Ultimaker 3 Review _ Crash Test _ I Like To Make Stuff

The Printer's Rigidity and Flexibility

One of the notable features of this printer is its rigidity in certain parts, with some components made from flexible materials. This design choice may be intended to improve durability and reduce maintenance costs over time. However, for me personally, I haven't found a compelling reason to justify the added expense of having multiple extruders, which would be necessary to take advantage of this feature. The cost of owning such a printer is a significant concern, with the current price tag of $3,500 being a major drawback.

A Comparative Look at Cost and Reliability

While some may argue that the Ultimaker brand name alone justifies the expense, I disagree. In my opinion, it's worth paying extra for a printer that works flawlessly every time, without worrying about issues like first-layer adhesion or temperature control. The reliability of this printer has been a major selling point for me, and I've had great luck with mine. Whether you're an individual hobbyist or an institution such as a school, where you need a printer to be reliable and consistent, this may be the right choice.

The Printer's Features

This printer boasts a range of features that set it apart from other models on the market. One notable feature is its Wi-Fi connectivity, which allows for wireless printing and monitoring. This can be especially convenient when working remotely or in a shared workspace. The camera system, with its wide-angle lens, provides an additional level of control and visibility during the printing process. With the ability to monitor prints in real-time via smartphone app, this feature may prove useful for some users.

A Different Approach to Printing

In contrast to other printers that rely on SD cards for storage, this model features a USB port instead. This may seem like a minor difference, but it's worth noting. The printer also comes with a built-in thumb drive, providing an alternative method of loading prints. Additionally, the print cores can be easily swapped out, making maintenance and material changes a breeze.

The Print Area and Design

One notable design choice is the increased print area, which measures 215 x 215 x 200 millimeters. This provides ample space for creating larger prints, but may not offer significant advantages over other printers with similar print areas. The extended model, which stands taller than this one, offers additional room for printing but comes at a higher price point.

