Neptune 4 Pro good-ish; Elegoo not so good
The Neptune 4 Pro is a decent machine. Its very large build plate for its cost is the major selling point, and it delivers on that promise. However, I’ve had a lot of issues with the printer. Broken belts, botched prints. It’s a 3d printer, it’s supposed to need fiddling with, right? But one particular episode is why I’m giving Elegoo only two stars. The Neptune Pro does not come with a wireless connection. I have kids. Flipping a jump drive back and forth from the computer to the Neptune is a bit much, so I did what many people do and got a wireless jump drive and tried to set the Neptune up on the wireless. While configuring the moonraker.conf file, something happened and the printer got to be unstable. I think what happened is that I turned it off and on too quickly, which sometimes caused issues. (I figured out later if I leave it off for a good 30 seconds, it was pretty stable.) but that was after I contacted support because I thought the firmware wasn’t working properly. After all, sometimes it worked perfectly, other times it just … sat there with the Elegoo logo spinning on the screen for five minutes before finally saying the firmware wasn’t working. Well, Elegoo said that I had modified the firmware (I had not!) and tried to “modify the machine” (by putting a usb wireless card into a usb port!) that invalidated my warranty. Obviously, I’ll never buy another Elegoo product again. Configuring a configuration file and using a usb stick in a usb port are not reasons to take away someone’s warranty. The problems with the machine have been numerous (as I said, broken drive belt, issues tuning the machine, instructions that were very hard to follow, especially with the assembly and leveling processes)…I should have spent the extra to get a Bambu, I guess.