It’s still a great printer for someone that wants to get into printing. It will give many years of hobby use

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WOW!. That is impressive

I did the motor vibration dampeners, and it helped a TON. There are also upgraded boards you can buy for $35 which use different drivers for the motors, and they apparently help quite a bit too. It is now the preferred way to go, since the dampeners cause the motors to heat up more than usual.

Oh, I'm not dogging it for a "my first 3d printer" type situation. It's a GREAT, very cheap entry point.

But people that are modding Ender3s with hundreds of dollars of mods are throwing that money away IMO. That printer is what it is. If you want something better after getting your feet wet, sell the Ender3, and take that mod money you were gonna spend to buy a better printer from the jump.

Yeah, the head-scratcher for me is why they weren't making molds with the 3D prints and casting their parts so they would have had consistency. But it's their pin, and it's all a learning process, they're just doing it very publicly.

The printer is what it is Vic

I put my prints up against yours and vice versa using each other’s STLs

Guaranteed the difference will be visible if there is any.

These were done on a 175 dollar printer using settings that I dialed with no supports and only a brim as to the way the printer needed.

Thoughts ?

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Yup, I swear by PEI sheets as well, for PETG they can be too good at sticking. It's a mandatory upgrade on most of my printers. Although, I have to admit that the AnyCubic UltraBase is pretty amazing as well (at least with PLA).

As far as nozzles, I'm using hardened steel in the Prusa (but I print Carbon-Fiber re-inforced filament occasionally), the others mostly have brass or nickel coated brass. Frankly, I usually end up tossing nozzles because they get partially clogged with charred filament residues then print quality tanks. I have run through *tons* of nozzles over the years. I found that cheap Amazon nozzles sometimes arrive in unusable states (nozzles not round, mis-sized, etc), and I have switched to name brand nozzles on most of my printers.

No problem, PM if the current set of suggestions to sort you out.

The eventual results are fine. The fiddling and noise are the problem. Ender3 would beat Charlie Daniels in a fiddling contest.

Great prints! Clearly, you've got great settings for your Ender-3.

I know I can get fabulous results from my CR-10 as well, but I also know that if I want to start a print in whichever material (PLA, PETG, ABS, TPU, PC-CF, etc), I can pretty much rely on the Prusa to knock it out. Now, if I'm printing a R2 dome in one shot, that's a job for the CR-10s5...

I am not sure if they made the change to the Ender 3's from the factory yet, but the new Creality silent board that comes in the Ender 5 is dead quiet.
You can buy it on Amazon set up for the Ender 3 for about $45.

You are correct my friend , they are quiet as a mouse.

More fiddling to get there. There's a market for the Enders for entry level and fiddlers. That's the main point, which is why the Prusa i3 MK3 (and 3S) is consistently at the top of the overall ratings. Having had 3 of them (and an Ender 3) I can very much recommend them. The Ender 5 is almost halfway to a Prusa i3-MK3S. I upgraded one of the Prusas to a much more expensive Raise3D E2, and while it does some nice things (mirror mode, dup mode, multicolor), the support for it is nowhere close to the prusas, I'd call it crap, which is crazy for a printer that costs as much as 4 i3MK3S machines.

You call us fiddlers Vic, but the learning curve actually teaches you more about printer settings and set up then just pulling one out of the box that someone has done for you.

One of the main cheap ass features of the Prusa are 3D printed parts. Aluminum extrusions or acrylic would be much better at that 1k price point. But even if a Chinese one only lasts me two years I would have to have a Prusa last me 14 years to equal its value. By then it would be surely outdated.

I can buy a new printer every 2/3 years and I personally know for a fact my print quality would be as good as yours.

Bottom line if your a full time business with expendable $$$$ and little patience buy the Prusa.

If your on a budget and actually want to be able to make a few buck with your printer and learn something in. the process buy an Ender.. My machine paid for itself in 3 days after purchase just from printing lithophanes.

PS..... If anyone needs any Ender help please reach out to me . Im not an expert but I have some experience in more than one model

I put all my Prusas together (and put together the 3S upgrades for all them) - none were bought assembled. Same thing for the first Ender 3. Don't assume.

But at some point you either want to fiddle or you want to work. I'm very glad I put togther those because I learned a lot, but not really interested in fiddling around with them after they're built. That's why the Ender3 left and the Prusas were locked in (haven't been changed since they were built and hardened nozzles added). One has Octoprint - one, but I hate it, so the others didn't get it.