Conclusion

Ultimately, my experience with this printer has been overwhelmingly positive. While the cost is undoubtedly a major drawback, I believe that the reliability and control offered by this machine make it worth considering. Whether you're an individual looking to upgrade your 3D printing capabilities or an institution seeking a reliable printer for educational purposes, this may be the right choice for you. However, if budget is a significant concern, alternative options may be more feasible.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey I'm Bobbitt I like to make stuff today we're going to talk about the ultimate or three to be totally transparent Ulta maker got in touch with me asked if they could send me this printer to keep and ask me if I would do a review of it they didn't give me any money and I promise I will give you my honest opinion okay with that out of the way let's get started when I took this thing out of the box it was fully assembled there's just a couple of things you have to snap into place to get it running you slide it in the glass build plate you put two little clips there to hold it in place and then you have to snap in the print course these are essentially the hot ends and they're swappable really quickly in case you want to use different types of materials or different sized nozzles on the back side of it you just snap in the spool holder slide on the spools of filament and then feed them into the extruders just like any other 3d printer you'll notice I said extruders because one of the big things about this printer is that it's dual extruder we'll talk more about the dual extruder in a minute but I want to point out that I use the two filaments that came with the machine one of them was PLA plastic the other was PVA PVA is made for support material and it dissolves in water so I got all that basic setup done and you're supposed to run the calibration but I decided not to just to see what would happen I put in the model that I use for all of my printers as kind of my baseline and that's the little Yoda from Thingiverse here's the Yoda that I printed on my ulta maker tube here's the one I did on this ultimate of three with zero calibration and honestly that blew me away a little bit I mean I didn't do any kind of setup no calibration of any kind and it came out at least as good as the elta maker - these are both PLA prints is the same material with the same settings just on different printers the PLA that I was using on this was the one that came with it it's Ultimate Ears brand and you'll notice that the spool looks a little different and that's because the spool has an NFC chip in it the cool thing about that is that the printer itself can read those NFC chips and figure out what kind of filament is in which printhead well while that is kind of cool it's also expensive the ultimate your filament is just pricey and I don't know if it has to do with the NFC chip or it's just a markup but it's pretty pricey stuff in the end the material itself is just like every other PLA as far as I understand but the spool is made to fit this machine exactly for me personally I probably will not be buying ultime Kerr filaments even though I absolutely love the printer while we're talking about materials let's talk about PVA its support material that dissolves in water and the cool thing about having the two heads here is that you can print your model in one material and then the support material in PVA or anything else you can take the model out like I did with the smaller yota head and put it right in the water you don't even have to wash it around the PVA dissolves and falls away the final surface where the PVA dissolved is really nice but it's not quite as smooth as the side that didn't have any support material I think this feature would be really nice if you had a highly detailed model that you weren't going to sand or finish in any way but if you're going to be doing any of that finish work later the PVA is kind of an extra step it makes the print process take much longer and the PVA itself is very expensive you don't have to use PVA in the other extruder you can do two different colors of filament and do a two color print for me personally I always finish my prints that get sanded and painted and turned into something larger so having two different colors is not useful to me but depending on your application that might be really awesome now there's several reasons why you would want to have dual extruders to colors support material or mixed material maybe you have part of a print that's rigid in a different part that's made with a flexible material there's a lot of different reasons but for me personally I haven't found a good reason to justify the cost of having to extruders and if you'll notice cost is the one thing that I've brought up several times as a negative that's the elephant in the room with this printer unfortunately it's really expensive this printer is $3,500 now I'm not saying it's not worth that but it is a lot of money for anybody to spend on a single piece of equipment if you compare that to other 3d printers that don't have all these features it seems astronomical but it will say that one thing that's really cool about this one and the other Ultimaker that I have is that they work perfectly every single time the other day in a private conversation somebody was asking why ultimate are so expensive and they were asking that in regards to it's just a brand name it's not worth that money and I disagree with that it is expensive but it's expensive in my opinion because it works every single time I never have to worry about the first layer whether it sticks down or not I never have to worry about the temperature and never have to worry about it clogging I have had great luck with these machines and while that cost may not be justified for an end of the also have a printer in their house if you're an institution like a school where you need the printer to work so that the kids can learn the technology this actually might be the one for you if you're in the medical field or anything like that where you have the justification to spend the money on a tool that will work every single time this is probably the printer you want all right money aside let's talk about some of the other features that this thing has some of them are really cool but maybe unnecessary and probably part of why it's so expensive so the printer has Wi-Fi is connected to your network which is really handy because you can send prints to it wirelessly that's one really cool thing but it also has a camera in here with a wide-angle lens that can watch the entire print bed the cool thing about that is that you can pull up the camera on your smartphone and monitor the prints in real time just as a test the other day I was laying in bed I pulled up my phone pulled up a model from my Dropbox and send it to the printer started the printer all from the app then I just laid there for a minute and watched a print now practically I'm not sure when you would use that or how often that would really be helpful but it is a pretty cool testament to technology another feature of this printer that's a little bit different than previous printers is it has no SD card typically printers print from SD but this one has a USB port in the front and comes with a little thumb drive probably not a big change I'm not sure that that really affects anything but it is a difference between this and the one that came before it this is the regular Ultimaker 3 the extended one is taller but this one has a 215 by 215 by 200 millimeter print area the extended is about 4 inches taller I believe but this is plenty of room to make a pretty good sized print the print cores on this pop in and out really easily and that makes it great for changing out nozzle sizes or if you have a different material that requires a different type of nozzle it's a lot easier than having to unscrew things and take stuff apart just to switch out the novel so when it comes down to it I love this printer I think it's fantastic would I spend my own thirty five hundred dollars on it I don't know probably not to be honest because I don't really need the Wi-Fi camera I don't really need the dual extrusion and if you were to go to an Ulta maker to plus which has the same extruder on the back of it you're talking about a thousand dollar difference in my mind the reliability of ultimate in general is the thing that I would spend the money on it not necessarily these other features but if you did want all of those extra features and you want the reliability of uLTA maker this is a fantastic printer hands-down really the only drawback in my mind is the cost and that's pretty big for a lot of people that's about it for this one I hope it was helpful to give you a little overview of what this one can do and what I think of it if you have any other questions