result of my first print it's not complete because I stopped it now as you can see it looks pretty hot horrible lots of stringing the supports are stuck way too hard to the print this is over your TPU it isn't wet I've dried it it's brand new in fact and I've used it on another printer without issues so it seems the typical profile that creality are installing for TPU the generic one doesn't seem to like this TPU at all I'm not that surprised if I'm honest I have had issues with generic TPU profiles on pretty much most printers and I always end up tweaking them so that's what I'm going to do here I'm going to go away have a play and then I'll come back and share with you my final results okay now this is still attached to the bill plate so what we're going to do is get this removed I've done some tweaks on the profile still a few more things that we need to do I didn't use any glue there to help with uh addision you didn't put anything on to help getting it off either so overall the prints come out okay the actual print quality is decent there is stringing as you can see especially around the um tree supports pretty horrible tree supports in fact now let me just compare this a second to a print on the bamboo A1 Mini this is the same TPU the same file obviously done on different slices what you can see is that the bamboo print is cleaner overall this is still a tweaked profile for the A1 Mini I'm going to be talking about these things in a separate video fairly soon specifically printing TPU and that's why I don't want to remove this one off the bed yet however you can see there that the mini has just done a bit of a TI your job although I will say the print is actually clean it's mostly the tree supports that's a mess on this compared to say what we had on the bamboo let me just put them side by side there you go so there's definitely more work to be done possibly a cooling issue which I need to do a bit more investigation on now with regards to getting these supports off I've not tried it yet so let's give it a try removing supports on TPU can be one of two things it can either be really nice and easy or it can be horrific it's not too bad not the best not the worst if we now try and get it off around the GoPro Mount because that is a a key area and might need to actually get a pair of pliers on this let's ju let's just see let's get the uh Snips involved there we go we'll then get to see how the layers look where the TPU has supported let's cut that off there we go we've got that out a lot of the imperfections are actually on the surface it's definitely not the cleanest print I've had in TPU but it's also not the worst the supported area has come out okay we've got obviously still some TPU it's definitely a little bit of work that needs to be done so what I'm going to do is just spend a couple of minutes going over this and then we'll have a look at the final result okay so there's the final print now I could clean this up with the heat gun actually which would sort out most of the issues but I haven't done that here I wanted to show you what it come out like not 100% certainly a functional part no issues with using this on a build if I was going to but there is definitely tweaking needed on the TPU profile with this Overture TPU I'm going to do some more testing and cover it more in in the future there's definitely some tweaks needing with regards to its performance with these flexibles the overall print quality is very good it's just there are places that you're getting a lot of zits as a result of the retraction points but also with the supports we're in as well I think there needs to be a bit more gap on the supports just to help with the removal and that then should should in the end improve the overall print quality okay so to share with you my thoughts on the k1c having spent a bit of time with it this printer is very very good and whilst it definitely isn't perfect and it still has some quirks like the original one which I'll talk about in a minute it is the printer I think the K1 should always have been creality seemed to have taken everything that was good with the K1 and left it alone and then tweaked the bits that were not so good so for instance we we've got an improved extruder and whilst crty have been tweaking that continuously on the release this definitely seems better we've got that new hot end they've improved the top end with regards to the belts and the pulley and overall it is giving really good results I'm not going to say it is dramatically better than the K1 but where they've improved it is with regards to the ringing performance or ghosting it is definitely better than my version one machine I'm not going to say it's perfect there are always things that can be improved my original K1 wasn't particularly bad but this is definitely better it's great that you can now print carbon fiber filaments and there are lots of little changes that are just making this a better printer overall as I've said though it isn't perfect and there are things on this that creality haven't improved for instance it is still a very noisy printer the fan in the base that cools the CPU on this is very loud as is the main cooling fans in the top and it is as loud as it was on the original one and it's one of the louder printers on the market but that isn't to say the likes of the bamboos are particularly quiet because they're not but if you're wanting to put this in a quiet environment you are going to want to potentially make some changes What's worst about this is the noise that it makes when it's not printing that CPU fan in the base is just always running and it's quite loud it's something you're probably going to want to upgrade with a noct toer alongside that the door hinge still is a bit of an issue on this printer there is a limited opening angle however there are modifications out there that you can make but I think it would have been nice if creality had done something on the door hinge considering just how many people break these what they've done well though is change the parts that make a difference and I'm really pleased with the results that I've had from this printer there are always areas that that I can criticize and there's definitely more work to be done on the profiles for TPU but overall it is definitely an improvement on what came before this isn't a night and day Improvement between the K1 to the k1c but it is definitely a better printer and if you were looking to buy the K1 I would simply skip it and get yourself the k1c because in my opinion it is definitely a better option with regards to choosing between this and the likes of the 1s that is a very complicated subject now because in the past it was a bit of a no-brainer today though this is a very good printer and I'm not exactly sure what reasons I could give you to choose the bamboo over this now based on the results that I've seen and it's actually worth taking into account that there are many things about this that make it better including how open creality have been with the likes of rooting how they behave with their online and offline capabilities and the potential for upgrades on this in the future compared to what you may have on the bamboo in the end creality have taken what they did well on the K1 improved on the bits that w't so good and delivered an absolutely solid printer and if you're interested in getting one there will be a link to it in the description I don't have confirmed pricing at the point of me making this video however I believe it's going to be about $560 in the US or £12 in the UK for that you're getting this new version of the printer as I've discussed here today that link in the description is an affiliate link and I will receive a small commission if you use it however that affiliate link has not changed my opinion on the product overall I am really impressed with what creality have done here on the k1c and it's great to see them bring this new model out and resolve many of the complaints that people had with the original version and as I've said if you're interested in getting it the link link is below now I am really interested in knowing what you think if you have any questions please do put them in the comments below there will be a link to this printer the bamboo printers and I will be releasing some content on printing TPU on the channel in the future so if you're interested in seeing that please do make sure you are subscribed there will be a link to my original K1 review in the description as well if you're interested in checking it out and as I've said if you want to buy yourself one of these there's a link below too anyway that's it from me please don't forget to subscribe if you found this video interesting if you'd like to support the channels there are links to my patreon in the description down below as well stay safe and I will speak to you soon

Channel: Mads Tech

Views: 32,168

Keywords: 3d Printer, Creality, Creality K1, Creality K1C, K1 3d Printer, K1C, K1C 3D Printer, Creality K1 Max, 3d Printing, Creality Review, K1 vs Bambu P1S, Bambu P1S, Creality 3D Printing, Bambu vs Creality, K1 vs P1S, Bambu Lab, Bambu Lab P1S, Bambu X1 vs Creality, Best 3d Printer, Creality Print, Creality Printer, Best 3D Printer, Creality vs Bambu, Bambu A1, K1 vs A1, K1C vs A1, A1 Mini

Id: ZvlhmWYldHU

Length: 32min 47sec (1967 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2024