XYZ Printing da Vinci Jr. 1.0 3D printer (fully assembled), FREE for: £12 300g PLA filament, £15 maintenance tools, modelling software, and video tutorials, 15x15x15cm Built Vol, Auto Leveling

Was a bit worried by some of the reviews on this printer, but decided to go ahead and make my own mind up. I'm glad i did. Great printer. Unpacking and initial setup was very easy. I did have to adjust the Z offset as the first print came off the bed, but it was very easy and it sorted the problem out first time. The build quality of the unit is very good and requires virtually no assembly. It took me a bit to work out the xyz software and I ended up using Tinkercad online as i liked the interface better. The model builds come out very well. There are enough settings to play around with to improve the end results, but no too many as to confuse the first time 3D printer, as i am. The prints do take a while, i'm not sure how it compares to others. but you just leave it to it so it's not a big issue to me. There have been a lot of complaints about the cost of the replacement filament and how you have to use XYZ branded. To be honest I don't think its extortionate at around £22 a roll. If you shop around you can get it cheaper still. I'm happy to use the original filament and i know it will work properly in the machine. For the amount of printing i'm likely to do, i have no complaints. I get how this printer may be too basic for some people, but for the first time 3D printer I don't think you could find a better machine to begin with. Great quality well priced machine, simple to use with good results. Winner all round for me.

Very easy to setup, works almost out of the box with minimal effort.Very good price point for such a finished product. Polished and consumer friendly the interface is intuitive and works without having to install anything on your PC (providing you're on windows 8 or later) Of course the software with it is recommended, and fairly simple to use. Can make some nice little figures with it as well as functional parts.Only drag is the DRM, This machine will not accept Filament from any other brand than XYZ, the work arounds to get it to accept other filaments involve cloning NFC chips and emulating them, then changing the values on the table to trick it into thinking you're using a new spool of Filament. This I only found out after spending a small fortune on Filaments from other sources. For the cost of one 0.5-0.6KG spool of Filament you can buy 2Kg+ from other brands. Of equal and even better quality.Great if you're just wanting to 3D print figures and small parts. Not good if you're a power user wanting to make this a hobby. The closed unit makes it more consumer friendly with a nice enclosure, can't stress enough how simple and straight forward this machine is. Very good first printer if you're wanting to get into it and not spend thousands of pounds on your first device.

Worked ok for a while. The insistence on XYZ using only their filament makes it a bit more expensive in the long run (although there are ways around it, google it!). Also being tied in to their software makes it a bit limiting. It's a great first printer as it's cheap, easy to use and produces good enough results. Eventually mine stopped working. The extruder gear gave up the ghost and just clicked away without pushing the filament. By that time I'd moved on to bigger and better printers and am going to gut this one and turn it onto a laser engraver.

I bought my da Vinci jr in April 2016. Back then it was one of the cheapest 3d printers available. The fact that it could only use XYZ filament wasn't too much of an issue as XYZ prices were only a little dearer than most others.As I write this review in October 2021 there are other, better, 3d printers available for less, and I have just bought 2kg of PLA filament for less than the price of 600g of the XYZ filament for this printer. Put simply, in late 2021 this printer is not worth buying at £285.50 (today's price) and probably not even at half that price.Setting up the XYZ Printing da Vinci Jr. 1.0 was very straightforward and during my time with it I found that it printed small objects, such as model crates, oil drums, treasure chests and so on for 28mm scale gaming, pretty well. For larger objects though, 50mm square dungeon tiles or bigger, base warping became a significant issue whatever I tried. While this didn't matter too much for dungeon tiles it did make printing buildings etc. pretty much impractical. (A 3d printer with a heated bed should solve this issue). Trying to print more than one object at a time also seemed to be a good way to guarantee failure.It was also part of my experience that things went wrong a fair bit and a certain amount of bodging and strong language ensued. I have to say that doesn't mean I regret buying this printer. I accepted that being a relatively early adopter of home 3d printing would bring challenges and enjoyed most of the experience.In spite of the issues, had I reviewed this printer back in 2016 I would have given it 3 or 4 stars, the 1 star score relates to the fact that, in 2021, I believe that this printer is so far behind the times, that it should not be retailing at a higher price than more modern machines (including those made by XYZ), especially given the need for overpriced proprietory filament.