﻿Hi I’m Gidon from thetechnologyman.com. The Mingda Magician X is a 3D printer specifically
targeted at new users. There’s very little assembly and it has automatic bed levelling, a
direct drive extruder and a colour touch screen. I’ll put it through its paces printing a range
of models in a variety of filaments - not just PLA - to try and help you
decide if this printer is right for you. If you’re new to 3D printing I’d highly
recommend watching at least some of my earlier video that introduces 3D printing with the budget
Creality Ender 3. I’ll provide a link on screen and down in the description, and I’ll provide
full timestamps if you just want to skip to the chapter of this review you’re interested in.
So let’s take a closer look. Overview
The printer is packaged in styrofoam rather than the usual dense packaging foam. It’s a
little messier but the printer arrived without any damage. It couldn’t really be much easier
to put together, requiring just six bolts to attach the upper assembly to the lower assembly.
I lightly attached one of the shorter bolts on either side to hold the gantry in place
and then tilted the printer on its side to attach the longer bolts through the base. I then secured
everything in place with the 4 shorter bolts. The filament holder can snap into position on the
top of the printer on either side and then you can connect the cabling for the heated bed, the two Z
motors and the 3 X axis cables. It’s very easy and the whole thing should take around 10 minutes.
The gantry sits in moulded plastic parts on the base and I did find it a very tight fit - I had
to gently push one of these parts outwards to be able to slide the gantry completely in.
As well as the printer you get a few additional accessories but fewer than I’ve come to expect.
Just some allen keys, a spanner, a spare nozzle, a short spare PTFE tube and a couple of spare bolts.
There is some sample filament but it’s labelled 3D pen filament and personally I wouldn't use this.
There are no flush cutters and there’s no spatula to get prints off the bed. This is an oversight
for a printer for beginners - you will need both. There is also a full sized SD card
and the user manual. After initial assembly you
need to check the bed and print head don't have any play. And you need to check the
tightness of the belts. This isn’t mentioned in the manual and could easily catch out a new user.
Both my bed and print head had a fair bit of play. The bed has two eccentric nuts and the print head
has one eccentric nut that you need to tighten with the supplied spanner to take out any play.
None of the guide wheels should be able to move freely independently.
You’ll probably only need a fraction of a turn to get everything snug. You should also check
the Z axes guide wheels on both sides. There are belt tensioning knobs on both
the X and Y axis that you can adjust - mine only needed a minor adjustment.
When you’re done with the tools and accessories they conveniently fit in the tray on the top of
the base, although I wouldn’t suggest using this tray when the printer is in operation.
The build quality of the printer is generally good. There’s a little more plastic that I would
have liked but these parts look injection moulded and the overall appearance of the printer looks
more polished than most printers I’ve tested. And the cabling is particularly neat,
mostly hidden away and there’s a thick cable to the heated bed with a sturdy connection.
Even this connector is injection moulded and embossed with the Mingda logo. Although it
would have made more sense to make this a right angled plug to use up less space at the back.
Only the Z axis cable is loose so you just need to make sure that it doesn't get caught on anything.
A drag chain might be nice to print off as a finishing touch. The ribbon cable that attaches
to the print head is stuck with double sided tape to the gantry. This had come away at one end,
and was also raised slightly in one area which rubs against the print head as it moves across.
Considering the overall size of the printer which you can see on-screen,
the build volume is surprisingly small - just 230mm square with 260mm build height.
The large base does cover most of the space required when the printer is in use
when you take account of the movement of the bed. So the actual footprint required for this printer
is similar to other printers with comparable print volumes. The plastic parts do make the printer
quite light at just under 7.5kg and it’s easy to move around with its integrated carry handle.
The printer should be already set to the correct voltage for your region but if you want to check
or you move location, you need to peel this piece of foam away to change it.
After turning it on you need to run the auto bed levelling by tapping on the Levelling icon on the
3.5” touch screen. The printer uses the nozzle itself and a strain gauge to measure the bed at
16 points to then compensate for any unevenness of the bed. The whole procedure takes 3 or 4 minutes
but it’s not done before every print and with the glass bed you don’t need to do it very often.
