I bought the five cheapest 3d printers on Amazon. And they're all pretty cute,
but let's find out if they can actually print. Now,
these printers ranged from about $79 on the low end to about $110 on the high
end. And that's because I had to filter out all of the printers that were just
copycats of the next one. There were a bunch in between there,
but they were basically the exact same printer with a different color or a
different brand name on there. Now, when these 3d printers arrived,
I thought it was some sort of a joke and I was being pranked. I mean,
look at the size of these boxes.
This thing is like three and a half inches thick maybe, and only this big.
And you're telling me there's a whole 3d printer in here. All right,
now this is actually the last 3d printer that I bought.
And I just thought it would be fun to see how many of these new cheap printers
you could fit inside. This one. Let's take a look.
1, 2, 3, 4,
and five with lots of room to spare.
Now each of these little printers will print a volume of about 100 by 100 by 100
millimeters.
So that's approximately a cube of about four inches by comparison,
a larger printer like this, like this trunk,
see here can actually print something 43 times larger than that,
which is insane. So these are pretty small printers,
almost as small as they come. Now as I was unboxing these.
I was just stupefied by how kind of, for lack of a better word,
cute some of this stuff was. In fact,
you can find things like screwdrivers that are perfect size for, I don't know,
Barbie dolls. I was joking, but that's actually a pretty,
super accurate size ratio.
Tell me where you are. You don't know the whole story.
The assembly on these 3d printers couldn't have been easier.
A couple of them were actually fully assembled and ready to go pretty much out
of the box. The others required minimal assembly. And in fact,
everything was going along really smoothly and really quickly until I got to
this printer, I looked and looked and looked,
but this one actually did not come with any screws or screwdriver to assemble
it. So the gantry, this part on top needed to be attached to the base.
And there were literally no screws included with it in order to do that.
Fortunately, Amazon was really great to work with in this case,
they actually issued me a full refund.
They didn't even ask for the old one back.
So I will find some screws to get that one assembled and test that out at a
later date.
But the new one that I purchased with that money is really the exact same one,
just a different color. So onward with the testing. Now,
before I show you the results of how these things actually print,
there's a few things you need to know when you're buying a small,
cheap 3d printer like this.
And the first is that none of these have a heated bed PLA,
which is what we're going to be using for testing on these printers.
It does not require a heated bed.
You can also print things like TPU or ninja flex,
or other flexible materials that don't require a heated bed,
and there are several other filaments out there that don't require that.
However,
if you want to print with abs with PETG with polycarbonate and a few
more,
those do require a heated bed and therefore are not an option on these lower end
printers. Second,
four of the five of these do not even have any sort of an interface.
You've basically just got four buttons to work with.
One of them has a tiny little LCD screen, and that screen is so small.
It's literally a, maybe an inch tall and has about five lines of text.
So you might need a magnifying glass to read it,
but it is kind of nice to have some information displayed on there.
Now these ones with four buttons, they have very simple functionality.
And after playing with these for a few days,
you get really comfortable with them. Now,
the next thing to keep in mind is that bed leveling on these printers is sketchy
at best. What you actually have to do is hit the home button to get zeroed out,
and then you unplug the machine to turn it off because who can afford a power
switch on these things, right? More buttons, more cost, I guess.
And then once you do that,
you actually have to manually move the head over on the X and Y axes
to your four corners and to your center, making sure the whole time,
not to mess with your Z axis because of course,
that will negate the purpose of the bed leveling.
Now to actually adjust the bed during this process,
you actually have to use one of these little screwdrivers and tighten or loosen
the screws in the four corners. And by four corners,
I'm not really meaning corners. There's two of them in a corner.
And in some cases, two of them are like two thirds along the length of the bed.
Don't ask me why. So it does feel kind of janky to use a screwdriver,
to do your bed leveling.
A couple of these do have a traditional turning knob and on the bright side with
all five of these printers, I found that once you dial in the bed leveling,
it seems to hold its position pretty well.
Another thing that these all have in common is they use a flexible magnetic bed,
which I was pretty impressed by.
The bed itself actually has pretty decent adhesion.
So items will stick to the bed pretty well,
as long as it's clean and they'll pop off pretty easily too.
If they don't pop off, you can actually just remove the bed, flex it,
and then magnetically attach it back to the base. So now to answer the question,
we're all dying to know, do they suck? Are they any good at all?
So every one of these printers actually came with a micro SD or a TF card.
And ironically, every one of them had the same test file on it. Now,
not only did they have the exact same files on the TF cards,
but they also all had eerily similar manuals, identical user guides,
identical card readers, nearly identical spatulas,
Do you think it's possible that they're like copying each other somehow,
but that's, there's copyright laws around that? I don't know.
And all of them actually printed this little rocket just fine.
They had varying qualities, but they were all passable. They were all decent,
but the real test comes. When you try to print something custom,
slicing it yourself, the way you would typically use a 3d printer.
Now I used Cura to set up a 3d printing profile for each of these printers.
If you're not familiar with Cura, it's basically a free slicer software,
which is software that converts a 3d model that you download from the web into
something that these printers can understand and print.
Also to try to make things a little bit easier to distinguish,
I assigned one color to each 3d printer.
So all of the models for any given 3d printer were printed out of the same
color.
I printed four different items on each of these printers to compare them one to
another, but I also wanted a control as it were.
So I used my Ender 3 V2, which is a very common printer.
