This is the elegoo neptune 3 pro. It's new, let's have a look at it.
The Neptune 3 pro feels like an entirely new machine when compared to the neptune 3,
mainly because...well...very few of the original parts of the neptune 3 remain. On the face of it,
it looks like a premium machine, with an obviously futuristic styling and branding.
The most striking
difference from the neptune 3 is that this is now a direct drive machine,
which is great in my opinion. The direct drive components stick out the front rather
than having any attempt to balance them across the rail but we'll look at that
in a moment. The frame is also new, being not black, but still standard aluminium profile,
at least where it matters, the front being flat to support these fancy logos.
I really like the colour of these profiles, it doesn't come across
in video all that well but I'm trying to show you the true colour in the footage.
The colour goes all the way down to parts of the base, which has the usual neptune style setup with
the same motherboard actually as the neptune 3, the new version of the robin nano. This is a board
I like because it comes with a full size usb B on it and those cables are way more reliable.
So what else is new on the neptune 3 pro that I can..
...shed light on?
It has a top mounted spool holder with floating filament extruder,
a term I've literally just made up. It also has dual z axes which is amazing for the price,
but also they are belted dual z axes which I am sure a lot of you will be happy about since you
all complain about the other kind, seriously its not that big a deal but yeah belted here.
There's a PEI sheet that I can't flaw as everything sticks to it, I dont know why,
but it is better than my other PEI sheets on my older printers..who knows,
but so far nothing has failed due to losing grip,
and thats really unusual for PEI actually. It's magnetic...obviously, and single sided.
We have also got mystery bed levelling I'll explain in a moment, and some smart fan control.
The price, on release is 230 dollars and it's regular price is quoted at
300. It should be available pretty soon I'm told.
That's the headline features so let's dive in a bit further.
So let's just fire straight into the huge question I have, if you've watched my last two videos
on flexible filament you will know that there's something special about this extruder and I am as
curious as you to find out what's going on inside here. To explain to those who are in the dark,
this printer has an unusual ability to print flexible filaments better than printers that
cost a lot more than it. By a huge margin. In my tests, this printer can print 70A shore hardness
filament flawlessly at 15mm/s and 95A tpu at up to 70mm/s. If you are interested in
this go watch my last video with charts in. So it's disassembly time, let's go.
As you can see there's a normal stepper in here but we should take a moment to look over to the
side, this mystery component here, do you know what this is? I'll give you 3 seconds and we
can pretend it's a game show...ready....nope you're wrong, it's an inductive probe. What,
you said that? I dont believe you. So yes this version of the neptune 3 has forsaken the strain
gauge and replaced it with an inductive probe. Why, you might ask? Well, elementary really, how
on earth would you add a strain gauge to this direct drive assembly? Exactly.
This sort of looks like a sprite extruder...I have some footage of that, heh. But here's a montage of
that because I know you all like those so much..I saw you skipping in the last video. Also I guess
this...
...is my disassembling hotend music now.
The extruder itself is sorta BMG with a BMG 3 to 1 ratio. It's reasonably
convoluted to disassemble, luckily other than for experimental purposes I haven't needed to,
I think these extruders are fairly resistant to jamming.
Also you can't tell, but its a ptfe tube inside there. Eh...can't
have everything. I expected this as they give you a spare one in a bag.
I am at a loss to explain why the extruder works so well compared to the sprite,
it must just come down to the tolerances, there's no other explanation. But there you go.
For the record it does work fine after me taking it apart.
We need to take a moment to appreciate the aesthetics of
this extruder and how Elegoo have left the perfect space on the front to...
...(add googly eyes)
Sorry elegoo, you know the rules and so do I. I am never going to
give up on putting googly eyes on things. You can't get content matched on dad jokes, right?
Inside the base we have... the same robin nano dw board from the neptune 3,
so I finally found something that's the same as the neptune 3!
Mine has an actual stm inside. I know that's not always the case. I covered this board in
my neptune 3 review so go watch that for more commentary, but it's an absolutely fine board
with optional esp chip socket if you want to add wireless upload, I haven't tested that.
Notice the ferrules, under that hot melt glue. Everything looks
to be in order here as you'd expect from elegoo.
Also see the feet on the bottom here, nice and chunky for good damping.
Psst...secret info for subtitle readers. Thumbnails are
back! You have to use elegoo cura though, so...
The user interface in general is pretty familiar, I mean it seems like it's some
kind of standard UI because the icons are the same as the SV04 ...touchscreen firmware
is a mysterious thing, there must be base libraries somewhere out there.
Either way it's all kinda logical,
and by the way the screen is capacitive which is also a first, for neptunes anyway,
this puts it in line with say the posher editions of the ender 3 S1 series like the plus here,
so it's really another more premium feature that's surprising to see at this price point.
Now theres a couple of things I did on this printer that wouldnt
really normally be considered in a review because I have been using it
What's left? Oh, just like...general print quality. Well. There's a con here,
you saw pros up until now, don't worry though its not a commentary on the print quality in
general because that is super neat, but one thing this printer doesn't have,
that say the sovol range do, is linear advance, and this does show on this cube for example,
the corners and the edges of the letters. This is sunlu meta filament by the way and
it is ....well...it prints at 170C so that's weird. It's good stuff though actually. But
back to the point, linear advance would be really nice to see and it is a firmware
thing so there's no reason to my mind that it cant be included in future, if not officially
then by 3rd party. Elegoo are, for the record, pretty good at sharing the marlin source code.
On to sound, we can check noise levels as the printer claims to be quiet, well, kind of,
the interesting thing I noticed is the hotend fan, not the part cooling ones but the hotend one,
does seem to turn on and off which is unique, officially it turns off below 50C so the printer
is a lot quieter when on standby for sure. But the fan in the base remains on so there is a
base level of noise, very few printers ever turn this one off, I have seen two ever that do that.
We have the results on screen, but also I thought I'd mess with the noise frequency
too just because I find that matters more to people than the volume, so that's also on screen.
So what's my thoughts on this printer? I think it's a real contender for budget printer of
the year, which is a contest I just made up, if I were entering printers I would probably have this,
the SV01 pro, the SV06, and maybe the hurakan but we'll talk about the hurakan another time, but
seriously the elegoo neptune 3 pro is a serious entry into the market at a perfect time, we don't
all want to spend high hundreds or over a thousand dollar pounds on a printer, and if you're printing
single colour in PLA then this is a remarkable printer to have as a second printer or a beginner
printer, or if you have a less capable TPU setup then this would be a good second printer for that.
It does have a couple of features that you don't get, namely the hotend isn't all metal so it's
not ideal for say PETG or anything hotter, and the lack of linear advance, but I think
you really can't go wrong with this printer either for features or trouble free printing.
So there you go, that was the Neptune 3
pro and it is available for pre-order at the time of writing, check out the links below if
you are interested and also tell me in the comments what you think of this printer!