Howdy all, so I’ve been looking to buy a 3D printer for a while now and now that I’ve got some money for it, ive been looking at the Ender 3 V3 SE as it seems to be a good sub $300 printer from the reviews.
However, I’ve heard that there were some bed leveling issues with it after a firmware update and I’ve been trying to find information if this has beem fixed or not yet.
So to anyone that has an Ender 3 V3 SE, has this been resolved? Is it ongoing? If it is, I’ll likely buy something else as I’m just getting into 3D printing and I’d rather not tinker with it a ton.
I have an Ender 3 V3 SE, never did a firmware update and haven’t had any issues with bed levelling. The auto calibration does its job pretty reliably for me. However, mine had some issues with the gantry being at not quite right angle. It could still print, but it got much better after printing and inserting the appropriate shims under the z-rail mounts.
Thank you! Really appreciate the reply, trying to find info about this has been less than successful. Specifically this happened after firmware 1.0.4 amd was supposedly fixed in 1.0.6 but seems to be nothing else after this to indicate if its fixed or not.
So a couple more questions if you dont mind:
What firmware version are you running? Any reason in particular you didn’t update the firmware? And would you say you like the performance?
I’m running 1.0.6 apparently. It simply didn’t occur to me to update it, since it’s not connected to the internet and worked fine out of the box for me.
I’d consider the performance quite good given the low price. Sure there are faster printers out there, but with the default profile in orca slicer it can do a benchy in ~50 minutes which is good enough for me. And quality wise the prints seem to be on par with what other people are producing with much more expensive printers.
What’s missing are some comfort features: no runout sensor, no failed print detection and no network connectivity mean that printing is a relatively manual process and it’s “risky” to do long prints unsupervised, because this thing will happily produce spaghetti until the gcode is done.
If OP can find a V3 KE for a decent price then you get filament runout sensor and network connectivity, among with some other nice stuff. And for the failed print detection you can add a Nebula camera which isn’t too expensive if you order it from Aliexpress. It also supports rooting so you can add some really nice stuff to it, like Mainsail. I have a KE and I’m pretty happy with it since I got it for a really good price. I don’t think I would recommend it at full retail price though.
Thanks for the recommendation! I’ve got around $300 to spend so I’m a bit flexible in the budget. I’ll keep an eye out. Hoping to get a decent black Friday or cyber Monday deal.