Yeah, the noise of the K2 seems to be a common complaint. But placed in a different room, if you have one, would solve much of that. Nor do I know what user hacks have been developed to mitigate the noise. Still, there seem to be more users that like their K1 than not. Crealty, if nothing else is almost a tinker’s dream machine. The installed user base is very active and highly talented. Crealty might not care much about their users, but they ain’t stopping anyone from modifying their machines. If you can dream up a hack, someone somewhere has probably already done it. I would almost bet there is an Ender 3 somewhere that has been rebuilt into a bread machine. :)
Qidi also gets dinged in reviews for fan noise. But if you have a printer that has active chamber heating, you are going to get a rather large fan to pull air into and exhaust air out to help control temperature. That’s the price you pay to print nylon filament I suppose. Qidi’s after sales support gets decent marks from users also. They seem to be pretty responsive to customer issues. Personally, I place high value on support. It’s worth more than the color of the paint and the badge glued to the machine. Being involved in million of dollars in industrial machine purchases over the years, I’ve learned that the hard way. Print quality seems to be considered average at the worst. Oddly, there are few reviews on line and no one seems to test the high end engineering filament printing ability. I think to really understand what the issues are you probably need to hang out in reddit’s r/Qidi for a while to gather a good sample. I did and while users had issues, they seem to get resolved and people could get on with their printing. I’m kind of wishing now I had bought the little X-Smart3 rather than the Bambu Mini.
I’m not sure the lidar tech is really that big of a game changer. Sure, the bambu printers do that layer detection, but so does the Anker. A lot of other ones can use a webcam to do print failure detection.
But if you’re not running 100 printers, you can just check the camera, or poke your head in the room every once in a while to see if anything failed.
I used to run a small print farm during COVID. I learned to hate fixing my printers. I never want to worry about leveling my beds or account for print vibration or worry about bed buildup or even look at my printer outside of the standard maintenance. I just want to print. Lol.
The Anker looks interesting. I think if I was in the market for a Cartesian style printer, I would pay the 100 bucks more and pick up a Prusa MK4S instead.
I think you might be surprised by how far 3d printing has come, Really none of that is a concern anymore, even with basic printers. Heck, most printers don’t even have an option for bed leveling.
Wwwwhhhhaaaaattttt?!?!?! Really? That sounds awesome.
In the past most of the cheaper printers didnt have bed levelers anyways. It’s always the paper method.
I installed 9x9 BLtouch for all my printers which helped a bunch, but when you’re printing 16 hours a day, the build up on the bed requires that I relevel the bed.
I really hope you’re right. It was pretty hell back then.
Looks like the Creality K1 has lidar tech but it’s super loud and the quality is pretty bad compared to the X1c.
I hope someone picks up the slack and gives us a worthy alternative.
Yeah, the noise of the K2 seems to be a common complaint. But placed in a different room, if you have one, would solve much of that. Nor do I know what user hacks have been developed to mitigate the noise. Still, there seem to be more users that like their K1 than not. Crealty, if nothing else is almost a tinker’s dream machine. The installed user base is very active and highly talented. Crealty might not care much about their users, but they ain’t stopping anyone from modifying their machines. If you can dream up a hack, someone somewhere has probably already done it. I would almost bet there is an Ender 3 somewhere that has been rebuilt into a bread machine. :)
Qidi also gets dinged in reviews for fan noise. But if you have a printer that has active chamber heating, you are going to get a rather large fan to pull air into and exhaust air out to help control temperature. That’s the price you pay to print nylon filament I suppose. Qidi’s after sales support gets decent marks from users also. They seem to be pretty responsive to customer issues. Personally, I place high value on support. It’s worth more than the color of the paint and the badge glued to the machine. Being involved in million of dollars in industrial machine purchases over the years, I’ve learned that the hard way. Print quality seems to be considered average at the worst. Oddly, there are few reviews on line and no one seems to test the high end engineering filament printing ability. I think to really understand what the issues are you probably need to hang out in reddit’s r/Qidi for a while to gather a good sample. I did and while users had issues, they seem to get resolved and people could get on with their printing. I’m kind of wishing now I had bought the little X-Smart3 rather than the Bambu Mini.
I’m not sure the lidar tech is really that big of a game changer. Sure, the bambu printers do that layer detection, but so does the Anker. A lot of other ones can use a webcam to do print failure detection.
But if you’re not running 100 printers, you can just check the camera, or poke your head in the room every once in a while to see if anything failed.
I used to run a small print farm during COVID. I learned to hate fixing my printers. I never want to worry about leveling my beds or account for print vibration or worry about bed buildup or even look at my printer outside of the standard maintenance. I just want to print. Lol.
The Anker looks interesting. I think if I was in the market for a Cartesian style printer, I would pay the 100 bucks more and pick up a Prusa MK4S instead.
I think you might be surprised by how far 3d printing has come, Really none of that is a concern anymore, even with basic printers. Heck, most printers don’t even have an option for bed leveling.
Wwwwhhhhaaaaattttt?!?!?! Really? That sounds awesome.
In the past most of the cheaper printers didnt have bed levelers anyways. It’s always the paper method.
I installed 9x9 BLtouch for all my printers which helped a bunch, but when you’re printing 16 hours a day, the build up on the bed requires that I relevel the bed.
I really hope you’re right. It was pretty hell back then.