Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2 3D printer review: Lot of features for not a lot of money

While the overall design and build quality is the same as the original Centauri Carbon – which is quite good – there are some key improvements. For starters, the glass front door feels more solid and the screen is larger. The feet have been changed to a more vibration compensating style. Both the light and the camera have been improved significantly, which is much appreciated. The Centauri Cabon 2 Combo comes with a repositioned auxiliary fan compared to the original CC. And, the nozzle viper and waste bin have been moved to the back left from the back right, so home for the hotend is at the back left now.

As for the setup, it is not as plug and play as the original mainly because of the Canvas system. There are quite a few extra steps to get the multicolor system installed before you can power on the printer. Fortunately, the steps are clearly mentioned in the documentation. Once set up, the one click calibration takes care of optimizing the nozzle, bed level, and vibration compensation. The whole calibration process takes about 26 to 27 minutes.

With the CC2, Elegoo has brought multi-color printing to the budget segment. Keeping that in mind, the Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2 Combo performs great. PLA and PETG prints are clean, consistent, and relatively quick right out of the box, without much tuning. The default z offset is a bit too low resulting in wavy first layers, but lowering the bed by 0.025 mm fixes that. Additionally, Elegoo claims 45 dB noise levels during prints and we measured average noise levels of around 44 dB to 47 dB with peaks of up to 54 dB. Notably, there's is a mild yet constant beep sound while the printer is idle.

The Canvas system allows up to four different colors and while Elegoo doesn’t recommend it, four different filament types as well. This allows printing PLA parts with PETG as support or vice versa, as well as different combinations of compatible filaments. Elegoo has also added an RFID sensor that works great with its own RFID compatible spools. Place the spool next to the Canvas system and it detects the color and type. All you have to do is assign it to a slot.

With the multicolor prints pictured below, the results were quite good. And, the included spool holders work with most filament brands. The stock profile that has been tuned by Elegoo produces solid prints with clean transitions between different colors, but also with a good amount of waste. With the Mini Square tool (by SabreDesign on Maker World), there were 74 color changes and due to the nature of the object, quite a lot of poop. With the Gear fidget spinner (designed by DavidVidacs on Maker World), there were 78 color changes but not as much poop. Much less for the Deadpool hueforge print (by Poly3Dart Officiel on Printables) since there were only four-color changes. Notably, the average time for a color change is about 1 minute and 10 seconds, with some transitions taking longer.

With a more challenging filament like ASA, the printer automatically switches to a temperature hold mode where the vents shut off. While the CC2 is able to hold temperature quite well, we did face adhesion issues with ASA. Preheating the bed for 10 minutes at 110 degrees C improved the results so that’s something to keep in mind. That being said, the high-temp nozzle and bed combo allows for printing more challenging filaments once the settings have been tuned.

Printing TPU was quite straightforward and hassle free as well. Elegoo states a Flexible Filament Printing Adapter is required for materials like TPU, but even without it, the prints came out just fine. Again, some profile tuning is required.

As for the software experience, it could be much better. The consistency was the main issue as the printer would randomly refuse to connect to Elegoo Slicer on Windows, and when it did connect, the device monitoring window would throw up connectivity errors. Interestingly, it was more seamless when using Elegoo Slicer on macOS. The Windows issues mostly resolved themselves and I believe the two slicer updates that arrived during the course of testing had something to do with it. The print time estimates, were still inaccurate as some multi-color prints took over 17% longer than what the slicer calculated.

Coming to the AI detection, there were a couple random occurrences of spaghetti detection when there was none. The auto-filament refill, filament runout sensor, hotend cover sensor, and power loss recovery, on the other hand, worked as they should.

Elegoo also launched the Matrix app that helps monitoring and remotely controlling the printer. The connectivity experience was inconsistent here as well. Currently, there is no way to send over G-code files that you have on your phone through the Matrix app, but that would be a neat feature to have. There are firmware/software issues that can be addressed by the company, and Elegoo is working on them.