Well, my lovely wife bought me a new printer for my birthday, a bit early, but Prime Days had an excellent deal on this beast. Anyway, I got it set up and it is happily running about 15 feet away from me. So here's my early impressions. Came very well packed and the instruction sheet was clearly written in excellent English. Anycubic says you can set it up in 10 minutes...okay. It actually only took me about 20 actually, taking my time. Set up is straight forward, the only thing that took more time than the assembly was adjusting the Z axis for proper bed adhesion. It comes with a magnetic steel build plate with just a bit of flex so you can pop your creation free. NO Bowden tubes! YAY!!! It uses a direct feed print head, feeding straight from the reel mounted above it. A fairly small footprint, if you have an 18"x18" square area, it will fit easily. A very quiet machine, and using the Anycubic filament, very little odor. Print quality is outstanding! Using the most detailed setting, it is delivering very smooth pieces that will see a LOT of use on my N scale layout. I will be printing buildings and even railroad cars using that setting. For terrain, I am using the Standard setting, it is about 50% quicker and turns out very usable stuff. And I am using Cura as my slicer, I have used it for years and the settings from my outgoing Ender 6 are working perfectly. [Cura does not have settings specifically for the Neo yet] Comparing this to my two previous Enders, a 3 and the 6, this appears to be a better engineered machine. They have worked to maintain the KISS principle, and it is quite intuitive to use. Also, putting Bowden tubes behind me is a true pleasure, and this may be part of my good feelings toward this machine. I have been turning out a bunch of 28mm goods for a game convention next month so far, and the quality of these prints has me quite impressed. I should be able to start trying RR goodies some time next week.
Congrats on having such an awesome wife! AND congrats on the Neo, too! While researching my latest purchase the Neo came up a lot in my search results and there were a lot of good things mentioned about it. The Neo feedback actually helped in my decision to go ahead with buying the Kobra 2. I also like the direct drive option for some day if I ever decide to print flexibles. Does the auto-level work as good for you as I've found mine? I think that might actually be my favorite upgrade from where I was at with my Ender 3, and that's saying something because for the most part my Ender stayed level. I just like not having to worry about it. Cheers -Mike
So far, yes it has stayed level. And the annoyance of leveling is what made me decide to replace it with the Ender 6 when the Kickstarter came up. Quite honestly, I wish I had kept the Ender 3, it was far more reliable.
