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63 About this deal
The Creality Ender 5 is a cost-effective DIY 3D printer kit. Its modular design makes it easy to assemble and improve. This lets you enhance its features according to your needs. In addition, the open-material system lets you experiment with a board selection of filaments from different brands. The advantage of a Bowden extruder is therefore that it is lighter and theoretically allows higher printing speeds. The disadvantage is that it is difficult to process flexible filaments with a Bowden extruder. The long distance between the extruder and the nozzle means that the flexible filament can partially compensate for the extrusion movements. Overall, the printer is a decent alternative, but the price it’s sold is a bit higher than other similar machines out there. Having the ability to enclose the printer afterward is also nice, but it makes me think of reasons why to get this instead of the more-popular Ender 6 if you’re looking for more speed. You could get that printer for a similar amount and get a real core-XY machine which already comes enclosed and has a stiffer bed. The heated platform lets you successfully print with PLA and PETG straight out the box. Even if showing some warping issues, printing with ABS and ASA is also possible. For sheer value allied to solid print quality, it’s hard to beat the Ender 5 as an affordable yet reliable printer. Should you have a bit more cash to throw around, the Ender 5 Pro’s choice upgrades are worth every penny, although you could potentially retrofit these yourself.
On the right side of the printer, an LCD display attached to the gantry lets you directly operate the device. The rotating dial lets you navigate the menu and select the printing settings in just a few steps. The Ender 5 Pro should suit those looking for a standard budget printer with a more vertical build volume to print larger prints. It has enviable upgrades, not least the metal extruder, 32-bit mainboard, and a unique design.
High Speed and High Stability
Talking about speed, Creality marketing tells us that you can get up to ~250mm/s with a 2000mm/s acceleration. My slicer profile used was set to this acceleration setting but with about half the speed mostly because if I tried to print faster, the ringing on the prints is significant and the bed starts wobbling a bit too much for my liking. First time using our firmware or having issues? Watch our video that is intended to clear up common mistakes people make when opening and using the firmware here: Unified 2 VSCode Tips for Noobs | EZTip #8 – YouTube
For most amateur printing projects, 50 to 80 mm/s is widely considered the optimal range to balance out print speed and print quality.
Unboxing, assembly, and first impression
The Ender 5 Pro has a metal-extruder, which helps iron some of the more common Bowden issues such as filament jams and clogs. The Ender 3 V2 instead uses a plastic alternative, but this is easily upgraded. The result of the detailed comparison between the Ender-5 S1 and the Ender-5 Pro is that the Ender-5 S1 is better in just about everything. The printer was completed, but you can see tiny gaps in some layers which are caused by the repeated retractions needed and also the extruder tension which was a bit too tight in my case. After lowering the pressure for the idler tension, all other prints were much better. With manual bed leveling becoming less common even on affordable consumer printers, the Ender 5 and Pro’s bed calibration feels somewhat outdated. Creality tries to ease the process with well-sized manual bed leveling nuts, but you’ll still spend quite a bit of time honing the bed before you can print. When the Creality Ender-5 S1 arrives, it does require a little assembly, but with a clear set of instructions, the whole machine can be built in around 10-20 minutes. There's nothing intricate to assemble, and the main bulk of the construction has already been done for you; you need to bolt in the uprights, install the tool head and then wire everything in. At each step, the instructions are clear, and for the most part, it's impossible to plug any of the wires into the wrong place. Even with no prior experience, there should be nothing here to challenge a complete novice.
As I do in every review, I started with a partially calibrated slicer profile and printed the 3D Benchy in PLA, with a speed of 80mm/s which is higher than what I would use on other 3D printers, to test the cooling capabilities of the machine. And the results are better than I expected, as the bow is still quite clean, a sign that the part cooling used in the Ender 5 S1 works as expected. The first thing to do, obviously, was to level the bed. The integrated CR Touch gives autolevelling capability, but before trying a print I decided to start off with a conventional levelling routine. The menu gives a neat option for this, with five numbered points corresponding to the centre and corners of the bed. Touch the appropriate point and the print head will move there, ready to be tested for clearance with the usual sheet of paper. The levelling menu includes up and down buttons to set the Z axis offset, so I set the levelling wheels at each corner of the bed to the middle of their travel, then used the offset buttons to get the centre of the bed at the correct height. Then I moved the head to each corner in turn and used the wheels to adjust them. I repeated the whole process twice more to make sure everything was perfectly dialled in, then opened Cura and went to slice a Benchy.With manual leveling you adjust the inclination of the print bed with a piece of paper. For this purpose, there are rotary screws under the print bed. With the screws, you adjust the distance between the nozzle and the print bed in several places on the print bed so that you can move the piece of paper with some friction between nozzle and print bed. Power off your printer and put the SD card into your printer’s SD slot. Turn the power on. This will cause the printer to flash the firmware from the SD card to your printer CPU. This may take up to 1 minute on some boards. Different printers/boards will have different .bin file names but they will all end in the .bin file extension.
So, what does the higher price tag land you? Firstly, you get the same cube frame, well-proportioned 220 x 220 x 300 mm build volume and the nippy bed heating of the original Ender 5. From there, the Ender 5 Pro pivots with a V1.15 silent mainboard with TMC2208 drivers for quieter printing compared to the Ender 5. There’s now thermal runaway protection in case things get a little too heated, too.Among the improvements are a just-about-average 220 x 220 x 300 mm build volume, ideal if you want a little more room to play with than the Ender 3. New dedicated stepper motors for each axis improve overall stability and fix the Ender 3’s unfortunate Y-axis wobble issues. A heated C-MAG magnetic build plate powered by a beefy 24V Mean Well PSU ensures speedy bed heating for ABS, PLA, TPU, and PETG printing. To achieve print success using ABS, an enclosure is a must have to ensure the table thermal conditions the filament needs. As we know, neither the Ender 3 and Ender 5 have an enclosure as standard, though it’s possible to build or buy one, at which point both machines perform admirably printing ABS.
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