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Affordable Awesomeness
The Chinese company Creality has been in the 3D printing game for a few years and the Creality CR-10 is a testament to their experience and commitment. The Creality CR-10 is by far the most affordable and innovative 3D printer we tested and despite having a few issues, it is one of the best ones in the mid-tier price range.
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The Creality CR-10 is a Cartesian style 3D printer that comes with a separate control box, has a huge build area, and go-faster stripes. That’s not all, the standard Creality CR-10 comes with a build area of 300 x 300 x 400mm but you can get the larger 400mm and 500mm cubed printers as well. Creality CR-10 so well designed and popular that we are seeing other companies adopt the same design as well, they must be doing something right then.
Creality CR-10 – What Is It?
Creality CR-10 is a 3D printer that you will either get for its affordable price or for it’s larger than normal printing bed. Both of the reasons are valid and are grounds of a solid recommendation from us. We are getting ahead of ourselves here, let’s take a deeper dive into what makes the Creality CR-10 so good.
Creality CR-10 – The Design
The design of the Creality CR-10 is what makes it unique and appealing. The Creality CR-10 comes with a simple and slender frame with elegant looking aluminum rails all around it. The design also has a simple 300 x 300mm glass print bed that can easily be removed as well. All the brainy parts are contained neatly in a separate unit called the control box that also has the mounted filament holder. The Creality CR-10 manages to look slim and sleek despite having the capacity to print big, which in our books is simply awesome.
The Creality CR-10 comes with a 0.4mm nozzle that can deal with a maximum resolution of 100 microns.
The Creality CR-10 comes with an SD card slot as well as USB connectivity, which can easily sort out all of your connectivity problems. The control box also has a large and clear to read LCD screen as well as a control wheel which can just as easily be navigated for fine-tunes.
There is also a nifty button located on the side of the control box that allows you the Creality CR-10 to switch between 110 and 220 volts on the power supply. This feature makes the Creality CR-10 viable across the globe.
However, the Creality CR-10 takes up a lot of room. No, we are not talking about its size or how big it is capable of printing stuff here, we are talking about positioning. The filament holder and control box have such dimensions that you’ll need to place them a specific distance away from the actual frame. This needs to be done in order to make the filament feed into the extruder without hindrance. The frame is big on its own, the control box as well and the fact that you need to place them a bit far apart takes up more space than we anticipated.
This isn’t such a big negative anyways, and by the time you are done seeing how well the Creality CR-10 works, you’d throw off the old iMac from your desk anyway.
Creality CR-10 – Biggest Features
Now that we’ve discussed the design of the unit, let’s talk about what the Creality CR-10 actually has to offer!
Large Printing Area
One of the biggest reasons why you’d want to get the Creality CR-10 is its large printing area. The product is available in three different sizes as well so if you really want to upsize, you can get the 500mm cubed version. We tried out the standard version and it was still bigger than the other 3D printers we tested.
Industrial Standards
The company claims that the Creality CR-10 comes with an industrial board. This results in 200 hours of continuous printing. We didn’t come close to that number during our testing but we never saw any degradation or performance over the few weeks we tried it out. This can be a great feature if you are aiming to do slight commercial work with the Creality CR-10.
Removable Glass Bed
The Creality CR-10 comes with a removable heated glass bed which makes it easier to store as well as clean if you want to. The overall quality of the bed is good, however, it takes a long time to heat up. Probably has to do something with the larger area but we are not sure. On the plus side, the heat is distributed equally across the bed and we didn’t find any problems whatsoever with that at least.
Works Well With Programs
The Creality CR-10 worked surprisingly well with multiple programs we tried it with. The Creality CR-10 itself is just a tool, which software you want to use with it is completely up to you. We tried Cura 2.6 with the Creality CR-10 after getting the custom settings for Creality CR-10 online which worked perfectly well with the unit. If you are already aware of how 3D printing goes, you’ll have no trouble getting the Creality CR-10 up and running after a few internet investigations.
Creality CR-10 – Printing
Printing with the Creality CR-10 was an enjoyable experience. We did see a bit of ringing in the initial prints and had to reassemble the whole unit with tighter screw-jobs, the pun wasn’t intended there. And the issues went away. As it is an “Assemble yourself” 3D printing kit, you may run into similar issues but most of them can be gotten rid of with ease. The instruction manual that came with the Creality CR-10 is so poorly made that you are better off looking online for help in assembly.
Once the initial kinks were ironed out, the Creality CR-10 really shone. The larger print space means we could print out some actually useable things rather than key ring trinkets and whatnot. Want to print out an awesome videogame character, sure, you can do that! Want a wall-mounted mythical creature head? Yes, you can do that as well. This is exactly why the Creality CR-10 is so beloved by the masses and now we can see why.
Overall, the Creality CR-10 provides an enjoyable experience with room for mods and hacking if you so desire.
Creality CR-10 – Downsides
There are a couple of downsides or cons in owning a Creality CR-10, as do most products these days. Here are a few of them:
- The extruder placement is a bit odd.
- The feet are not enough to weaken print bed inertia.
- The bed takes some time to heat up.
- The filament holder can get tangled.
Creality CR-10 – Is It Worth It?
For the asking price of just $400, the Creality CR-10 is absolutely worth it. You may have some reservations getting a 3D printer from China but the Creality CR-10 is a genuinely well thought out product that improved on the previous iterations in a tangible way.
The Creality CR-10 provides you with a large space to make your designs a reality or simply make something fun for the heck of it. The assembly experience is a chore for someone who can’t read blurry instructions (which is almost everyone). The bed takes some time to heat up as well. However, if you can overlook some of the downsides, the Creality CR-10 is a great 3D printer for those looking to upgrade or even get into 3D printing but don’t want to be limited by small prints.
In short, yes, the Creality CR-10 is worth the asking price and we thoroughly enjoyed playing with it in office.
