This is the Crealty CR-10S Pro. It was sent to me by banggood.com to do
a review and I'm going to give you my honest opinion, both the good and the bad,
on this special edition of Filament Friday.
This special edition of Filament Friday is brought to you by these patreon
supporters. This is a CR 10 and this is a CR-10s. This is my original Creality machine.
When I got this two years ago I was amazed how good it prints. It's
been a fantastic machine running 24/7 in my print farm. I love it.
The CR-10s is like $100 more and added a few features. It added 256 K memory to
the box, this is 128k. It added a filament run-out
sensor, which frankly I don't think is that necessary. So I just put a piece of
filament in it and through it to the side. That thing never stayed on anyway. And the
other thing it had dual threaded rods. This has a single threaded rod so some
people thought that would make it better. But I actually I think I made it worse
because the one driver drives both motors and splits the current and never
seemed to maintain bed level. So what I did was took the extra one off, the motor
and the threaded rod, and now this thing stays very level and prints really nice. So
when people ask should I buy a CR-10S or a CR-10, I always say save $100 just
buy a CR 10. But now we have The CR-10S Pro, the latest evolution of
the CR-10. I returned the CR-10 back to its rightful place on the bench and
let's take a closer look at the CR-10S pro. So what are the major
differences between the CR 10 and a CR 10 s pro? Well first of all it's $200
more. $200 dollars more than the CR 10 but what do you get for that $200? Quite a
bit. You get better electronics built into the base. You get auto level on the
hot end you got capricorn tubing for higher temperature. You've got dual
threaded rods driven by trinamic drivers. You've got dual gears on the
extruder with less gaps so you should be able to print flexible filaments,
although I'll explain more about that in a minute, and you do have the filament
run-out sensor, just like the CR-10s. Although it's much beefier and built
into the bracket on the side here. So let's look a little closer at the
Electronics in this guy. You've got 256k memory on the motherboard which is more
than the CR-10 and you've also got trinamic drivers which makes driving the
stepper motors much quieter and much smoother. You've also got a touchscreen
control versus a graphics control with a control knob and it works really well.
You've got a meanwell power supply, 24 volt just like the Ender 3 so it
heats up the bed a lot quicker and also the hot end a lot quicker. In addition to
that you've got easier wiring, there's one ribbon cable that comes up to the
side and connects up here by the extruder assembly. And just below the
filament sensor is a circuit board where it breaks all the wires out already
connected so one connection of that ribbon cable and you're just about done.
It's basically four screws to mount the gantry, two connectors for the stepper
motors and then this ribbon cable and you're ready to go.
The bed assembly is a lot different than this vs the CR-10. It's got dual
aluminum extrusion that are spread out and eight wheels to guide it so it's
much more stable. And it's got an aluminum frame and then an aluminum
plate clipped on top of it with buildtak not glass. CR-10 had a glass bed.
This has aluminum. And then it's got insulation underneath to keep the heat
in and heat up quicker. But I like a glass bed and so I tried it on this
machine and the auto level sensor just didn't like it. It kept jamming the
nozzle into the glass. I even tried a mirror thinking that
might help and that didn't improve anything so that could be why the ships
with an aluminium plate instead of glass. Once I got it set up at the auto level
working, which took a while, I explain in a minute. I was able to print two separate
cats the CR-10 CAT. The same one I printed on that machine when I first got
it and it came out really really nice. So it did a good job on these. Then I
printed really big I printed this orange vase in vase mode so it's a single wall
all the way around using my Filament Friday filament and it came out really
smooth at a 0.28 layer height. So I'm really impressed with how solid
this thing. It printed really really nice. But getting to this point, well now that
was a headache. To start off I printed the only sample file that was included on the
SD card and that was the dog print. And this is the same dog print that's
included with the Ender 3. In fact it's exact same g-code file because it
printed right there where it would be centered on the size of an Ender 3
so they didn't even slice one specifically for this machine. It should
have the cat. This was the file that was with CR-10. It didn't have it. But I
printed this and to me it's not the best test print.
It's got supports and everything else but it was printing fine and then it broke
off the bed and I ended up with a spaghetti mess. And when I looked at the
base of it, it clearly was not properly adjusted. The auto level sensor needed
some tweaking so I thought okay let's go back to the manual and we'll adjust it.
