When the MK3 came out about five years ago now, it was an easy recommendation in a sea of then-mediocre alternatives that took years to catch up. Now the tables have turned, and it’s on Prusa’s machines to catch up. Is the classic Prusa recipe still enough to make the MK4 worth 1200€? I’m not convinced yet, so let’s explore. Even though they’ve dropped the “Prusa Mendel i3” part of the name, the MK4 still is a continuation of the “Mendel” heritage of Prusa’s printers, and as such, the basicContinue reading

The E3D Revo High Flow nozzle is sort of a solution to a problem that E3D created themselves. It’s typically what Apple would do, but this isn’t in fact a bad ecosystem or a bad product, but the core issue with these is, of course, the Revo ecosystem uses nozzles that are all the exact same length, which makes for super easy quick swapping. You take out one nozzle size, you pop in another one, you don’t have to reset your Z height, there’s no extra mass, extra PID valuesContinue reading

E3D’s Revo and ObXidian Nozzles E3D’s Hermes, or now Hemera, introduced a new, compact heatbreak mount. A couple of years later, the reason for that became clear: There’s a whole new ecosystem of hotends, extruders, and integrated nozzlebreaks that all revolve around this new form factor that makes nozzle swaps faster and printing more reliable. E3D was calling it Revo. But… there was a small problem. Only E3D are allowed to make nozzles for it, and the only nozzles they were making were plain brass. Which meant you could onlyContinue reading

The eternal quest for that one bed surface that perfectly sticks while printing and completely releases when cold. Many have tried to find it, many have failed, but 3DQue have finally done it. Or at least that’s what they claim for the Quinly system, which promises to turn your humble 3D printer into a global-scale production unit by adding a network gateway that controls your printer and that you can use to queue up prints, a lift kit that angles your machine so that parts can slide off once they’reContinue reading

Resin printers, they’re pretty great, right? Well, they’re also mostly all the same, so I get that reviews of yet another Chitubox-based cookie cutter printer aren’t exactly interesting. So I tried to find one that was different – and that’s the Anycubic Photon M3 series. The Anycubic machines all use a custom ecosystem; this is the mid-size M3 Plus, they’ve also got the base M3, which uses a 4K masking LCD, this M3 Plus uses a 6K one and the M3 Max uses a 7K screen. The two larger machines,Continue reading

It’s time to take an in-depth look at E3D’s newest hotend ecosystem – the RapidChange Revo. You get the new quick-swap nozzlebreaks, a new self-regulating heater, an optional smaller form factor, significantly better performance and a new patents package that makes sure nobody will ever be making nozzles or heaters without E3D’s approval. After using the Revo for a couple of weeks and putting it through one of the most extensive testing sets I’ve ever done on a product, I’ve got some thoughts, graphs, and numbers I want to shareContinue reading

It’s chocolate! Fresh out of a 3D printer! That’s kind of amazing, but I’ve got questions, like: Can the mycusini 2.0 provide more than just amazement? Will it fall apart like the mycusini 1.0 that I unboxed? Is it actually practical to 3D print with chocolate? How expensive is it to run?  So this is the mycusini 2.0 from Print4Taste GmbH, a German company that’s actually less than an hour away from me. They’ve been around for a while. At first, they’ve been making “prosumer” or “professional” level machines withContinue reading

Today we’re going to have a look at the Flashforge Voxelab Aquila. Can you tell which one of these is the Aquila? Yeah, I can’t either. And I think that’s a problem. But first, let’s start out with the Aquila itself. It’s a 220x220x250mm build size, 32-bit board, silent drivers, 0.4mm nozzle, color LCD screen, silicon carbide coated glass bed, no auto-leveling, no filament sensor, the standard Creality-style hotend, good print quality, but plenty of design flaws and a price of between 150 and $200, depending on when and whereContinue reading