FlashForge Adventurer 4 review: Close to an ideal 3D printer
Our Verdict
The FlashForge Adventurer 4 is an splendid printer that can produce high-quality prints at a very moderate cost, though you'll have to fence with a few frustrating quirks.
For
- Swappable print heads provide cloth flexibility
- Handles multiple materials with ease
- Good price
Against
- Built-in camera limited by weak internal lighting
- No automated bed leveling and filament loading
- Changing nozzle is rather a fiddley process
Tom's Guide Verdict
The FlashForge Adventurer 4 is an fantabulous printer that can produce high-quality prints at a very moderate cost, though you'll have to contend with a few frustrating quirks.
Pros
- +
Swappable print heads provide material flexibility
- +
Handles multiple materials with ease
- +
Proficient cost
Cons
- -
Built-in camera express by weak internal lighting
- -
No automatic bed leveling and filament loading
- -
Changing nozzle is rather a fiddley procedure
At beginning glance, the FlashForge Charlatan 4 might strike 3D printing enthusiasts equally a adequately boring device. it prints mostly without fuss, with few issues and quirks. My second print with the Charlatan 4 — a big bird feeder that took nearly 29 hours to print — would take scared the crap out of me a few years ago, when long, large prints were complex and likely to fail. But the Adventurer four handled that print without issue, producing a smooth, clean impress with no hassles almost straight out of the box.
That kind of straight-ahead functioning shows just how far 3D printing has come, and as I institute in my FlashForge Charlatan 4 review, information technology makes this device an appealing option for enthusiasts looking for ane of the all-time 3D printers that'southward a few steps alee of printers aimed at beginners. That said, press with the FlashForge Charlatan 4 isn't completely hassle-free, as the software that prepares your print and operates the printer itself has more than than a few rough edges.
FlashForge Adventurer 4 review: Price and availability
The FlashForge Adventure iv is available now for $799.99. That price includes four print heads and a 1kg reel of filament. You can also opt for a package with a 2kg reel ($829) or 4kg reel ($859).
The Adventure 4 costs more than some of the entry-level printers we've tested like the $399 Monoprice Voxel. But it's besides a more advanced device that's a bit more affordable that some of the pro-level 3D printers that command four-effigy price tags.
FlashForge Charlatan iv review: Design
The Charlatan iv is a large 3D printer, measuring 21.7 ten xix.7 x 18.v inches. The entire printing mechanism is enclosed, with a small-scale fan at the back that sucks the air out through a HEPA filter. That means that printing is a lot less smelly than it can be with most 3D printers. The filter captures whatsoever small particles that are given off: a cause of business organization for open 3D printers.
There are clear panels on the acme and sides, and the front is mostly covered by a clear plastic door that opens to provide access to the print bed. On the right side is a smaller door that covers the filament reel. This ways that the filament reel is also, to some caste, protected from the exterior air, which can be important for materials like PLA that tend to blot wet.
The Adventurer 4's print bed is flexible and removable, and then you can elevator off the entire bed and bend it to remove a impress. That's much easier than having to pry away at a fixed print bed. FlashForge includes a second print bed, so you tin can starting time a second print going every bit soon as the showtime print is removed. That'due south a big plus for a decorated 3D printer that needs to continue the output coming. In improver, the starting time thing that shows on the printer control screen when a print is done is a dialog box asking if you want to print the aforementioned object again.
You control the Adventurer four through a simple touch-screen on the left side of the front. This was easy to use, except when inbound a password into the Wi-Fi setup. The tiny on-screen keyboard repeatedly detected two presses for one or mistook the letter of the alphabet that was typed. Otherwise, that panel's fine for starting and monitoring a print, though.
I also had issues with Wi-Fi connectivity. On the FlashForge Adventurer 4. For unknown reasons, this printer refused to connect to my Wi-Fi network. After numerous attempts and ensuring that the passphrase was correctly entered, I gave upwardly and used the wired ethernet connection instead, which worked without issues.
