Over the past few years, I have reviewed quite a few TronXY 3D Printers. I have reviewed their XY-3, X5, and their X3 machines. Their machines were never bad machines but they certainly needed quite a bit of fine tuning and tinkering with to get them to a point that I was happy with. They have seemed to be stepping up their game with their latest machines and overall, I was very happy with the print quality of the XY-3 machine. When TronXY approached me and asked if I was interested in reviewing their XY-2 Pro machine, the main thing I was curious about was the auto bed leveling.
I have reviewed quite a few machines since the popular Ender 3 from Creality that are basically clones of that machine with very little that has been added. I think that Creality has done a great job with their printers, but their latest line of Pro machines were really disappointing in the auto leveling department. Many people want auto bed leveling, but when it does not work properly I would much rather just have manual leveling. What I saw with the XY-2 Pro 3D Printer from TronXY, was what the Ender 3 offered, but with a touch screen and auto bed leveling. I was curious to see if this machine fell short with the auto bed leveling or if it actually was effective.
The XY-2 Pro came packaged very nicely, had a small spool of filament, plenty of spare parts, and was very simple to set up. I liked that the power supply and main board were out of the way underneath the machine and hidden. The base of the machine is also constructed of 4040 and 2040 extrusions so it is very rigid. The instructions that came with the machine were great, and the anodized blue parts to this machine looked awesome. Set up took no more than about 15 minutes and I was ready to power on the machine.
I booted the machine up and ran it through its auto leveling process. The machine goes around probing 16 points on the bed and then displays the values of each point in a grid. The machine asks you to check the points and make sure there is not a larger difference than 0.8mm in the numbers displayed. If there are, you will want to raise or lower the bed in that particular corner and run the probing again. This took me three tries before I was happy with the results. You will then need to set your z-offset which is very easy to do with a piece of printer paper.
I then dove in and ran 6 prints that were between 6-12 hours each. For the slicer, I used a profile that was built for the my Ender 3 in Cura. Overall, this worked very well, but since my Ender 3 is now direct drive I did have to bump the retraction up to help with stringing. The auto leveling worked flawlessly which was not something that I was expecting. The build plate on this machine is knock off buildtak that is on a flexible board which you clip on the machine. When a print is done, all that you need to do is unclip the bed, flex the part off and reclip the bed.
Overall, the prints that came off of this machine turned out very nicely. I did notice some slight artifacts in the Z direction, but I am unsure as to what caused them. The Z axis seems very rigid and I do not believe that the lead screw is bent. I think that for the price, if you want auto bed leveling built in, this may be the best machine that I have tested. Of course, this machine is not perfect and the fan that blows air through the mainboard is incredibly loud. If noise is a concern for you then I would suggest replacing it with a higher quality fan.
One other small thing that does not affect the machine at all but slightly bugged me is the binder clips used to hold the bed down. They seem to have been thrown in quite randomly in a variety of colors. To me it looks cheap having mismatched clips on the machine. This can easily be changed out for cents on the dollar, but I do try my best to point out even the little things. Hopefully this is something that they will address with future units that they are shipping out.
At the time of writing this review, you can pick up the TronXY XY-2 Pro for around $200. With its nice touch screen and auto bed leveling, this is certainly a machine to consider if you are looking to pick up your first printer or add one to your existing lineup. Going into this review, I thought the bed leveling was going to be a disaster. However, TronXY really seems to have a good job with their hardware choices as well as configuration of firmware.
To find out more or purchase this machine for yourself follow the link here.
