I hadn’t thought of writing something about the Ender series vs the Spark X i7 until the challenge came up, but as soon as the topic came up I jad to jump on it. The E3pro wasnt my first printer, but it was the first one that taught me how to make upgrades and adjustments to improve performance. I still own my E3pro’s as they are amazing at printing silks which never fun well on faster speeds anyway. Every aspect of the i7 is a vast improvement over the Enders Ive been running. I’ll break down the upgrades Ive made to my enders and compare to the stock offering from the i7.
Setup-
When you first opened up the Ender 3 box, you felt like you were about to use an erector set. Plenty of users were plagued with issues due to frames not being square, overly tight/loose screws and belts, mismatched wiring connectiona or poorly routed wires. All of these things could be fixed, but so many people give up at the first issue they encounter. When you open the i7 box, you have the CFS and a printer. The most effort you put into it is lifting it out of the box and removing the stabilization brackets used in shipping. The only connections are the power cable, CFS cable, and the filament tubes. Power on and connect to your network, update, calibrate and print. I made a point of letting my 10yr old be the one to set it up to show how easy it is.
Printing -
Slicing the files is pretty much the same on both as you can use the same software, but unless you’ve upgraded to klipper, there is no wireless transfer to the Ender 3. Its a minor inconvenience, but a noticeable one all the same. Another upgrade you could add would be auto leveling with a bed prone, but this was experimental when I started and even though its gotten easier, you still have issues with certain brands of probes being difficult to set up. Couple that with bent or damaged probes and finding a good mounting method, many would give up or not try. The leveling that is built into the i7 has been great so far and even has a camera that can detect if there is an item already on the bed or a spaghetti failure.
Maintenance-
This is where the i7 really shined to me. I like changing nozzle sizes. I like .2 for high details like lettering and .6 or .8 for fast, large prints. I even dedicated one of my E3 printers as a .6 since I bounced between .4 and .6 so much. I was so excited to see the super easy way to swap the nozzle on the i7. I was also very impressed with the hating element and thermistor setup and how there was no complicated way to connect them to the nozzle. When swapping things out on the Ender 3, you were almost always doing a complete breakdown to make sure everything was clean and tight, and it had to be with the nozzle hot. I will be uploading the video of my 10yr old swapping the nozzle for a print we just did and it was so much easier than Ive ever done before. Even better is that you can swap it cold and not worry about creep or needing to recalibrate the z-offset every time you change something.
Conclusion-
With the Ender series, there were lots of compromises to provide a cheap printer to the community, but it was up to them to modify the machine to make it really shine. The Spark X i7 seems to take so many of the concerns of the community and pack them into a very affordable multicolor machine.