This
is the sovol SV01 Pro.
And it's actually quite good! Let's take a look.
At around a 300 dollar price tag this machine is certainly not the cheapest
out there when it comes to ender clones, but there is one reason above all others why
that is perhaps better value than you might initially think,
and I can show you it without saying anything, unusual for me, but here goes.
If I put the bed on the artillery sidewinder which is a 4-500 dollar printer
you can see it's closer to that, than this. So that hopefully puts the matter to bed.
S ovol if you don't know them are a company that are aligned closely enough with creality
that they use a lot of their parts, but they clearly have their own designers as the build
choices are different enough that you wouldn't know if it weren't for the obvious signs,
the probe here for example is a CR-touch which is a creality product. Nothing else on this
printer really looks any more endery than it would on any brand. You have a smooth fronted frame that
looks nice, the blue trim on the gantry is a bit snazzy with the belt tensioners even snazzier,
I think these are similar-ish to the ender 3 S1, and there are twin ZEE screws around
the back. Notably the Z screws have no belt but we'll get to that in a moment.
As you maybe already worked out it's actually got a direct drive mechanism which is becoming
quite common now on this form factor, but still unusual enough to raise the odd eyebrow at this
price point, being a titan style extruder with a we'll see in a minute style hotend.
It's a bed slinger type printer with the usual wheels and springs
which are the yellow kind and the bed comes with a flexible magnetic build plate. Finally
we have a colour touch screen off to the side in almost the same way as the newer ender 3s do.
So before we look at the performance of any of these bits I want to show you inside
the printer. The bottom has two fan vents, one for the PSU which is nice, but before we
take off the panel I noticed something odd about the wheels - they look like they've
already done a few prints! I figured out why, so don't worry if your printer arrives like this,
it hasnt been used, the bed can move back and forth during transportation. Clean the dust off,
or not, its up to you, it won't harm anything. I did a video about it actually.
Once inside we are surprised but also not surprised to find a creality 4.2.2
board in here. I guess I would have guessed 4.2.7 if I am being honest but guessing by the
label on the sd card port this one, unlike the one in my old ender 3, is fitted with TMC2208s,
which will be running in step/dir or legacy mode as is the way with these boards, but that's a
discussion for another time. This is an absolutely fine setup, and unlike the ender 3 and v2,
I spy ferrules! It looks really weird to see ferrules on a creality board doesn't it?
This is obviously great, as this is one of the more common failure modes on these boards.
Moving on to the hotend - The cooling fan is pretty sizeable and I must say quite loud,
I think mine might be a bit rattly too which is a shame considering the effort they've put into
even putting damping washers on. It's about the same as an ender 3 v2 in terms of noise I think,
so not great but I guess the way this hotend is configured, that part cooling fan will be very
easy to change if you feel like it, although we'll test the performance in a minute.
The inside of the hotend is kind of the design of a titan aero with the heatsink going up the
side here like this, it's kind of a cool design and I like the compactness, and one
thing I've definitely noticed is that it lacks something compared to my other titan extruders.
It doesn't make the distinct titan noise.
I don't know why. I quite like the reassuring click of a titan style extruder.
I don't think it's in any way all metal, in fact the machine is hardware limited to 260c which is
higher than I'd recommend going anyway,
the machine and hotend is primarily suitable for PLA, TPU and PETG.
I want to look at the z screws next, now there's no belt between them so they could theoretically
go out of sync while not energized, especially if the printer is moved or shaken about a bit. There
doesn't seem to be anything to address that in terms of levelling so I designed, in the loosest
meaning of the term, these two pieces - one goes either end of the bed and you can just raise the
gantry until it hits the marks on the aluminium or the bottom or however you wish, and then disable
steppers and manually turn to level the gantry. I think this is worth doing every now and then,
because it takes a couple of seconds, and while the auto levelling will compensate for a wonky
gantry, it's better to have everything straight especially for taller prints.
So let's talk about the bed levelling - actually pretty impressive. On the interface you just
choose the bed levelling menu and the printer will immediately home. You shouldn't, but could,
dive straight in and do auto levelling at this point but I recommend doing the steps in this
order. First pick aux levelling, and go through each corner and get them all to the same height.
