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Genius 3D Printer

I bought this Genius 3D printer from Artillery, a Chinese manufacturer.

Print quality is excellent, and is very easy to set up. It comes in two pieces. Four screws to fit it together, and a few idiot proof cable connections and you are ready to go.

It handles TPU straight out of the box (a big selling point for me).

There are three things that I don't like about it, the first two are easily fixed...

1) You have to manually set up the printer profile in your slicer. There is a printer profile hidden on the supplied SD card, but it is WRONG! It has the wrong temperatures for PLA, and the wrong build volume. I didn't check the other settings, as I created my own profile from scratch. It isn't hard to do, unless you are a newbie to 3D printing. But this is very nearly a perfect printer for newbies!

2) I don't like glass beds, so I added a £10 Tronxy magnetic plastic build plate. This is personal preference. YMMV.

3) The heated bed temperature isn't consistent over the whole surface. The edges are luke warm when the centre is hot. This doesn't change even when I pre-heat for a long time. I don't know if this is a design fault, a faulty part, or if it is only a problem after I added the magnetic build plate. Luckily, the Tronxy bed is good enough that prints stick well even at the low temperatures. I also tried a PEI coated spring metal plate, but at the cooler edges, the first layer often failed.

I hooked the printer up to a Raspberry PI using OctoPrint. So the total cost of the printer came to nearly £280.

Even with the bed temperature issue, I think it is an excellent printer.

Years ago China was renowned for cheap crap, but that's no longer true. Some of their brands are very good, including Artillery