Creality sets a new baseline for budget 3D printing. It’s the same old Ender 3 experience, improved with current hardware that includes a 32-bit mainboard, silent stepper motor drivers, a much cleaner appearance and design, plus plenty of other, smaller, touches.
Old Ender problems persist, such as the filament feed opening being in a difficult to use place, but these grumbles aside, there’s a lot to the Ender 3 V2 that makes it worthy of the hype.

Gone from the Ender 3 V2 are the boxy metal enclosures of previous Ender 3 models. On the Ender 3 V2, we find tidy new molded plastic panels across the printer, which, at the detriment of being, obviously, plasticky, distances the Ender 3 V2 from a semblance of tinkerability of its predecessors. (Even though the Ender 3 V2 is every bit as modifiable as its predecessors – there’s just more plastic to unscrew first.)

With this new aesthetic, the Ender 3 V2 looks much more, dare we say it, professional? Not in the sense of the printer’s performance, more that it is less of an eyesore for those without a dedicated workshop where it’s acceptable for screws, rods, extrusions, and all manner of stuff to be on show. As is increasingly common, the power supply has moved into the base of the printer, which, again, gives a sleeker and more streamlined look.

Despite the numerous new light-touch changes to the machine, the Ender 3 V2 is, at its core, very much the same as the Ender 3. The same 220 x 220 x 250 mm build volume, with a single hot end fed by a Bowden extruder, offline printing via microSD, and manual bed leveling. In fact, looking at the specs on paper, you’d barely be able to tell the two apart.

This sameness carries through to the print quality, which, for a ~$250 machine, is really quite good. For the majority of our continued time printing with the Ender 3 V2, we have been using the stock Ender 3 Pro profile in Cura 4.6.1, and it practically sings (both retraction and layer-change behavior need fine-tuning, but otherwise this is a functional starting point.)