There's two different bed leveling adjustments level 1 and level 2 so I
tried level 1 which basically moves to the corner and you manually adjust
the knobs and it was so far off I said this can't be right I'm not going to do
that. So I went to level 2 and level 2 talks about adjusting a little screw
with the screwdriver they include to adjust the sensor either up or down. What
I didn't realize is when they were saying move it up or down, they're
referring to the sensor not the nozzle. So maybe it's my misinterpretation but I
was adjusting the screw to adjust the nozzle up or down which is the exact
opposite of the sensor. You want the sensor to go down to lift the nozzle and
you want the sensor to go up to lower the nozzle so I totally screwed up my
machine. So at that point I threw their instructions aside, the Z offset wasn't
doing anything for me, so I printed the cat, just the first layer. And I checked it
and I tweaked the screw, peeled the cat off and printed it again. I did that for about 45
minutes to an hour and finally got this thing to level consistently. To make sure
that I had the auto level working across the whole bed I printed five CHEP cubes,
one at each corner and one in the middle, and it printed out beautifully. The only
problem I had is one CHEP cube had a bottom corner that warped just
slightly. And fair warning, don't watch Creality's video on how to auto
level this thing, because they go through all the steps to auto level it but then when
the first layer goes down and they tell you to tweak the knob and rub your
finger on it to make sure that it's sticking. That's the same method I use to
level the manual bed on the Ender 3. It's like they're watching my videos. But
if you do that you're screwing up your auto level because the next time it
prints, the sensor will then adjust to that bed postions and you'll still be off.
You have to adjust the sensor, not the bed. The next thing I wanted to do is print
these rubber feet. They're very soft that I print him all day long in my
Ender 3 with that EZR extruder which I showed in a previous video. I
wanted to try out the same flexible material on here. It's got the dual
gears and real tight tolerances so I tried to print a rubber foot with it and
it got to this layer and then the filament escaped out of the gears. It
popped out. So I tried it again and it did it again. So as far as I'm
concerned, this extruder is an improvement but it still won't print the
real flexible stuff. Probably Semi-flex no problem but the real flexible stuff
like rubbery stuff like this? It can't handle it!
I took the fan cover off and here's the capacitive auto level sensor and the hot
end.The hot end has the PTFE tube going all the way down to the nozzle and it's
not the same nozzle as a standard CR-10. It's a new style. But it's got the same
issue that if you don't get that PTFE tube all the way down, you get a blockage
just like I did on the machine here. For the extra two hundred dollars you're
definitely getting a better machine than the CR-10. You get a lot better
electronics. Those Triamic drivers make these stepper really quiet and really
smooth and this is a fantastic PLA printing machin. To me, they should have
put an e3dv6 hotend on it though. There's PTFE tubes still going down to
the nozzle that limits your temperature range. An E3DV6 with a heat break
would have been much much better. And nowat six hundred dollars you're in
competition with like this guy which is the Prusa MK2S. This guy has an
actual E3DV6. It's got a direct drive so it'll do that
flexible material and it's got a auto level that calibrates itself, no screwing
around. It just does it. Now that's definitely a smaller printer than this
but it's very very reliable and prints beautifully. So this is what you're
competing with now once you're in this price range. So, the advantage of the
Creality machines where they were like sub $400, the CR-10 to CR-10 mini and the Ender 3
and they're fantastic printers for that price. But once you start getting up
into the six to seven hundred dollar range you better have some really good parts
because the competition gets a lot tougher. So that's my first experience
with the CR-10S Pro. For the extra two hundred bucks you're definitely getting
a lot more machine than the CR-10. Is it worth to 200 bucks? Well that's really
your call. Personally that is a great deal and with
the extra 200 bucks you can buy maybe a better slicer. you can buy some
filament, you can buy a Filament Friday Tool Kit (haha) and still be under 600 bucks.
But it's really what you want and what you need so it's not a bad machine but
it's starting to get to that ceiling where it's now is competing with other
printers. It's a tough call. So I'll leave it up to you. I'll put links in the
description below. If you are gonna buy one I appreciate if you use those
affiliate links. It really helps out the channel. And that's it for this special
edition of Filament Friday.