finalarbiter

You’re good, I didn’t take it as an attack. I totally understand where you’re coming from, I used to manage a fleet of 12 ender 3 printers with varying degrees of modifications from the previous lab manager and hated every minute of it.

I’m not familiar with Creality’s R&D program and cannot really speak to their efforts in that department. They could very well not be pursuing much R&D in addition to cutting QC and having nonexistent customer support, but I didn’t want to make claims in an area I’m uninformed.

Costs can be cut in a variety of ways and each manufacturer has different approaches that affect their end product differently. The main areas that are affected by cost-cutting measures first would typically be quality control (QC), research & development (R&D), and customer support.

In contrast to Creality, some budget manufacturers skimp on R&D instead of QC. They do this by taking existing designs developed by the open-source community (e.g. RepRap, Voron, etc.) and finding cheaper ways to produce them, rather than designing new machines in-house. For example, the Sovol SV08 is pretty obviously a Voron v2 with some custom parts to make it visually distinct.

Creality machines are inexpensive for a reason- they use cheap components and have next to no quality control. As far as I’m aware, that’s no better now than it was when they were peddling the first Ender 3s. It’s entirely possible that your friend got lucky and you didn’t in the quality lottery, it’s just the way it goes sometimes.

Older Creality designs were great if you wanted a machine to tinker with. I would never recommend that brand for people who want a printer that just works, though.

I bought a CR6-SE from Creality several years ago for similar reasons to you. It had all the upgrades one would typically do to an Ender 3 and was supposed to be basically bulletproof. I don’t think I ever got a successful print from it, and it’s been relegated to paperweight duty until I finally get around to taking it apart for components.

It’s only a layer line if it’s parallel to the bed, otherwise it’s just sparkling print artefacts.

A calendar is not an inventory management system.

Interesting. Seems like a natural next step from the recent color mixing features Bambu/Orca slicers (I assume if it isn’t already in Orca, it will be soon).