Defining 3D printers : Ultimaker3 vs Creality CR-10S

We have two good quality printers in our Fablab, an Ultimaker3 and a Creality CR-10S.

What are the differences between them ?

First, the price ! An Ultimaker3 is worth a bit more than 3000€_, and a Creality CR-10S is worth more or less __400€. Another interesting difference, is that the Ultimaker3 comes all together, the Creality comes in kit (you have to build it yourslef).

Creality 3D printer

Are those differences important when it comes to the quality of the printing ? That’s what we’ll try to find out ! Both of them use the FDM process.

What is the FDM process ?

FDM is the abreviation for Fused Deposition Modeling. The material is deposited by the machine, one layer on top of another, to create a 3 dimensional object. You can see the different layers on the picture below :

3D layers

Here is a schematic of a classical FDM machine setup :

FDM setup

What tests are we doing ?

We’re doing this test done by Autodesk and Kickstarter. It’s a bit different than the classical benchy boat everyone is doing, and a bit more interesting. because it tests a great number of characteristics. On Cura we used the recommended settings and printed with polycarbonate. The print lasted 12 hours!

Here is the link to the file.

Here are all the settings we can analyse thanks to this test :

test-settings

Tests on the Ultimaker3

Here is what it looks like after printing. We are pretty glad of the result !

test picture

We first printed with the Ultimaker3, here are the things we could observe : - Overhang: surfaces printed at an angle less than 20° don’t come out very well - Negative feature resolution: the tolerance for nested pieces needs to be at least 0.5 mm, under that the piece remains stuck to the object - Dimensional accuracy: there’s a 0.05 to 0.2 mm tolerance. The smaller the dimension, the bigger the tolerance.