From time to time I come across good deals for 3D printers, and a recent promotion for Creality Ender 3 3D printer appears to be one of them.
Creality Ender 3 has gotten some pretty good reviews – see video embedded below – in the sub $200 market, and GearBest is now offering the 3D printer for $169.99 including shipping from their Los Angeles warehouse. That deal is only available to the US however, and if you purchase it from the China warehouse (CN-099) price is $179.99 + shipping. That’s still a pretty good price though, as the official Aliexpress store offers the printer for $208 with Fedex shipping.
Creality Ender 3 specifications:
- Modeling Technology – FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling）
- Printing Speed – 180mm/s
- Filament – 1.75mm PLA, TPU, ABS
- Layer Thickness – 0.1-0.4mm
- Nozzle Diameter – 0.4mm
- Printing Accuracy – ±0.1mm
- Working Mode – Online or SD offline
- Nozzle Temperature – 255℃
- Hot bed Temperature – 110℃
- Printing Size – 220 x 220 x 250mm
- Power Supply – 100-265V 50-60Hz input, 24V/15A (360W) output
- Dimensions – 440 x 410 x 465mm
- Weight – 8kg
The 3D printer can handle STL, OBJ, and G-code 3D printing files. Note that like with must model, Ender 3 comes as a kit so you’d have to assemble it yourself.
You’ll also find some more user reviews on Amazon US,and possibly some extra information on the manufacturer’s product page.
Thanks to Karl for the tip.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Pros: It’s open source ( https://github.com/Creality3DPrinting/Ender-3 ) and people are already designing / ordering upgrade parts that sum-total the value WAY higher than anything else on the market.
Cons: You’ll need a few extra high quality couplers day1.
That’s a plus, don’t you think? That they’re using a cheap core to take it beyond anything else on the market, right?
I did see a blog post of a blog post about Creality on hackaday. I guess they are not completely open.
I’m really thinking about buying another 3d printer and gifting my current anet a8 to my cousins. The ender-3 is on the top of my list since you can have it shipped from germany through aliexpress. Maybe buying some vslot-alu and a bigger hotbed to create a bigger print volume.
https://hackaday.com/2018/08/27/gpl-violations-cost-creality-a-us-distributor/ is worth a read. Creality have lost their US distributor because of GPL violations it seems. Their US distributor also calls into question their build quality https://www.printedsolid.com/blogs/news/we-are-ending-our-relationship-with-creality They certainly aren’t pulling any punches :”In our own internal testing we found about 1 in 5 CR-10S printers and 100% or the CR-X printers had a fault, failure or missing parts on them and we would fix each and every one of them before selling them. When dealing with a low end machine like the CR-10S we were bringing their QC up to a higher level for the units we sold.… Read more »
Kind of cinches it, that…
Kind of odd… Selling a EU plugged device to the US for the deal.