THEN choose auto levelling and you should find your numbers here are
closer together. Both ways will give good first layers because that's how the mesh
works, but there's a right way and a wrong way, you know how it is.
I found the CR-touch probe's repeatability was actually surprisingly good, as you can see.
Normally about now I do a bed adhesion test but since I was printing out some filament
anyway....what, you don't....I thought we all printed out filament? Where do you get your
filament from if you don't print it out? Anyway this kind of shows that the bed is spot on level
and even, so I can forego the usual test and save wasting my hand crafted artisan filament.
What next - the UI. This I think is probably the most full featured and
well thought out UI I've seen on a touch screen interface so far,
now obviously that's out of a sample of maybe 10 printers, but even so. The UI appears unassuming
when you first start it up, in fact it defaults to dark mode which might look better but I
prefer light mode from a useability perspective. There's lots of tiny details that have obviously
taken effort to code in here, like when you level the bed the little space guy jumps in sync with
the process. But on a more functional note, everything is well laid out and there's even
an advanced section that you're warned to not poke around in that contains all the stuff that
most interfaces dont, including PID and K value for linear advance if you want to go there.
With linear advance enabled on this marlin build I have high expectations of the print quality and my
test piece does ..maybe...confirm this. It's nice and neat although there is some ghosting there,
performance isn't quite as good as it could be considering, so maybe some tuning might be
needed, I know that's a thing you can do. You can also see the extra cooling fan noise is giving you
some return too as the quality of the two pole bits on the test print is better than usual.
Perfectly acceptable. I've also added a new test for overhangs to try to see cooling performance
in a bit more detail but this printer just kind of blew through it, the only thing that can cause
overhangs to fail apparently is literally printing on thin air. There was no drop in
quality at all so I had to make the test harder. I think this might be the best bridging and overhang
performance I've seen from stock, but it's a new test so we'll see going forward I guess.
TPU next and it's not all good news. Plain old 95A TPU performance is excellent. No issues at all.
Very minimal stringing in my test and good prints all round,
I will share the profile I used, I even got a tiny octopus out of it with
no problems or extra tuning. The problem arises if you want to print softer TPU because
there's a lot of unconstrained space inside the extruder, but this is a fairly niche need, so most
people will never want to print anything softer than 95A which didn't fail once during the tests.
I can happily report, much to my surprise, that a basic M600 command for change filament works.
This is something that doesnt work on a creality machine to my knowledge unless newer ones do. But
it also works really well - you just stick the command into cura as I just showed you then the
machine beeps when it's time, throws the filament out, and it just waits patiently. You then put
the new filament in, preheat, and go again. You can see from an octoprint graph that it doesn't
even let the bed cool, which means the part wont even come off the bed if you have a PEI plate on.
I think we're nearing the end so just a bit of caretaking to do before I summarize.
The bed surface is marginally incompatible with silk filaments, as you can see on mine it leaves
white stains, which are mostly aesthetic, but either way I would advise you do look into getting
a PEI bed to use with this one, as in, as well not instead, as per my previous video on printer beds.
Octoprint works fine out of the box, not that it has a box, but it works with zero config.
I think that's about it. So in summary this is
yet another machine that looked like an unassuming ender clone, but turns out to be..in my opinion,
a much better value proposition than an ender 3 v2 and a much easier machine to get along
with on a day to day basis, with the refined user interface that supports _normal marlin
functions_ and the fairly functional direct drive hotend and preinstalled magnetic bed
giving you a simple upgrade path to PEI, there's not a lot to dislike about it so long
as you want to print mainly PLA and don't mind paying extra compared to a basic ender clone, The
only gripes I have really are the noise level and potential need to align the gantry now and then,
neither of those are huge deals and I think you could definitely argue that twin Z screws that
need syncing now and then is always better than single z axis, on a direct drive especially.
It's a shame they didn't nail down the TPU escape path to make this a perfect machine for flexibles,
but it will manage with anything that isn't specialist as I showed.
So I think it occupies a decent space in the market for anyone who finds the square
ender bed too restrictive but doesn't want a giant machine, especially if you
have an idea that you want a direct drive printer, it's a good way to get into that.
So as always let me know what you think. I will see you next time, thank you for watching!