My ANET ET4 (clone) has died in a blob of melted PLA and I am not going to fix it once again.

Would you buy a solid, community supported Ender 3 S1 or a newer, faster and shiny Anycubik Kobra 2?

They have almost the same price, dimensions, and both come with direct extruder

  • neal@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Can’t speak to any other 3d printers since I recently purchased my first one. But it’s an Ender 3 S1 and I love it. So far I’ve been running it nearly constantly and throwing different materials through it. No issues so far!
    Also if you live near a Microcenter you can usually pick one up for $199.

  • ffhein@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Not sure I’d describe any printer Creality manufactured after 2019 as “solid” :) They have really shitty quality assurance, so it’s a bit of a gamble when buying anything from them.

    I’d also take the “5x faster” claims from Anycubic’s marketing with a massive grain of salt, and I’m fairly sure you’ll get the same speeds on any printer that isn’t a just another clone of 5 year old designs. The Kobra 2 has a volcano style hotend, but if you buy a different printer and the hotends melt capacity is the limiting factor you can just put a CHT nozzle in it, either genuine from Bondtech or a high quality Chinese clone like Mellow or Trianglelab.

    Not entirely sure how the LeviQ thingy on the Kobra 2 works, but if it is what I think it is, then it’ll automate the nozzle-probe distance (a.k.a. probe Z offset) calibration which is very nice. Having a probe automates the bed level compensation, but I’ve always found it somewhat annoying having to recalibrate the nozzle-probe distance every now and then.

    Finding some mixed info regarding the type of hotend the Kobra 2 has… One review claiming that it is all-metal, while another saying it’s PTFE lined. If you’re only going to print PLA it doesn’t matter, but if you want to print filaments that require higher temps you might need to upgrade it.

    Apart from the LeviQ I think these two printers and Sovol SV06 are very similar feature wise. The SV06 is one of the few cheap printers that come with all-metal hotend, but that’s usually a pretty easy upgrade on others.