Pulled the plug and ordered a Bambu Lab X2D Combo from Reichelt to replace the Ender 3 V2 that’s been sitting on my desk for years.
It’s not like I didn’t try to make the Ender work. Over the years I put a Sprite extruder on it, a CR Touch for auto bed leveling, the dual Z-axis upgrade, and a magnetic steel plate, basically the standard list of mods everyone tells you to do if you want an Ender 3 V2 that doesn’t fight you. And it helped. First layers stopped being a coin flip, adhesion got consistent, print quality went up a notch. What none of it touched was speed. Underneath the upgrades it’s still the same frame, the same motion system, and anything bigger than a phone stand was still a multi-hour print. You can only mod your way around so much of a printer’s architecture before you’re just polishing the same ceiling.
Multi-color was the other half of the problem. The Ender is single extruder, single filament, and that’s it. Want a two-color print? Swap filament mid-print and hope the seam is invisible enough, or don’t bother. I mostly didn’t bother, which meant a chunk of what I actually wanted to print just never happened.
The X2D fixes both, at least on paper. It’s built around Bambu’s dual-nozzle system instead of the usual AMS filament-swapping carousel, which should mean multi-material and multi-color without the waste and the long swap times AMS setups are known for. And Bambu printers are just fast, full stop, compared to what I’ve been running. Whether it lives up to that once it’s actually on my desk is a different question, and I’ll believe the speed claims when I’ve timed a print myself.
Reichelt had it in stock with a Combo bundle at a decent price, so this wasn’t a long research phase. It’s a chunk of money for a 3D printer, more than I’ve ever spent on one, and I’m aware that’s an easy way to turn a printer into a much more expensive doorstop if it doesn’t fit how I actually work. But three years of buying upgrades for a printer that still couldn’t do the two things I actually wanted will do that to a budget.
Ender 3 V2 is getting boxed up, not thrown out. Someone on ricardo.ch is going to inherit a well-modded printer for cheap, and all they’ll need to bring is patience.