Note To Creality: Review Of The Creality CR10S Pro V2

Creality CR10S Pro V2.

What a mouthful! Creality, C’mon! With that said, let’s start with the name.

Creality, your naming scheme is HORRIBLE.

No one likes it. Not one person has said “I get it”, “that makes sense”, “cool name”. The truth is that no one has to, they are YOUR products. Who cares if you have the worst naming next to Samsung?

The truth is- people looking in to your products, people whom have yet to make a purchase spend an awful amount of time searching for the sometimes minute, sometimes monumental differences between them.

CR10, CR10S, CR10S Pro, CR10S Pro V2? I’m genuinely frustrated by this. It’s getting quite serious if I’m honest, I’ll explain later.

Why name it like this?

It’s a sales tactic. It has to be. I’m not going to insinuate here but someone made a tactical decision to obfuscate the naming.

What is your flagship model?

How is anyone supposed to know? Price? I have the CR10S Pro V2, that sure sounds premium, however *enter shruggie here*. There is no hint as to the quality of product you are putting out. Think of the Galaxy Note OG. It didn’t take a degree to know the Note 2 was the flagship Note device. Following that the Note 3 was the one to beat. The iterative number gave that away.

In short, as someone that has done quite a bit of research on all of your products, I’ve settled on “you have no flagship”.

The Good.

Price. It must be mentioned. Creality brings value that others simply don’t offer. Comparable printers are hundreds more, which leaves me curious how they are able to do it if I’m honest.

The printer is very easy to put together. A lot of premium printers take quite a lot of tinkering to assemble. While I’m a mechanically inclined person, there are too many nuances to 3D printing that it’s best to pay that extra $50 etc. to have it assembled or designed in a way to make it easy to assemble. A notable measure of Creality’s design efforts are realized with their printers ease of assembly.

The design is aesthetically pleasing. Not much to say here. They killed it with the red accents. I bought red PETG just to print extras, like the filament feeders and obligatory “thin men”.

It prints well when you get it tuned properly. This takes effort however and I’ll expand on it a bit in the “ugly” section.

The touchscreen makes it very easy to navigate the menus. It’s a little flaky though because of the firmware. Either way, it will be hard to not have a touch screen with so much real estate in the future.

The form-factor is convenient considering the build area on this thing. The filament holder doesn’t seem to present a problem on top of the machine. I have however installed a filament holder with bearings and it would make horrible noises when the plastic reel would grind against the holder. Whatever you do, install the bearing holder and use CHEAP bearings. Cheap bearings are super packed with grease and create just a tad resistance to where the reel won’t spin endlessly on it’s own.

Relatively quiet. Quiet enough that my wife can stand it while it’s printing in the next room while we are watching TV. I’m looking in to a quieter front fans. All fans except those on the gantry are Noctua and are dead silent.

The bad.

The unit was easy to assemble but it sure took a lot of work to get it configured properly. I had issues setting the z-axis. I had to tweak the leveling sensor. After days of YouTubing I finally achieved some decent results. I then realized the gantry was super loose, so I had to adjust the tension wheel and redo all adjustments. That’s how it is, however it’s clear that no one had made an attempt to tighten the gantry.

Both fans on the gantry make bearing noise. The left one gets obnoxious some times. I can touch it with my finger to slow it down and it seems to quiet it. It’s odd.

Early this week, the machine was shutting down intermittently. I still do not know why. I could hear a slight clicking inside the unit. This may move in to the ugly category if it continues.

The ugly.

The name. Enough said.

Flaky firmware. It did not ship with thermal runaway protection enabled. I upgraded it with the TinyMachines version which enabled it. I still have odd artifacts that doesn’t present well for Creality. The default firmware also caused a glitch that when I plugged in an OctoPi/Raspberry Pi, the printer would shut down, causing me to find the TM version and realize the thermal protection was off.

The feed block is not properly aligned with the feeder gear. This causes friction on the filament creating a lot of dust. I should have likely stated something when I purchased it, however I put a lot of mileage on it before I realized it was a problem.

The verdict.

It’s a great printer with a horrible name. I’ve printed 1000 3DVerkStan model face shields through it, hundreds of mask comfort straps, and a few intricate pieces during an occasional break from printing COVID stuffs.

It’s printed everything I’ve thrown at it, however it did seem to struggle with some Prusa filament for some reason. It was making a loud squeaking noise at the feeder gear and it stuck to my Wham Bam build plate too much and effectively destroyed it. Note to all, don’t heat the build plate the first time you use PETG on a Wham Bam build surface. I set the temperature to 80 as requested and it was almost like it was on there with Gorilla glue.

I’ve had issues with clogs on an .8mm nozzle which isn’t common. However I’ve been printing 1000 face shields with it non-stop for 4 months. I don’t think that amount of printing is common either. Other than that, I haven’t had to perform too much maintenance.

The value is best in class. I’d say, the best in the industry. Sure, they print well, most do, but Creality is the undisputed king of VALUE.

Start with a Creality. If you decide to stay in the hobby, then consider other options.

I won’t be purchasing another one however. Not unless they introduce something special. It may seem petty, but their naming truly contributes to my frustration with them and I feel like they are creating throw-away printers. Compare this to Prusa whom claim to make printers that will be upgrade-able for years and has so far made good on their claim. Prusa doesn’t offer the touchscreen, build area, and certainly can’t compete with the value. I’m not constrained by money however.

On my next rig I’m eyeing quality, speed, and company culture for my next printer.