Everything costs. You pay in time or money. A "cheap" ender will be more expensive in time. A more full featured, expensive Prusa (or even more expensive printers) will cost more money, but less in overall time to dial in and maintain. It's all a tradeoff and everyone picks the one that works for them. I've been (and to some extent still am) on both sides.

I get why prusa 3d printers it's parts. If you never commit to a design, you can tweak it forever. Also by printing their own parts, they put test hours on their own printers (and test their own filament). They can also easily adjust part runs for demand. It's really a win win win, and if nobody is really complaining they have no reason to injection mold the parts.

Aluminum extrusion is great, but I don’t see how acrylic would be any better than 3D printed PETG. Acrylic is relatively brittle and doesn’t dampen vibration worth peanuts. Anytime a piece of acrylic gets a tiny crack, it runs the risk of structural failure.

Sucks you didn't have luck with the E2 either. After you posted that you bought one I said what the heck I'll add one to the line up. No dice. Not even Close to their Pro series on any level just had issues continuous. Luckily I gave them a call and said its going back, put another Raise Pro2 on the truck and call it a day. Of 8 printers we have 6 of the Raise3d Pro2 units that Never stop nor have issue. Hope you can get it dialed in.

The main problem with the Raise3D E2 is it was clearly released with half-baked firmware and terrible support, which is not a great combination for a $3500 printer. I was telling THEM how to work around the machine's shortcomings when I had to figure them out for myself because the US support is so bad.

Once I realized that them saying it supported ABS was a lie, it got a lot easier. Also, I had to abandon 0.20 nozzles since their unfinished calibration system only supported stock 0.40 and manual calibration was a huge pain. So giving up on 0.20 and moving to PETG instead of ABS solved a lot of problems, but it was much more fiddling than I wanted to do for a $3500 investment.

Duplication mode is awesome, and PETG is good enough with the 0.40 nozzle to print brackets for the upcoming coil fan kits. I've been using it pretty much just to print those brackets night and day. Not what I expected to be doing with it, but whatever.

0.20 nozzle auto calibration support was just added a week or two ago, many many many months after release. It's something it should have had from day 1. Camera is still a mess because the firmware is incomplete, so hacks I made to work around it and force the camera to iris down (essentially adjust the white balance properly) are what others have to use also until Raise gets their act together and gives user access to the camera parameters - should have also been a day 1 feature.

So yeah, it worked out okay, and I have it dialed in for a good purpose now so I don't have to mess with it. I think they'll eventually get the software to where it should have been at day 1, but I would never, ever recommend Raise3D to anyone that wasn't a fiddler. It's got some great convenience features, but it's just overshadowed by half-baked firmware and terrible support.

Trust me I do agree that the Prusa are better printers without a doubt. And they come with specific software which defiantly make for a fair leaning curve.

I really feel for more here like myself a Creality machine will do what they need if they take the effort to do so.

With the amount of printing and $$$ Im doing at this point they are fine . In the future if I see fit and revenue constitutes it I may upgrade. if I do it would be a Prusa

But you have to admit when a machine is dialed in, your print quality is most likely no better than mine.

Absolutely! Creality has done the entire hobby a BIG favor, these days it really hard to sell a cr@p printer. Before the cr-10 and ender-3, the sub-$500 printer market was full of printers that couldn’t put out a half decent benchy. Now, there is no reason to own a sub-standard 3D printer for even $100.

The higher end FDM printers mostly add convenience, reliability, and/or range of materials. But let’s all face it, a $200 resin printer kicks all of our printers in quality.

Yeah that was my First fear sign when it arrived. The Pro2 had dialed in firmware with hundreds of print settings for virtually Every material combo. The E2 was barren. Lol. Hope you get it flying.

Not sure what you mean by this. The Prusa slicers is an evolved version of Slice3r. I use Cura for over a year on three different printers and it seemed like every print required me messing with all kinds of settings to achieve the desire results. Prusa Slicer does just about everything Cura does (and more in some cases), is constantly being updated with features, and it is nearly plug and play. Took me a week or two to get comfortable with the initial change in slicers (I didn't really want to but figured I'd give it a try), and once I did I never thought twice about using Cura again.

I agree. It was 5 am and what I meant to say that having a program and slicer that’s specific to the printer has to make the learning curve easier