about this printer leave them down in the comments I'll do my best to answer if I can but I'll also link the ultime Kerr site which has all the specs and all the other information about this particular printer that's it for this one guys thanks for watching I'll see you next timehey I'm Bobbitt I like to make stuff today we're going to talk about the ultimate or three to be totally transparent Ulta maker got in touch with me asked if they could send me this printer to keep and ask me if I would do a review of it they didn't give me any money and I promise I will give you my honest opinion okay with that out of the way let's get started when I took this thing out of the box it was fully assembled there's just a couple of things you have to snap into place to get it running you slide it in the glass build plate you put two little clips there to hold it in place and then you have to snap in the print course these are essentially the hot ends and they're swappable really quickly in case you want to use different types of materials or different sized nozzles on the back side of it you just snap in the spool holder slide on the spools of filament and then feed them into the extruders just like any other 3d printer you'll notice I said extruders because one of the big things about this printer is that it's dual extruder we'll talk more about the dual extruder in a minute but I want to point out that I use the two filaments that came with the machine one of them was PLA plastic the other was PVA PVA is made for support material and it dissolves in water so I got all that basic setup done and you're supposed to run the calibration but I decided not to just to see what would happen I put in the model that I use for all of my printers as kind of my baseline and that's the little Yoda from Thingiverse here's the Yoda that I printed on my ulta maker tube here's the one I did on this ultimate of three with zero calibration and honestly that blew me away a little bit I mean I didn't do any kind of setup no calibration of any kind and it came out at least as good as the elta maker - these are both PLA prints is the same material with the same settings just on different printers the PLA that I was using on this was the one that came with it it's Ultimate Ears brand and you'll notice that the spool looks a little different and that's because the spool has an NFC chip in it the cool thing about that is that the printer itself can read those NFC chips and figure out what kind of filament is in which printhead well while that is kind of cool it's also expensive the ultimate your filament is just pricey and I don't know if it has to do with the NFC chip or it's just a markup but it's pretty pricey stuff in the end the material itself is just like every other PLA as far as I understand but the spool is made to fit this machine exactly for me personally I probably will not be buying ultime Kerr filaments even though I absolutely love the printer while we're talking about materials let's talk about PVA its support material that dissolves in water and the cool thing about having the two heads here is that you can print your model in one material and then the support material in PVA or anything else you can take the model out like I did with the smaller yota head and put it right in the water you don't even have to wash it around the PVA dissolves and falls away the final surface where the PVA dissolved is really nice but it's not quite as smooth as the side that didn't have any support material I think this feature would be really nice if you had a highly detailed model that you weren't going to sand or finish in any way but if you're going to be doing any of that finish work later the PVA is kind of an extra step it makes the print process take much longer and the PVA itself is very expensive you don't have to use PVA in the other extruder you can do two different colors of filament and do a two color print for me personally I always finish my prints that get sanded and painted and turned into something larger so having two different colors is not useful to me but depending on your application that might be really awesome now there's several reasons why you would want to have dual extruders to colors support material or mixed material maybe you have part of a print that's rigid in a different part that's made with a flexible material there's a lot of different reasons but for me personally I haven't found a good reason to justify the cost of having to extruders and if you'll notice cost is the one thing that I've brought up several times as a negative that's the elephant in the room with this printer unfortunately it's really expensive this printer is $3,500 now I'm not saying it's not worth that but it is a lot of money for anybody to spend on a single piece of equipment if you compare that to other 3d printers that don't have all these features it seems astronomical but it will say that one thing that's really cool about this one and the other Ultimaker that I have is that they work perfectly every single time the other day in a private conversation somebody was asking why ultimate are so expensive and they were asking that in regards to it's just a brand name it's not worth that money and I disagree with that it is expensive but it's expensive in my opinion because it works every single time I never have to worry about the first layer whether it sticks down or not I never have to worry about the temperature and never have to worry about it clogging I have had great luck with these machines and while that cost may not be justified for an end of the also have a printer in their house if you're an institution like a school where you need the printer to work so that the kids can learn the technology this actually might be the one for you if you're in the medical field or anything like that where you have the justification to spend the money on a tool that will work every single time this is probably the printer you want all right money aside let's talk about some of the other features that this thing has some of them are really cool but maybe unnecessary and probably part of why it's so expensive so the printer has Wi-Fi is connected to your network which is really handy because you can send prints to it wirelessly that's one really cool thing but it also has a camera in here with a wide-angle lens that can watch the entire print bed the cool thing about that is that you can pull up the camera on your smartphone and monitor the prints in real time just as a test the other day I was laying in bed I pulled up my phone pulled up a model from my Dropbox and send it to the printer started the printer all from the app then I just laid there for a minute and watched a print now practically I'm not sure when you would use that or how often that would really be helpful but it is a pretty cool testament to technology another feature of this printer that's a little bit different than previous printers is it has no SD card typically printers print from SD but this one has a USB port in the front and comes with a little thumb drive probably not a big change I'm not sure that that really affects anything but it is a difference between this and the one that came before it this is the regular Ultimaker 3 the extended one is taller but this one has a 215 by 215 by 200 millimeter print area the extended is about 4 inches taller I believe but this is plenty of room to make a pretty good sized print the print cores on this pop in and out really easily and that makes it great for changing out nozzle sizes or if you have a different material that requires a different type of nozzle it's a lot easier than having to unscrew things and take stuff apart just to switch out the novel so when it comes down to it I love this printer I think it's fantastic would I spend my own thirty five hundred dollars on it I don't know probably not to be honest because I don't really need the Wi-Fi camera I don't really need the dual extrusion and if you were to go to an Ulta maker to plus which has the same extruder on the back of it you're talking about a thousand dollar difference in my mind the reliability of ultimate in general is the thing that I would spend the money on it not necessarily these other features but if you did want all of those extra features and you want the reliability of uLTA maker this is a fantastic printer hands-down really the only drawback in my mind is the cost and that's pretty big for a lot of people that's about it for this one I hope it was helpful to give you a little overview of what this one can do and what I think of it if you have any other questions about this printer leave them down in the comments I'll do my best to answer if I can but I'll also link the ultime Kerr site which has all the specs and all the other information about this particular printer that's it for this one guys thanks for watching I'll see you next time\n"