Hey all,
I’m planning on upgrading my Ender 3 V2 with a new printer, and I’m not sure which printer to choose.
SV08 has a massive build area, which I really like because of the size of my personal projects. And Klipper is a plus I guess? Never tried this firmware before.
On the other hand Prusa is well tested and known, also its multicolor extension is alluring to me.
Can you share your experiences if you used them before to help me choose? Thanks!
If you are willing to spend the money, I would highly recommend a Prusa. The quality of service and support alone is worth the extra money. If the cost of a Prusa bothers you, I would point you at Qidi as a more budget friendly brand. If I was starting over and looking to buy my first printer, I would be looking at the Core One or the Qidi Plus 4. And Qidi is set to release their own AMS called the Qidi box for the Plus 4 here shortly.
Edit to add: There is nothing to fear from Klipper. MainSail is easy to pickup and use.
Klipper is a game changer for speed and print quality once you get past the intial setup learning curve - it basically gave my old ender a new life before I upgraded.
Isn’t prusa the company that did a 180 this year and started to enshitify their firmware? I remember some open source 3d printer co deciding to fuck over their fan bases good will this year and I thought it was them?
Yeah, they have taken some things proprietary with software and hardware. This was done in response to Chinese manufacturers, and yes Bambu in particular, taking the proprietary pathway and not giving new ideas back to the open source community.
Now, Bambu making proprietary products is well within their right. But that makes life harder for a true open source manufacturer to make enough money to stay in business. So it ain’t taking 20/10 vision to read the writing on the wall if Prusa intends to stay in business. So there is a real need to protect themselves.
I recently traded up my Sovol SV06 for a Prusa CORE One and have MK4Ss and an SV07 Plus at work. The Sovols are good budget machines in general, but the SVO6 was so much more reliable than the SV07 Plus, which required a lot more troubleshooting. The MK4Ss and the CORE One are great if you have the budget to spend on them. They’re reliable and good quality. The community of users is large and any issues you might run into have typically been troubleshot by others already.
How do you feel about building a printer?
The SV08 is basically a Voron 2.4, and while I think that it’s not bad for the money, for close to the same amount you can buy a Formbot 2.4R2 350mm kit.
A standard Voron 2.4 build will be easier to add a tool changer to compared to a SV08 (efforts are ongoing though). It runs mainline Klipper, which will also open up a myriad of other options. The Voron is much more of a project though.
An SV08 is $600 and a Formbot 350mm kit is $800 plus $65 for the printed parts if you don’t already have a printer that can do ABS, so it’s 44% more for the Voron, which isn’t that close to the same amount. It’s a big enough difference to make the SV08 the better choice for some people.
The $600 SV08 doesn’t include the enclosure, and I bought my 350 Formbot kit for less than $800 with shipping.
My enclosure is made from £4 of plywood, £8 of filament and £35 of laser-cut acrylic, and unlike the official SV08 aluminium enclosure, doesn’t have massive holes in it. I left out the SV08 enclosure price because the Sovol enclosure is expensive and dumb.
We can agree it’s expensive and dumb.
I have a Prusa MK4 and i really like it. Even though you would get better quality prints with the same amount of money else where, its just good enough for my needs. And i love having the peace of mind that the owner behind it really likes open source. I do not have the feeling that i get features stripped away from me or some other corpo bullshit ruining my day. Use it since 2.5 years (~5 prints/month) now never had to fix anything.
I’ve got an SV08. It’s not a perfect printer, but making a printer without the problems it has (e.g. the bed takes nearly an hour to settle after it’s reached temperature, so it needs a long preheat for all but the shortest prints) would require making it much more expensive (e.g. a thick aluminium or graphite bed that wouldn’t warp would add another 20% of the cost of the printer). That specific problem is sidestepped with the MK4S by simply having a much smaller build volume rather than because it’s higher-end and more expensive. I’ve not needed support from Sovol (yet?), so can’t comment on whether they’re still super slow like they supposedly were right after the SV08 launched.
I like the sovol sv06 Plus. I have 3