FlashForge Adventurer 4 review: Swappable print nozzles
One of the FlashForge Adventurer 4'due south unique features is that y'all can swap out the device's print nozzle — the business organisation end of the printer that melts the filament. The printer comes with four nozzles with different diameters for the hole that the filament comes out of. In addition to the 0.3 and 0.6mm options, you get two 0.4mm nozzles, one of which works at 240 ℃, and one that works at 265℃ for materials that need higher temperatures.
The thought is that the bigger the diameter of the pigsty on the nozzle, the more filament tin can come out at a time. That allows for thicker layers of cloth, speeding upwards print times The different temperatures allow for different materials. Some filaments need college temperatures to melt, then the college temperature nozzle lets you employ materials similar Nylon.
Swappable nozzles definitely makes the Adventurer 4 more flexible than most 3D printers, but the process of irresolute nozzles is rather finicky and very manual. You plough the printer off, release the clips that hold the nozzle in place, pull the nozzle assembly out, and then cut the filament to release the nozzle assembly. You then button the filament into the new nozzle before pushing everything back into place until the clips re-engage and lock it in place. Y'all and so turn the printer dorsum on and use the manual controls to forward the filament until it comes out of the nozzle. Finally, you have to use the controls to enter a temperature offset, a value that FlashForge writes on the packaging of the nozzle that is the difference betwixt the temperature measured by the sensor on the nozzle and the existent temperature it reaches.
That's a significant hassle, and it is possible to utilise the wrong nozzle without realizing it: the printer does not discover the type of nozzle installed and volition endeavour and impress with a different 1 to the specified ane installed.
Compare that to the automated nozzle change process of the Ultimaker S5, which detects the installed impress nozzle and automates the procedure of removing and replacing the filament. Ultimaker's arroyo involves a lot less hassle if you lot are ofttimes using the different print nozzles for different prints.
FlashForge Adventurer 4 review: Setup
The Adventurer iv is a very simple printer to prepare upwards — you just have the 3D printer out of the box, remove the orange tape that holds the doors closed, and remove a few pieces of cream that hold the print head in identify during shipping. In one case that's washed, yous can load the included 1KG of filament into the printer (our examination unit came with reddish filament) and run the calibration setup.
This is where the setup process gets a bit less hassle-free. Many 3D printers have a self-leveling feature, where the printer automatically detects the impress bed using a sensor on the print head; on the Charlatan iv, though, you end up doing a lot of the work yourself. If you select the automated bed leveling, the printer moves the print head to ix different spots on the print bed. At each, you lot apply the touch-screen control to move the print head up and down past fractions of a millimeter until you lot tin but slide an included piece of mylar between the print head and the bed, indicating that at that place is the required tiny gap betwixt the two.
One time yous've done this for nine points on the print bed, the printer calculates any bumps or bend to the impress bed and adjusts for them while printing. It's an odd combination of transmission and automated that feels out of place in a sophisticated, automated printer like this.
Loading the filament is a fairly simple process. You mountain the filament spool on the claw in the space on the right of the printer and push the end of the filament into the feeder. With the click of a button, the feeder grabs the filament and pushes it upwardly through the tube into the print caput. In one case you see the melted filament coming out of the Charlatan 4'south print head, you lot hit the terminate button and you lot are ready to print.
FlashForge Adventurer 4 review: Controls
You operate the Adventurer 4 through the on-device controls or through a network-continued app. To employ features like the 3D printer's built-in camera, you have to use the FlashPrint software, available for Mac and Windows. Alternatively, you can create prints using software like Cura and saved to USB drives for press.
FlashPrint is a decent package for loading and preparing 3D prints. It supports a wide range of formats and offers a good selection of features. Once loaded, models can be scaled, stretched, duplicated, and otherwise jiggered around for printing. They tin can also be sliced — useful if you lot want to print a big model in parts. The program can also automatically adapt a grouping of models for best printing and provides extensive control over the creation of supports that hold the model in place.
Once y'all have the model prepared, you lot click on the piece button, which chops the model into layers that the FlashForge Adventurer 4 volition build one by i and creates the file that tells the printer where to movement and when to squirt out the filament. When this process is done, you lot can preview the print layer past layer, which is useful for spotting any potential problems with your print.
