TronXY XY-2 PRO vs Creality Ender 3 (PRO) vs Anet ET4

[Kevlarsjäl]

Hi, Of the 2/3 of these printers which one would you choose and why? Is there a significant difference in quality and print speed. It appears to me that the Creality is both faster and is capable of a higher resolution, the Anet seems somewhere in between the 2 and I think it may be quieter.Looking at getting one of these but can't decide.Thanks for any advice

[curious aardvark]

well the ender 3 is a badly designed piece of junk that will require a lot of work to get any real joy from it.

Hmm, well tyou've picked three near identical printers - all with the really lousy creality i3 design flaws.

So I would not buy ANY of them :-)

[Kevlarsjäl]

Hmmm ok, was looking for an entry level (obviously) the other option I guess was a Tevo Tarantula. I don't really want to be shovelling a tonne of money at the hobby just yet.

Why do you say it's badly designed? I know that there's some mods out there that tweak a few areas. Is there a machine at the same price-point or near to it that you WOULD recommend?

[curious aardvark]

The i3 - as originally desinged by josef prusa.
SHOULD have:
1) dual z axis stepper motors - moves the z-axis evenly both sides
2) 2 support rails for the print bed - Keeps it level and stable
3) direct drive extruder - prints faster and is better for flexible filaments.

What creality did was take that design and throw all three of those design factors out the window.

This m,akes any printer based on the creality design problematic. On a long x gantry, without 2 motors it will NEVER move evenly both sides.
with just a central bed rail - it will almost never be perfectly flat or level.
With an awkardly placed bowden tube extruder you will struggle with flexible filaments and when the hot end is near the extruder you get really sharp angles for the extruder to push filament round.

There simply are NO upsides with messing around with the original design like this.

Now, because the creality design is much cheaper and they don't give a crap how bad the machines are if people on youtube are paid to tell you they work.
Lots of people have jumped on the bandwagon and are also making badly flawed i3's.

So when looking for an i3 those are the three design essentials you should look for.

Of the three, the direct drive extruder and the dual z motors are the most important.
the sovol-01 is a machine with dual z-motors and dd extruder. They also use a fairly wide central rail and that doesn't seem to cause much of aproblem.
https://www.amazon.com/Sovol-Pre-Ass...3694323&sr=8-4

The best starter machine around is probably the prusa mini. Costs more, but is cutting edge.

And this is the problem, people won't pay reasonable money.

The monoprice mini v2 is actually also a good place to start. https://www.amazon.com/Monoprice-Sel...3694695&sr=8-2

I mean get an ender 3 design if you want a baptism by fire - but for machine that might just work well - Almost ANYTHING else :-)

have you though about a delta ?
https://www.amazon.com/FLSUN-Lastest...3694892&sr=8-5

[AutoWiz]

So the awesome thing about these printers is that they come unassembled. Which means that by the time you have followed the directions to the point of being able to plug it in you will have already acquired the knowledge and experience of how to change each and every part that makes up your machine. This is an incredible bonus that comes with the low end machines. To claim this experience up front empowers you to work with this machine moving forward. After building a few printers I picked one and decided to swap out a bunch of parts before I started the assembly. This is an easy thing for a machine so well known as the creality ender 3. You can easily find and join a facebook group for this printer. You can also find a plethora of upgrades available for free download on thingiverse. And you can buy better parts to be installed on initial assembly if you just do some research on the weak links of that printer before you start building it. And in the end you will understand that what you were really choosing today was a frame design and all the parts you will bolt up to it will be subject to change as you chase specific print quality or speeds or other aspects. Cheers and good luck on w/e road you decide to take. If it helps you can see what I did with my Black Widow printer from the time I ordered it right here: https://3dprintboard.com/showthread....-250mm-X-300mm

[Kevlarsjäl]

Ok, Thanks heaps for the advice, time and effort. You both have certainly given me something to think about. Think I'm gonna have to start looking again.
AutoWiz - love how you've customized your Black Widow. It's really an inspiration.

[curious aardvark]

we do have very different approaches.
I like stuff to work with a minimum of outlay my end.
Auto will happily dismantle and rebuild anything :-)

Both valid approaches.

I suspect most people lie somewhere in the middle.
So decide how much rebuilding you want to do and then pick a budget, and then add $100 to your budget and look again :-)

[crabjoe]

I'm here wondering about the Tronxy XY-2 Pro vs the Ender 3 Pro for a 1st printer.. It seems I can't find much info on the Tronxy.

I'm really leaning towards the Tronxy, but in the specs, it seems the print speed is way slow... max at 100 vs the Ender maxing out at 180. Also, I saw that the Tronxy can't print TPU. In fact, on AliExpress, Tronxy actually had said it can't print TPU.

I guess I have a lot to learn before jumping in, because on Amazon, someone left a comment stating they can print TPU with the Tronxy.. I'm so confused.. I wish this thread had more posts.

[curious aardvark]

they are the same machine - see previous post on why you should never buy this design !