The printer automatically heats up the nozzle and bed before taking the measurements.
You can see the red LED illuminate each time the nozzle touches the bed.
You can then tap on Preheat and then PLA to heat up the bed and nozzle to predefined printing
temperatures, ready to insert filament. This printer is direct drive which means you load
filament straight into the dual drive extruder at the print head. It doesn’t have to travel through
a long length of PTFE tubing from the extruder to the hotend. This should make loading and unloading
filament quicker and easier. It has other potential advantages too which I’ll come back to.
Snip the filament at 45° and try to straighten the end as much as possible. Then push it through
the filament sensor and into the extruder gears, whilst releasing tension on the extruder’s tension
lever. You do this with your thumb depressing the tension knob while your index finger pulls back
on the lever. It’s quite a stiff spring so you might need a little more force than you think.
Then tap on Menu | Extrude and tap on Load a few times to feed filament out of the nozzle.
This procedure is more difficult than it should be and took me a few attempts initially.
It can help to remove the extruder thumb screw which lets you see what’s going on. You can then
more easily guide the filament through the gears and down into the hotend. You can then manually
push hot filament through the nozzle before replacing the tension screw. This screw is
a little short so make sure it’s engaged in the nut before trying to tighten it around one turn.
An alternative way to load filament is to start extruding and at the same time
firmly push the filament into the rotating extruder gears. With a little practice the
gears should catch the filament and load it into the hotend and out the nozzle.
The front of the printer has a thumb drive port, the full sized SD card port and a USB-C port
for connecting to a computer or Octoprint via a Raspberry Pi for wireless printing.
It’s a great selection of ports, all easily accessible right at the front of the printer.
And it’s the first printer I’ve seen with a USB-C port. There are also two SD card
storage slots. Performance
The printer has a V6 style hotend that can print at up to 260°C. I wouldn’t go much above
250°C since it’s not an all metal design and the PTFE lining will degrade at higher temperatures.
Mingda supplies a spare piece of PTFE tubing if you manage to burn the installed one.
Mingda only lists PLA, ABS and TPU or Flex as supported materials but not PETG.
I tried printing with all these supported filaments and also PETG.
The printer uses a belt driven dual Z-axis that should provide more accurate larger
prints. The Z axes had a generous amount of grease applied to them, so be careful to not
contaminate the build plate with greasy fingers. Before starting on my test prints I updated the
firmware. Copy the latest firmware for the mainboard and screen from Mingda’s
website to the SD card and turn the printer on. The printer will then update itself.
You can print from either a USB stick or the supplied SD card. The SD card has a few test
prints so for my first print I tried the Vase. Tap on print and then Vase. I used some Anycubic white
PLA and it printed successfully in just under one hour 15 minutes. It’s not actually printed in vase
mode where the printer prints in one continuous spiral, so you can see the seam, but the print
looks fine. The Z-offset was a little high so I tapped on Baby Steps during the print to lower it
slightly. You can also adjust the Z-Offset from the home screen before a print. Any adjustments
you make in Baby Steps are also saved here. When you go to Z-offset you can’t actually move
the nozzle to its zero position. This means you can’t use the usual method of sliding a piece
of paper underneath the nozzle to check the offset. I think this would be easier for new
users - it’s harder to adjust this on the fly while printing and requires some experience.
Mingda has told me they’ll add this feature to an upcoming firmware release.
The printer uses a coated glass bed and PLA stuck to the bed well, but prints were tricky to remove.
You should let the bed cool down but I still found the prints quite difficult to remove with
the coating Mingda uses. I pretty much always had to use a spatula, sometimes with a lot of force.
You can try raising the Z-offset slightly or use some bed adhesive like 3DLac, Magigoo
or glue stick which should help the prints release - but I still needed the spatula in most cases.
If you’re using something like Magigoo or glue stick you can squirt a little water or IPA
which should help release your print more easily. A removable PEI sheet makes life so much easier
especially for beginners. You can simply pull the sheet off, flex it once or twice
and the print pops off. You don’t even need to wait for it to cool down. Still
the glass bed works ok for PLA and you won’t need to run the bed levelling very often.
