So this is it. The infamous creality K1. The
printer that's been ruffling everyone's feathers. Let's go.
By the time this review comes out I think most of you are already quite familiar with this machine,
so I won't waste a lot of time introducing it. It's creality's answer to a certain
other company's enclosed printer - and I don't mean flashforge.
Might as well show you them side by side.
Obviously the creality K1 is not a multi material printer, and so far as I can tell it doesn't have
any provision for that, lacking a way to cut the filament in the hotend. It's a corexy direct drive
mechanism, and yes it is direct drive, they've obviously done a great job in this portal 2 style
hotend at hiding the extruder as I've heard a lot of people thinking it's a bowden, it
is not. We'll poke in there in a bit.
The bed is held on three z screws and is a magnetic surface that comes with an A plate,
and only an A plate. One must assume that a B plate might be coming later.
The A plate is almost identical to the PLA side of the bed that comes with the X1. By almost, I mean
literally. These could have come from the same factory. Maybe they did. I don't know of any other
printers that use this surface, but it is actually really good, I'll talk about it in a minute.
As you can see the other parts include steel x rods, huge steppers with big
pulley wheels on them that sorta act like gearing up, a really good light,
and the incredibly panoramic glass case. Aesthetically this might be one of the
best looking printers we've seen in the consumer market, it's like a display cabinet that prints.
As you can see if you can read the top, it says to use glue stick. The bambu one says
the same. They aren't kidding - you need to use glue stick on this. Failing to use glue
stick can mean damaging the surface trying to remove it. It's also a semi disposable surface,
my bambu came with two spare stickers to put on the steel subsurface should it need replacing.
They're pretty hard wearing but it does mean eventually, after maybe, I dunno, 200 prints,
you might need to replace it. Bambu also says it's only for PLA, I don't know what the deal
is on the K1 - it's the only bed, so I assume they think it's good for PETG and ABS. There's
two fairly obvious omissions to anyone who has reviewed or owns an X1C though. Firstly,
where's the glue stick? I think it would be worth including one, I have had glue sticks
included in printers with PEI sheets, that dont need them, so it's kind of silly not to
throw one in. Free advertising for bambu is the price of not including a creality glue stick,
oh well. Secondly, the best tool to get parts off this bed, and I am not kidding here,
is the blade tool bambu included with the X1C. I am hopefully showing you how well this works. You
won't get this kind of performance from a plastic or metal scraper, it's really surprising how
well this works. Again, not included, and in my opinion should be. But otherwise,
aside from rants about non included items, this bed is perfectly fine. Stuff really sticks.
It's better at holding parts than PEI, with less errors. The only price is you have to use glue.
As far as quality goes, well, I don't see any issues. We've got a bed test print, which is
fine. My calibration print looks really good, you can see the bridging is insanely good in there,
best I've seen, and overhangs and the two thin spikes are good too,
this indicates superior cooling which is down to the huge curtain fan. The quality you're
getting on prints is much better than usual and this is almost certainly down to the cooling.
I had printed this wrench on the bambu a couple of days ago and was
seriously impressed at how it came out, it's an actual working wrench,
you can increase the number of walls to make it stronger, it's really clever, but I thought it
would be a good challenge for the K1 as it came out working perfectly from the X1 first time.
And the K1 managed it perfectly first time too, so that's a decent indication that print
accuracy is good and there's not much slop or overextrusion to cause things to fuse together.
I've actually also tried a few other challenging prints on the machine and it had zero problems
with them. As you can see stuff comes off the printer working, that's quite unusual.
My unit...prints fine, but what is going on with other peoples'? I'm not entirely sure, but most
issues seem to revolve around the extruder. Creality actually sent me a spare extruder
which I have confirmed is the same as the original, sending a spare extruder is a new
one by me but I'll take it, it saves me having to disassemble the existing one.
This is probably the smallest extruder I've seen,
and it's very very custom. Compare it to extruders creality was making in 2020ish
and you can see the difference. The problem it seems is that this might have been too ambitious.
It's pretty pointless to comment any further though, as my unit is still
working fine after something like 50 hours of printing time I would guess,
which does take me to the next point which I...wish I didn't have to go into.
This is klipper, on board the printer. If you've used klipper you probably would recognise that
from the interfaces, especially if you stick the IP address into a browser and get greeted with
mains...creality print. There's two problems here. Firstly, this is...breaking klipper and mainsail's
licenses. But even if you're willing to skip past that, it's crippling the printer. Let me explain.
This is the elegoo neptune 4. It doesn't look like it runs klipper, but it does run klipper.
You can plug this into a network and access fluidddd like so. You can configure it using
the fluidd interface using these tabs down the side. Where's the tabs on creality's version?
Absent. So you can't configure anything. Not even basic stuff like acceleration or
square corner velocity. I get that creality don't want you to do that,
but this is a klipper machine. It's supposed to be configurable.
So, there are many ways to send a print to a klipper printer, and I normally use cura,
but the same apples to prusaslicer - you connect using moonraker. I don't want to explain that
as I already did two videos ago, but that's the klipper API. Thats how you send prints to
klipper. Unless you have a K1. Because creality have blocked external access to moonraker. I
did some digging around and they use http transfer to send their print on creality print,
so what this effectively means is you either use creality print, or you have
to upload the file manually, or use a usb stick. Now...I heard down the grape vine that creality
plan to "open source" the K1 but that is sort of a little too late. That needs to be done 4
weeks ago or whatever, and to my understanding we need to be given full access to the source
and to the machine, and nothing less. And open up the API endpoint so we can print from other
slicers. Obviously. This is something that frankly I can't even understand.
Users are crying out for klipper printers, and klipper is a selling point on printers in 2023,
so it makes zero sense to hide it, or to lock it down. If you want to see it done right,
or at least more right, then look at what elegoo is doing, look at what sovol is doing. The neptune
4 is a printer that has an identical UI to the neptune 3 that was marlin, so if they can manage
to implement this properly then so can creality. And I really hope that this criticism is taken
on board and creality sorts it out, because as far as I can tell they absolutely can.
Let's look at the inside.
So, what creality have done is use a different chipset to usual, this is mips architecture I
believe instead of arm, consequently there are different chips here than we're used to
seeing. Well, except for the usual ARM based mcu, apparently that gigadevice chip is indispensible.
Everything seems fine and normal in here, interesting to see how the three screws
work with the tensioner and belt there. We have ferrules and we have earthing.
We also have a toolhead board which I'll show you as I opened this up to
check thermal runaway which does work, make of this what you will.
So I think that's probably about it for the K1 for now, I doubt this is the last I'll be showing you
about it, but it is the end of the review. To summarise, I think this is a surprisingly well
engineered machine, albeit potentially with a few mistakes that aren't too surprising,
I do think creality have outdone themselves and brought us something way beyond what we might
have expected, but at the same time, what's stopping it from being a great machine is the
choices they have made, that hopefully they will reconsider. I think the machine is selling well,
as you'd expect for a creality, and rightly so, everything I've printed on it turned out as high
quality as the bambu it's trying to compete with, but I think with the right approach
to klipper it would signal to users that this isn't a proprietary machine but a moddable one,
and that would put it on a whole new level, and so far that's...well...an opportunity missed.
Let me know what you think in the comments, and, I dont know why I have to say this for
creality reviews but please keep it civil, if you don't I'll delete the comment,
obviously. Will you buy one? Will you buy one if they solve the klipper issues? Are you waiting for
the max? Let me know. I will see you next time for probably the neptune 4. Thank you for watching!