Another 3D printer - Elegoo Centaur Carbon

I tried to get the Cetus3D 3D printer running recently so that I could flash up a bearing shroud to cover the thrust bearing I decided to fit to the Paramo #3 vise I've just overhauled. 

Obviously the only solution would be to buy a replacement. I looked at a few possibilities, including:

• Bambu Labs P1S £340
• Qiqi Q2 £560
• Creality K2 £469
• Prusa Core One £919
• Elegoo Centaur Carbon £259

The Bambu is the market leader at the low cost end of the market. The Qiqi and Elegoo seem to be sort of clones of the Bambu. The Creality is sort of trying to be there too but seems to be expensive and not a wonderful success. Prusa seems to be trading on its early market presence and the pricing seems to have got away from them without any obvious advantage in terms of quality or technology.

Some offer multi colour printing but that ties you to an expensive machine and it appears that the colour changing process is very wasteful of filament. Elegoo seems to have pissed off many of their early adoptors by promising a multi colour option - then abandoning it. 

But at £260 delivered (within 36 hours of ordering) and with generally pretty good reviews, the Elegoo it is. It's sitting in its box awaiting opening tomorrow (Xmas Day). After ~30 mins of assembly, it is good to go, almost right out of the box.

Here it is. Now that the Xmas dinner has almost worn off enough for me to be able to move again, let's get stuck in and see what we've got here.

As noted in the various reviews, it's nicely packed and the instructions are fairly good. The quick start leaflet isn't actually ideal, as it overlooks a couple of steps, such as the need to attach the filament detector module and the spool mount.

Remove the 3 transit screws that hold the table. These are handily marked with orange arrow stickers.

Then power it up and off it goes. That last step (auto zeroing) is what takes most of the time.

Finally, connect to wifi and get printing. 

There are several sample files on the UFD supplied, including Benchy. I have some eSUN PLA+ filament on the old Cetus3D, so rather than open another reel, that's the one to use.

It has a built-in web server that allows you to access the controls and view the platform-mounted webcam, so you can monitor progress remotely. This doesn't require you to dial in to a cloud server, as apparently is required by Bambu for instance.