Creality Ender-5 S1 3D Printer Review

It's been a while since we last looked at a 3D printer, and since then many things have changed in the 3D printing space, from new filaments designed for lab use to technologies being developed that could save lives. The world of 3D Printing is a fast-growing community, full of technological advancements and all sorts of creativity; but for consumers, the most exciting things are those that we can get our hands on ourselves. As cool as it is that houses can be 3D printed, for the average person it's not exciting unless you get to experience that yourself, this is where home 3D printers come in. In particular today, the Creality Ender-5 S1 is our focus, a home 3D printing solution designed for ease of use and speed. Creality Ender-5 S1 Creality have been in the game for many years, creating popular and affordable printers, affordable for a 3D printer that is. Their products cover a wide range of options, from filament printers to resin printers, 3D scanners and even laser cutters. Creality offer something for all sorts of creative purposes, and with this printer they want to set themselves up as the go-to choice for cheap and reliable printers. There are some important questions we need to ask when looking at a 3D printer, like how is the print quality? How fast does it print? And does the speed leave us with more print errors? To find out, it's about time we started looking at the printer. Features 250mm/s Printing SpeedStable Cube FrameCR Touch Auto-LevelingMultiple ways of printing How We Test Testing a 3D printer is a process that involves a lot of minor tweaks and different software depending on the printer you are using. All printers have different systems and ways of working so comparing one to another is somewhat unfair, so instead we will be evaluating the printer on its print quality alone, with ease of use being evaluated on its own. Slicer A slicer is the software you use to convert a 3D model to G.code; this is what a printer uses to know what it is supposed to do, it contains all the information the printer needs to understand what it needs to do, this includes coordinates, temperature, speed and when to extrude material. The slicer we used when testing this printer was Creality Slicer version 4.8.2, which can be found for you to download here. Prints We will be printing a few models for testing, each will be linked as they are mentioned so you can download them if you desire. The models we will print for testing were specifically designed for that purpose and contain scenarios to push the printer to its limit. Packaging & Accessories The box is as descriptive as you'd want it to be, you know exactly what is inside and the box is easily recyclable. Opening the box, we can see that everything inside is very well-packed, all sitting inside some high-density foam cut to fit the parts perfectly. On this first layer we see some parts of the printer as well as a box that contains some accessories. The second layer of foam contains more printer parts and some free filament to get yourself started. The final layer contains the base of the printer and a whole lot of cables. The accessories box contains many different things, including tools, cables, and screws needed for assembling the printer. Creality also provided us with two spools of filament and the Creality Sonic Pad, which we will be using for the review of this printer. Build Process The instructions are easy to follow, providing written and visual aid to help you understand what to do. The first step is to attach the bulk of the frame to the base. The screws and tools needed to assemble the printer are all provided in the accessories box. The next step is to attach the top of the printer. Most of the printer is already assembled, so it makes it simple and easy to find the parts and screw them together. Next we need to attach the print bed to the frame, this is done in two parts, the first part involves attaching the bed to the Z-Axis which is a pre-assembled unit. Once you've attached the bed you then need to take the entire unit you've just put together and screw it into the frame of the printer, this slots right into the back and creates a strong structure. The Last steps are simple, screw in some support beams, the filament holder and then follow the diagrams on where to plug in the cables, and then you're ready to start calibration. A Closer Look As a whole the printer is fairly well-contained, most of it stays within the frame with only the parts at the top being a concern. The print head is a large single unit of parts contained in a metal housing that also acts as a fan grill to prevent anything from blocking the fan. On top of the printer are two handles to make carrying around as easy as possible, and with the weight of the printer this does help a lot. To the side of the printer is a place to hang your spool of filament, unlike some other printers this only has support for 1 spool at a time. The printer is powered by a standard kettle lead. The printer uses physical buttons to detect the home points for the print head. Setup & Calibration Calibration was mostly an automatic process, the printer guides you through quite easily once you first turn it on and requires little from you as the user to get it running. The only thing that was a pain to get through was levelling the bed, because whilst there is software to help with this process, it certainly helps to make it as level as possible before you start printing. Part of the set-up process involves manually adjusting the height of each corner of the bed to get as close to level as possible, so the printer can account for the tiny differences that are impossible for you to get exactly right. We also had the additional task of setting up the Sonic Pad, this was easy enough, but we did unfortunately come into a few struggles with SD card compatibility with the printer. This meant that the firmware we had to load wasn't being read, so I'd suggest you just stick with the included SD card for this. Calibration Cube A Calibration cube is quite as simple as it sounds, it is a cube that features an "X", "Y" and "Z" embedded in it for each respective axis of the printer. The embedded letters allow you to look for any warping or layer shifts on the corresponding axis and will let you know which axis needs adjusting. Generally, you will be printing many of these cubes one after another, making changes where necessary until you have a perfect cube. The calibration cube we used can be found on Thingiverse here. Right out of the box, the calibration cube came out without faults in any of the axis X-Axis Y-Axis Z-Axis Interface The Interface is how you interact with the printer itself, this is how you will change settings and calibrate it. You will be using the interface for pretty much everything so