I sliced my own models in Cura which is the recommended slicer - the program that
converts your 3D models into so-called g-code that the printer can process.
You’ll need to add the printer manually in the current version of Cura. The manual guides
through the setup and includes a profile for PLA on the SD card which you can import. And you can
download profiles for ABS and TPU from their website. Alternatively if you download Cura
version 5 which is just coming out of beta, the printer has already been added for you.
To test the automatic bed levelling I printed the Fab365 A-Team van. This uses most of the bed and
also tests the tolerances of the printer. This is a long print and took 11 hours to
complete. The glass bed is removable with a single clip at the front, and I placed it in
the freezer for 5 minutes to release the print. This print is foldable and came out ok, but some
of the joints did fail trying to assemble it. I also printed a calibration cube to test the
accuracy. It should measure 20mm in all directions and was a little off but looked ok quality-wise.
Next I printed the 3DBenchy in just over 1 hour 17 minutes which looked good apart from a small
amount of ghosting or ringing around the holes at the front of the boat. This is one disadvantage
of direct drive over a typical bowden style printer - resulting from the heavier print
head which has to include the extruder. I printed this twisted vase in vase mode
which prints in one continuous spiral. You just need to tick Spiralise Outer Contour in Cura.
It’s a great way to print quickly and it checks for any inaccuracies in the Z axis. The vase came
out very well with no artefacts. I also printed these stackable storage containers again in vase
mode which you can print in several sizes. They also printed very well in 3DQF titanium white.
All these prints were at the standard 0.2mm layer height and the default 50mm/s print speed.
Mingda claims a maximum print speed of 80mm/s so I tried printing the 3DBenchy again at this
faster speed. The included profile has Lift Head enabled under Cooling in Cura which made a mess
of the chimney and slowed down the print. But even printing the model again with this
disabled the print wasn’t any faster. I’d have to experiment further to speed up PLA prints.
Like loading filament, removing filament is also harder than it should be. There’s
no automatic way to unload filament - you can’t even run the extruder backwards.
I found the most reliable method was to get the nozzle up to temperature,
release tension on the extruder tension lever and push some filament out of the nozzle and then pull
upwards to remove the filament. But occasionally I did get a small piece of filament left behind,
stuck in between the extruder gears that I had to remove with some needle nose pliers.
Next I tried printing some flexible filament to print a new bumper for my son’s RC car.
This printed very well with barely any stringing - another advantage of this direct drive setup.
This was printed with FilaTech FilaFlex 40 which is good for the bumper but you can get far more
flexible filaments like this NinjaFlex that would be a challenge for Bowden style printers.
But even with Mingda’s direct drive setup I found it very difficult to load the NinjaFlex
into the extruder and even once loaded I didn't manage to get a successful print.
The filament runout sensor also didn’t recognise the deep blue filament so I had to turn off the
sensor in the settings. I’ll persevere and update the accompanying written article at
thetechnologyman.com if I have any success. Next up I tried ABS in the form of eSun’s ABS+.
Even small prints like this calibration cube lifted around the corners on the glass bed
but I did manage to print it successfully decreasing the Z-offset and printing with a brim.
I’m not a big fan of using painter’s tape and bed adhesives like 3DLac and
Magigoo but they do help with ABS on a glass bed. I tried a more challenging
print - a fan duct for the Flsun Superracer I reviewed recently for an upcoming video.
The model printed successfully and looks good with the matte finish of the black ABS+. If you
don’t have too many drafts, you can get away with small prints like this without an enclosure.
I checked with Mingda why PETG isn’t listed as a supported material.
They did provide a PETG profile but suggested using painter’s tape to protect the bed.
I tried printing with both painter’s tape, various bed adhesives and PETG printed ok,
releasing easily when the bed had cooled down. I checked the heated bed with a Flir thermal
imaging camera. The temperature was quite even across the bed and I did confirm it
could achieve 110°C maximum should you need it. The printer has a 32-bit mainboard and silent
stepper drivers and overall it’s a fairly quiet printer but it’s certainly not silent.
