You can’t have too many 3D printers right? For low-volume products, prototypes, and test fixtures, I often use 3D printed parts. I’ve posted previously about my Diggro Alpha 3 and Diggro Alpha 5 printers which work great with PLA and PLA+. They were remarkable values when I bought them and are still reliable workhorses.
However, I found over time that these basic printers were missing some important features. I used an RPiZero with Octopi to add Wifi and visual observation, but then I needed to find a place to mount the pi+camera and separately a light. I had to run separate cables for printer, pi, light, and it starts to get a little janky. I also never really got the auto-leveling on the Diggro 5 to work properly. So these printers work, but they require some attention to use and are pretty slow. They also aren’t enclosed and so they really are limited to printing PLA (I’ve never had great luck with anything else).
For quite a while, I’ve wanted a printer that would work with a wider range of materials, especially carbon fiber filament. So when Creality came out with their K1C for $470, I bought one. It was fully enclosed, included a camera, wifi, auto-bed leveling, and could print with all sorts of filament. At the time, it was their flagship FDM printer and I was excited to try it, but I was very busy and set it aside. Unbelievably (for me), I left this new toy in the box for an entire year, but finally, this week, I had a chance to unbox and try it. So far, I’m very impressed.
The good (and so far, it’s all good):
- Speed – this thing is insanely fast. I really can’t overstate how crazy fast it is; the extruder moves like Hammy the Squirrel on Red Bull. It is so much faster than my older printers it’s ludicrous and it doesn’t seem to sacrifice any quality to achieve this.
- Auto-bed leveling – just works; I’ve run several prints and each have come out perfectly and I’ve never even attempted bed leveling.
- Fully enclosed – the enclosure looks good, works well, and includes bright interior lights
- Includes a fan with carbon filter and I don’t smell anything even when sitting right next to it.
- Magnetic bed – includes a nifty nozzle wiping brush so the nozzle is always clean when it starts printing.
- Nice color touch-screen display – just like the Diggro
- Built in WiFi – you access the full-featured web page from any PC including the camera
- Camera – it comes with a perfectly positioned camera built into the enclosure so you can watch your print remotely
- AI – it claims to be able to detect a failed print using the camera and automatically stop. I haven’t tested this yet.
- Can print everything from PLA to Carbon Fiber.
- Although this shouldn’t matter, it looks great too.
This appears to be as close to perfect as you can get with a single-extruder FDM printer and I can see why it has received such praise. All the things you add to cheaper printers as upgrades come with this and seem to work out-of-the-box; the whole package is much nicer than anything you could DIY. My only critique might be that it is a little noisy, not terrible, but you definitely couldn’t sleep with it running in the same room. It’s hard to see how you could have anything moving that fast without it being a little noisy.
If this keeps working as well as it has so far, my next FDM printer is likely to be another Creality (one of the K2 series or whatever is similar at the time).