It's well tested and it runs for about $260 to purchase new.
And I printed those same four items on that printer as well. Now,
one thing to be aware of is that the filament that comes with some of these low
end 3d printers is also low end in many cases.
So if the diameter of this is not exactly 1.75,
or really close to it consistently throughout the school,
which is often the case, they should really just toss these.
Now I use a brand called eSUN for a lot of my 3d printing.
This video is not sponsored by them,
but I do trust this brand and I'll put links to the spools of filament that I
use in the description below.
If you want to make sure to get something that's decent quality,
the first item was an XYZ calibration cube to help see how accurate all of the
prints were in all three axes.
We're going to look at the measurement of the X axis, the Y axis and the Z axis,
and they should all be 20 millimeters.
I'm going to measure these and find out how far off it is from that 20
millimeters by percentage,
after getting those measurements on the control print here on the average of all
three sides,
it came out to a percentage of 0.72% off of the 20 millimeters.
So that's the standard that we're comparing these other ones to.
I think we can pretty safely write this first attempt off as a failure.
Three of the five didn't even produce something recognizable as a cube,
a fourth one really wasn't either.
It had such bad layer shift that it was completely unusable.
And we did get one decent result here. And when I say decent, I mean,
it looks like a cube, right?
But there was even layer shift in that sufficient to where you can't actually
measure it and get anything reasonable. Okay.
So the first round was a catastrophe. No worries.
We can move on from this first.
I checked to see if I could adjust the belt tension on these to see if that was
causing some of the issues. Unfortunately,
there was really no adjustability on these printers for the belt tension.
So I decided I needed to slow the print speed down even more. I mean,
this is kind of embarrassingly slow.
We're down to 13 millimeters per second here,
but I thought if that can get us a decent print, let's do it.
We just need success here. And to my delight,
four of the five printers produced a calibration cube that was at least decent.
It was measurable. Okay. So you can see,
we actually got a 0.73 almost identically accurate as the Ender 3
V2. So that's pretty impressive. That's good results.
Even if it was really slow. On three of the others,
they just got progressively worse. And then on our beloved little Minnie here,
this thing again,
just refuse to move the Z-axis up and was a total failure again.
So no cube for the Minnie.
Now I do want to take just a second to thank all of our channel members.
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Memberships,
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great videos like this. Well, I think it's great. Hopefully you're enjoying it.
Now for the next test. I decided to print a self watering plant pot.
This one is about 85 millimeters square and 82 millimeters high.
So this takes up most of the build volume of these little printers.
Now in a somewhat shocking turn of events,
the Minnie probably produced the highest quality print here.
Not sure why the Z-axis decided to come back to life and work.
And not only did it work, it produced probably the cleanest lines,
the least amount of layer shift,
and just overall the best product in second place, we have the K seven,
which did at least a pretty decent job.
Third place would be the K one fourth place the T 8,000 and in last place,
the X one, which had some pretty significant layer shift and some poor bridging.
Now our next test is the mini 3d printer test dropping from first place in the
last round to last place. This round is the mini. Once again,
it failed completely and refuse to move that Z axis up.
This thing is very temperamental in fourth place.
We have the X one and in third place, we have the T 8,000 in second place.
We had the case seven and in first place is the K one with the most legible
text, even though not perfect at all decent overhangs and almost no stringing
whatsoever. Now it wasn't as clean and nice as our control. Definitely not,
but it is the clear winner of this round, at least now last,
but certainly not least is the Darth Vader bust. Now here's a,
full-size one that I printed on. One of my FlashForge printers.
And the idea with this one is just to print something that other people might
print normally on a printers like this, something that's just kind of for fun.
Now, once again,
all of these printed successfully with the exception of the mini,
the other four, all printed successfully, but with varying degrees of quality.
Now, if I had to rate these in order,
I would say that the ETA 8,000 was probably fourth of those four successful
prints followed by the X1 probably number three and then the K
seven for number two,
and finally the K one for first place as far as quality.
So what we saw in all of this testing is an upset, basically the mini here,
which was the most expensive of all of these 3d printers did the worst by far,
it didn't succeed on any,
but really two total prints of all of the things we've tried on this,
including the rocket that came with it. So a nice little interface,
a enclosed structure,
and what looks to be the highest quality printer here turns out to be the worst.
One of the bunch, contrast that to the K one over here,
where if you said Nils,
what printer would you recommend for about a hundred bucks? I'd say,
get this guy. This is the one I'd recommend because it had the most success.
It was the most consistent, and it was the cleanest.
As far as its printing capabilities,
it has your traditional gantry style layout,
and it did a pretty good job and cost a lot less than this guy, too.
So there are links in the description. If you want to use those,
those are affiliate links,
which just means it gives me a couple of bucks when you use them and it doesn't
cost you any more.
So I appreciate you supporting the channel that now for just about $50,
more than what you pay for a printer, like one of these,
you can upgrade to an ender three, which is definitely larger.
It's way more popular. One of the most popular printers out there today,
and has a huge support and huge options for upgrades in the future.
Aside from that, you can get an ender three V2, for example,
that's a little bit newer and has a lot more features.
And that's the one we use to compare all of these ones to today.
Or if you want something that's actually larger,
you can go with the longer LK five pro for example, I've got to review,
you can check out right here on that printer,
which comes in at under $300 and does large prints.
And does them really well with lots of bells and whistles,
I'm Nils with the 3d printing zone. Thanks for watching.