The printer has a 24V 15A 360W power supply and even when it’s not printing this fan doesn’t turn
itself off. After only 20 or 30 hours of use this fan failed and made a lot of noise when
the printer was turned on. It’s a 24V 6015 fan which I replaced with a better quality one, but
it wasn’t particularly easy. The base is held on with 12 screws with three of them underneath the
foam feet. And the power supply cover is held in place with 6 screws. I could then very carefully
install the new fan. Looking on the Facebook forum this seems to be a fairly common issue.
The touch screen is responsive and the layout and icons are mainly intuitive. You can turn off
the beeps under settings, although the printer still beeps when it completes a print. Here is
also where you turn on the filament runout sensor which for some reason is turned off by default.
You can adjust the print and fans speeds, flow rate and adjust Baby Steps, but there aren’t
any more advanced settings should you want to tweak anything. But I did successfully connect
to the printer via Octoprint to confirm the extruder e-steps and check the temperature
stability. And you can send and monitor prints wirelessly using Octoprint as well.
Finally I tested the filament runout sensor and power outage resume feature. When the filament
runs out the nozzle moves to the home position so you can load more filament and resume the print.
After a simulated power outage you’ll get a prompt to resume the print. Both features worked
as expected. You will most likely get a small blob where the print continues after a power failure.
Just idling, the printer consumes 13W and I’m now measuring the total power consumption to
print a 20mm calibration cube in PLA with default settings for all my printer reviews. The Mingda
Magician X consumed 72Wh. In comparison the Prusa MK3s+ used 8w idling and 75Wh to print the same
calibration cube with comparable settings. I didn’t get any clogs or jams in my testing,
but Mingda do provide several video tutorials that I’ll link to below for disassembling the hotend.
One thing to note is the hotend cover uses Japanese JIS screws even though they look like
standard Phillips screws, so either use a JIS screwdriver like this Vessel one or take care
removing them with a Phillips screwdriver. Conclusions
The Mingda Magician X is marketed as an easy to use printer for beginners to 3D printing. It is
very quick and easy to assemble, and the auto bed levelling is as simple as tapping the levelling
icon. I am surprised Mingda chose a glass plate over a far more user friendly flexible PEI sheet,
and I did find loading and unloading filament much harder than it should be.
Despite its direct drive system it couldn’t handle very flexible filaments like NinjaFlex
but I got good prints from some other slightly less flexible filaments I tried.
The only other supported filament was ABS and I did have trouble with warping and had to revert to
some old school methods to get successful prints. It’s disappointing they don’t list PETG as
a supported filament but I did manage to get average results printing PETG,
so long as I used some tape or bed adhesive to help the print release from the glass bed. PETG
is such a popular filament, I find it surprising that a printer at this price point isn’t ready to
print at least PLA and PETG out of the box. Upgrading to a flexible textured PEI sheet is
an easy upgrade and would solve many of the minor issues I had. PLA will be easy to remove
without waiting for the bed to cool down and it’ll handle PETG with ease. Since the bed is
the exact same size as the popular Ender 3, you can pick one up relatively cheaply off Amazon.
I plan this upgrade myself and will provide a link down below to the sheet I go for.
The build quality of the printer is generally good and with its injection moulded parts it
looks more polished than most 3D printers I’ve tested even if there’s a little more
plastic than I’d like. It’s fairly quiet in operation but the power supply fan is always on
and it was disappointing to have this fail on me after less than a month of use. I do always
try to test tech support with printers I review, and Mingda support was very good and responsive,
especially considering the time zone differences. They helped with the fan issue, but also with many
other questions I had. There’s also an active Facebook group that I’ll link to down below.
I’ll be reviewing the Creality Ender 3 S1 Pro in the next couple of weeks which is very similar
to this printer, but with an all metal hotend to handle higher temperature filaments and a magnetic
PEI build plate. I’ll be comparing it to the Mingda and my Prusa Mini+ so please take a look at
that review if you’re interested. If it’s already out there’ll be a link on screen and down below.
But I’d love to hear your thoughts. What do you think of this printer? Or Is there
another printer you want me to look at? And as always, if you have any questions,
please ask - I read every comment and will do my best to respond.
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