- Not everyone has the cashola to shell out
on a fancy 3D printer.
And even relatively basic home enthusiast ones
can still cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
Or at least, they did.
Feast your eyes on the Easythreed X1,
a sub $100 3D printer,
straight to you from Shenzhen, China.
It moves, it extrudes, sometimes it goofs up.
But it has basically zero competition in this price bracket,
so we absolutely needed to take a look at it.
Just like I need to tell you about our sponsor.
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(upbeat music)
(electronic beeping)
I know what you're thinking
because I was thinking the exact same thing.
This thing has to be a hot pile of garbage.
But hold on for a second.
Even if it is hot garbage,
you have to appreciate
that hitting such a low price point
while delivering something that functions at all
is pretty impressive.
There are multiple injection-molded parts,
each one requiring a costly tool to manufacture
and it even comes 99% preassembled.
There's clearly a lot of value for your money here,
as long as you temper your expectations.
The accessory package includes what you need
and absolutely nothing more,
you get a small screw driver,
a few meters of PLA filament,
a card reader and microSD card
preloaded with manuals, software,
and a test print file,
and finally a 12-volt 2.5 Amp power supply.
The X1 gets away with such a wimpy power supply, by the way,
because there is no heated print bed
but that means that you're only able to print in PLA
as most other plastics
will have bad adhesion and warping issues
without a heating bed,
which is fine.
I mean, we can't recommend PLA for anything structural
but for decorative prints,
single-use widgets or toys,
it gets the job done just fine,
that is as long as it's a decent quality filament.
Out of the gate,
the included G-code file produced this little cat model
and there is a lot that we can learn from this.
The stringing between the ears and the tail
tells us that while the X1's hot and cooling fan
seems to be working,
the lack of a part cooling fan,
so one that helps solidify the plastics
after it's been extruded,
means that the printer ends up
either dragging material along with the nozzle
or printing on top of semi-liquid material,
There's also visible porosity
along the perimeters of the model
that tells us that our filament is not extruding evenly.
Now initially,
we blamed the printer for this, understandably,
but upon closer inspection of the included filament,
we discovered that it is complete garbage.
The diameter of this small length of the starter filament
varies by over 0.3 millimeters from one end to the other.
To put that in context,
most manufacturers strive to keep it under 0.05 millimeters
across an entire spool like this one.
The good news is that once we switched
to some decent filament,
the print quality actually improved dramatically.
It's still not great,
especially side by side
against prints that are coming out of our Ultimaker 3 Plus,
but it's in line with our expectations
given the price point
and I think we can do even better.
So from here out,
we're gonna be making our own G-code using a slicer
which takes our 3D model
and slices it, hence the name,
into multiple 2D layers
that are laid down in order to make the 3D shapes we want.
Now Easythreed did include their own slicer
called Easyware which uses the Unity engine.
Yes, that Unity engine from "Escape from Tarkov,"
so that's neat.
And it functions just fine with the default settings,
but the menu is a bit unwieldy and for some reason
the settings list kept scrolling itself upward.
So after one test print of our LTT logo,
which I have right here,
sort of holding together still.
We made the decision to move to a slicer,
that Colin, our writer for this video,
was more familiar with.
That's Prusa Slicer
which actually ended up
making things worse rather than better,
believe it or not.
Too much material was being extruded
and the nozzle was too low on the first layer,
dragging itself around in the PLA.
After iterating half a dozen times though
and moving to a slightly larger coin,
mostly just to help with the part cooling
so that it's not going over the exact same spot
that's still liquid right away,
we actually started to see some half-decent results.
Now we've still got some infill
and perimeter blending issues,
which was a little surprising
given the up to 30% overlap that we tried,
but overall big gains were made
and we felt like the X1 was ready to take on Benchy.
The Benchy benchmark model
is an excellent trial print for a few reasons,
one, it contains nearly every difficult 3D printing feature,
like curved overhangs, tiny surface details,
long curved perimeters,
and both small and slanted holes.
For comparison,
this blue one here is printed on our Ultimaker 3 Plus.
You can check out our full review on that printer
in the card up here.
Now it's not perfect.
There's a bit of weird patterning in the vertical surfaces
but it has nice crisp edges with no stringing,
and its bridged sections are pretty good
considering that there's no support structure included.
Most of these issues can really be attributed
to the lack of tuning
and our fast print speed.
Compared to the X1s,
it's easy to see which machine did the better job.
Oh, by the way, we didn't mention this
but it comes with a magnetic print bed.
Mind you, it's kind of ruined already
from just a dozen prints.
But anyway, with more dialing in,
we probably could get better results than this,
particularly on the under-extruded sections
but the results here are as expected.
Our solid infill is still under-extruded
which means that even after the tuning we've done so far,
there's more time we would need to invest
in order to improve print reliability.
These hanging bits under the roof here,
indicate both a lack of speed and cooling.
We see a similar problem in the undersides of the archways
and as for the smokestack on the top,
that turned into a hot gooey blob.
And this is an example of fine detail print problems
that you simply cannot fix
by slowing down the printhead
because it can't solidify with the hot end so close to it.
Now there are some files out there
to hack a cooling fan onto this printer,
and actually a heated bed while you're at it.
But this isn't the printer to buy
if you're trying to do
even a moderate amount of 3D printing.
It's an ultra low buck starter machine,
designed to fit onto a bookshelf
or in a dorm room closet
along with all of your shirts from LLTStore.com.
If all you wanted was something to tinker with,
and if you can manage to make a bath toy or two
for your kid, so much the better.
Well it works,
which is actually more than we expected
for under $100.
But if you want consistency
and plug and play operation,
it's worth the money to grab something like
a Monoprice Mini
which comes in at 219
or if you can swing it, a Prusa Mini.
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
wow, we don't actually do a lot of 3D printing videos
but hey, you could check out
our Ultimaker 3 Plus review I guess.
That was a long time ago.
Luke was still reviewing stuff.