you'd hope it's easy to use and functional, that is why we are having a look at it, to understand if this is going to be a user-friendly experience or if you will be struggling to work it. Because we used the Sonic Pad for this review, I will be looking at the interface on that, but the interface on the printer itself isn't too dissimilar. The home screen of the Sonic Pad is full of important information, including temperatures of the hot end and hot bed, with a graph showing temperatures over time, which could help you diagnose problems with temperature if they came up. There are also a few options that we will look more into now. The first of the sub menus allows you to move the different axis of the printer when you aren't printing anything; this is useful for diagnosing problems or moving things to get ease of access to reach a model on the bed. The next menu lets you quickly set a target temperature for the hot bed and hot end, allowing custom temperatures as well as the presets for PLA and PETG. The Control menu contains even more options, Motors off is just a simple option that does exactly what it says on the tin and hasn't got a page of its own, whilst the temperature page is identical to the preheating page. The Extrusion page allows you to manually extrude material, you'd want to do this to check for blockages and to run remaining material through when changing filament. The fan page is another page that does exactly what you would expect, from here you can control the speed of the fan exactly as you would like. The configure option on the main menu takes us to yet more options. All of these options are self-explanatory, but we can see an option for a camera, unfortunately there is no built-in camera, this is an option to set up a camera separately if you desire. Finally, on the main menu is the print option, this takes you to a list of all models and folders that you have stored locally or that are stored on the Creality Cloud. Once you select a file, you are presented with a screen giving information on that file, including the size of the file and an estimated print time. When you are ready to print, you simply press the button and the printer does the rest of the work. When printing, you get a few more options, like fine-tuning the Z-axis offset that you would have previously set during the configuration process, as well as adjust temperatures and pause or stop the print all together. 3DBenchy 3DBenchy is a 3D Printing torture test, it features many difficult points for a 3D Printer to print and provides a very good look at not just the print quality but also the quality of the filament used. Benchy has become somewhat of a celebrity in the world of 3D Printing and can be found to download for yourself here. In addition to Benchy, we also printed an all-in-one 3D Printer test to see how well it manages some specific tasks, The first thing you'll notice is that in the overhang test, the overhang does manage to survive even up to the top where we look at an 80-degree overhang. On the other side of the overhang we can see that whilst it did manage to support itself, the material had started to drip before it could cool, meaning that we end up with an uneven finish. The next test is the bridging test, this is a test to see how well the printer can manage to bridge the gap between two points at increasing distances. And even at the furthest distance, the bridge successfully connects the two points. Print Showcase Please enjoy this collection of prints we did with this printer so you can get an idea of what to expect from it, not all of these prints have a practical function, but that's not what 3D printing is about, it's about creating things you wouldn't be able to normally and having some fun with it as you do. Cable Organiser Clip-On Can Topper NASA Chain-mail In the last review we did of a 3D Printer, I had printed our video editor a headphone clamp for his desk, but between then and this review, he broke it. He got a little overzealous with the screw and had tightened it a bit too far and snapped the thread clean off. So I've taken the opportunity to print a brand new one for him in a slightly different design. The Creality Printer managed to print this perfectly well with just a little issue with the first layer, but I'm not going to blame the printer for this as I believe it was down to the print bed not being perfectly cleaned before the print. Headphone Clamp Screw Headphone Clamp Another thing I tried printing is this box that I threw together in a cad software, this design was meant to be a tight fit, but not so tight that it's impossible to put the lid on. As you can see from the photo, the lid printed with a slightly off size, and as a result the two pieces don't fit together at all, and there is some slight damage to the part from trying to get the two to fit. This shows us one thing to bear in mind is that precise designs may need to take a few iterations to get a perfect fit, as we also found a few other prints were slightly off and caused an overly tight fit. How Much Does It Cost? Coming in at $529 or £579 from the Creality Store, and an additional $159 or £165 at the Creality Store for the Sonic Pad, it's not that expensive for a 3D printer, but it's still quite an investment. Whilst there are certainly cheaper options, many of those feature some compromises compared to this printer, so for the money I think this is a pretty good all-round option, and the addition of the Sonic Pad could be a worthwhile investment if the control pad is something you could find useful. Overview When it comes to the initial setup and calibration of the printer, it was very quick and easy to get it going, most of my time with it initially was bed levelling, which was rather tedious, but with a 3D printer, you would expect some tedium given that prints can take hours if not days to complete. In terms of quality, the prints were pretty good, but they lacked a little in precision because even though they looked the part, I found that models that should fit together without flaw often were tighter than I would expect, why this is? I can't be sure, but I think with some time I could figure it out and get some very clean and precise parts printed. Should I Buy One? In general, the prints are good, and this printer is easy to use, not the most precise, but it's also not advertised as being the be-all and end-all printer, for the price it's hard to argue with the features, the only major consideration is the print bed, coming in a little smaller than other options you aren't going to be able to print quite as large of models. Overall though I recommend this printer, as a first printer this is easy to dip your toes into the water to see how you like 3D printing before you possibly move on to higher-end models, maybe even from Creality themselves.