Finally, you can send the file to the printer and start the print, either by saving information technology to a USB drive or sending it over the local network. For the latter, you can discover the impress in progress through the camera built into the Charlatan 4, albeit just at a rather low 640 x 480 pixel resolution. This camera can also capture time-lapses that are saved on the printer, but once more the depression resolution makes for grainy videos that don't really let you see how the impress is progressing.
The merely lighting inside the Adventurer 4 is a unmarried LED on the print head, so y'all don't run across that much via the camera unless there are other lights on. I concluded up putting a pocket-sized LED aquarium light on the top of the printer to provide more illumination.
The FlashPrint software too allows you to connect to multiple 3D printers and send a impress file to all of them at once. That's a useful feature if you are serious nigh press and want to produce multiple prints at once, simply it doesn't permit for multiple users or clients, and so it volition be of limited use in a school or other multi-user environment. If you need more control over the printer or desire to provide admission to multiple users, the Charlatan 4 tin piece of work with two deject press services — Polar 3D and FlashCloud, Flashforge'due south own cloud printing service. These are better options than FlashPrint for classroom or function use, but we didn't test them extensively.
FlashForge Adventurer four review: Print materials
The combination of swappable print nozzles and a heated impress bed means that the Adventurer 4 tin handle a huge range of materials, from the standard PLA and ABS to more exotic materials like medical-grade Nylon, PETG or transparent materials such every bit T-Glase. The printer's nozzles work up to 265℃, while the heated impress bed can go up to 110℃, which also increases the number of printer materials the Charlatan 4 tin support.
The Adventurer four does non require filament from any particular manufacturer: there is no sensor to observe a cloth tag such every bit is often seen on printers from manufacturers similar XYZPrinting. So, yous can employ any filament that is 1.75mm in diameter.
FlashForge Adventurer 4 review: Print speed
The Adventurer 4 offers an boilerplate impress speed compared to other 3D printers we've tested. Our Thinker test model took between 3 hours and just more than than 10 to print, depending on the size of the print nozzle yous use.
Choosing a print nozzle for the FlashForge Adventurer 4 comes down to a compromise between quality and speed: the larger the output of the impress nozzle, the quicker the print because it can squeeze out more filament at a time.
We test the speed of a printer by timing how long it takes to produce a four-inch high print of our Thinker model, and with the Adventurer four'south largest 0.6mm nozzle in place, this took 3 hours and 25 minutes. The same print with the 0.3mm nozzle took 10 hours and 37 minutes, well-nigh iii times as long. The difference is considering of the number of layers that had to be printed: the 0.6mm version had 444 layers, while the 0.3mm version had 850 layers.
FlashForge Adventurer 4 review: Print quality
The FlashForge Adventure 4 produced splendid quality prints across the lath, managing to print all of the complex models that nosotros apply for testing without whatsoever major issues.
The merely flaw nosotros plant was a tendency to produce stringy filaments of material when printing with PLA, which fabricated some of the prints look like they had been playing host to a clan of spiders.
This is caused by insufficient retraction, where the printer should pull the filament back into the impress nozzle when it is moving it from one office of the print to another. If it doesn't retract enough, some filament stays at the stop of the nozzle, stretching out into a thin string of filament that sticks to the print.
These strands of filament are more of an annoyance than a trouble, though; you lot can easily remove them with a sharp knife.
FlashForge Adventurer 4 review: Verdict
The FlashForge Adventurer 4 gets close to being the platonic 3D printer: feed information technology a 3D model, leave it to work and information technology volition produce a decent 3D print. Unfortunately, the Adventurer 4 isn't quite perfect. I found issues with the software, such as the disability to connect to my Wi-Fi network and the hardware, such as the manual way you have to calibrate and swap print nozzles.
These bug aside, the FlashForge Charlatan 4 is a smashing option for the serious 3D printer user who wants to print and print and impress without hassle. And the sub-$i,000 toll is tough to beat every bit well.
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/flashforge-adventurer-4
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