You might have noticed that a number of times in this video the audio went weird when I said “Adventurer 3”. That’s because I actually said “Ender 3” over and over and had to correct the audio by copy-pasting the few parts where I said the name right. So that’s the story to that.
You guys know I love FlashForge. I have been a fan of them since the Creator 1. Partially it was because I had good experience with the Rep1 and they were building off that base. And since that time they’ve made quality printers at a good price. But no one’s perfect, and I gotta level (heh heh) with you, I don’t predict the Adventurer 4 is gonna do as well as the Adventuer 3 did for them.
I feel like we’ve got a situation here like Makerbot did with the Replicator 2. The Rep 2 wasn’t a bad machine, it had a lot of upgrades over the Rep1 also. But it wasn’t good enough to justify the hike in price that they did. And, unfortunately, they followed that up with the Gen5, which spelled the beginning of the end for Makerbot. Let’s hope history isn’t repeating itself.
Yes, the Adventurer 4 has everything that made the Adventurer 3 great, and it has some great new features. But it isn’t enough to justify a 2x increase in price.
I chose to edit out a 5 minute rant about the dimensional inaccuracy of the A4. The 16mm cubed PrintABloks I printed with it turned out 16.3 x 16.3 x 15.6. That z dimension disparity… yowch. But in the edit I decided, first of all, the video was running too long, and secondly, when I brought this up to Flashforge they assured me they’d make that right before it released, so I didn’t need to rub their nose in it. And I hope they do, because that’s the one thing that stops this from being an Ultimaker killer. Ultimakers print accurate. If they do fix that, this could be an ultimaker killer for sure.
You know what would be cool? A button you could push in the A4’s (or A3’s, maybe) calibration menu that would run you through a script and give you something to measure to fix the accuracy. Like what you do with open source machines, only have them do the math for you. That would be sweet. Give the user control of their accuracy. But it’s gotta take into account extrusion width.
At this point if people ask me what I recommend, I’m still going to say the Adventurer 3 over the Adventurer 4 for beginners, schools and makerspaces. Partially because the A3 isn’t so small that it’s unusable, and slightly smaller build volume is a good way to insure your public use printers are being hogged for days at a time.
And at the price is right.
What I could really get behind would be, like, an Adventurer 3 sized printer that had room for a full size spool in it or on it, the A4s magnetic build plate (because that is cool), the user interface changes of the Adventurer 4, and a hepa filter, and still only charge about $400 for it.
