Robo C2 Review: High-Quality 3D Prints — If You’re Willing to Wait

Our Verdict

The Robo C2 offers high-quality prints at a reasonable price, only the printer takes a while to produce large prints.

For

Excellent print quality
Error-gratuitous printing
Sleek design

Against

No automatic print-bed leveling
Printing is slow
Limited to PLA

Tom'south Guide Verdict

The Robo C2 offers high-quality prints at a reasonable cost, simply the printer takes a while to produce large prints.

Pros

+
Fantabulous print quality
+
Error-gratuitous printing
+
Sleek design

Cons

-
No automatic print-bed leveling
-
Press is deadening
-
Express to PLA

Robo 3D is perhaps all-time-known for its more than expensive 3D printers like the $1,500 R2, only the C2 is a more affordable midrange model that may appeal to those who value print quality over speed, such as artists or modelers. The $679 C2 offers a lot of features for its relatively affordable price, including Wi-Fi, true stand-solitary printing and excellent print quality using PLA filament. But slightly more than expensive printers like the LulzBot Mini back up a wider range of materials, and the C2's press pace may frustrate some users.

Pattern: Rounded Corners, Clean Look

The Robo C2 has an attractive, practical design that it shares with other Robo 3D printers. The gently curved white plastic case with blueish highlights looks clean and mod, hiding the motors and drive belts that brand the printer work. The instance won't stop inquiring fingers from discovering the hot printhead, though, so this isn't a printer that should be used by younger, unsupervised 3D explorers.

(Image credit: Robo)

The heart of the Robo C2 is the printhead, which melts the PLA filament held in a reel attached to the printer's back, squirting it onto the print bed. This big printhead moves left and right, while the print bed moves up and down to create the layers of the impress.

A nonstick plastic that can be removed and replaced covers the print bed, and three spare sheets of plastic are included with the C2. The bed isn't heated: Information technology relies on the PLA sticking to the plastic for adhesion. We didn't take any issues with prints peeling away or lifting from this printer, though: All of our exam prints remained attached to the bed without issues.

You tin can lift off the print bed to make removing a impress from the C2 easier. The bed is held in place with 4 magnets that lock onto metal knobs on the base of operations so it won't shift during printing. This works well, merely we did find one issue: On our exam unit, one of the magnets wasn't properly glued into place, then it fell off the impress bed the start time we removed it. A couple drops of super mucilage speedily fixed this problem.

Credit: Richard Baguley — (Image credit: Richard Baguley)

We also found that the C2 was very noisy when it was first used, producing an unpleasant squeaking audio as the printhead moved around. Fortunately, this stopped when nosotros used some of the included grease to lubricate the mechanism, just neither of these problems is the sort of thing we expect to notice on a new printer.

Beneath the print bed is the 3.5-inch touch screen that you use to control the C2. The screen is large and vivid enough to exist easily seen, and the bear upon controls worked well. However, the screen moved and bent rather alarmingly when nosotros pressed a button with anything more than moderate force, which is probably why Robo 3D includes a small bear on-screen stylus to use. A finger works just as well, though.

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On the dorsum of the printer, y'all'll find Ethernet, USB and ability sockets. The C2 also includes an 802.11g Wi-Fi connection, and any of these can be used to connect the printer to a figurer.

The C2 offers a impress volume of 5 x 5 x 6 inches, for a full of 150 cubic inches. That is significantly smaller than many more expensive models, but information technology's about boilerplate for smaller, cheaper printers of this type; it'south also big enough to print most common objects.

Impress Materials: Only PLA Support

The C2 supports merely one type of print material — 1.75-mm polylactic acid (PLA) filament. That'south non a huge hardship, though: PLA filament is available in a huge range of colors and finishes from both Robo 3D and other manufacturers.

Update: Robo contacted u.s. about materials support, and the company claims that it will support more 22 materials that don't require a heated print bed, such as flexible materials similar nGen_FLEX, colorFabb Metals, sinterable filaments, and more. This is correct, simply the lack of a heated print bed makes press with these and other materials more difficult, so we experience that our conclusions are even so right.

Robo 3D sells PLA in both large 1KG reels for between $20 to $40, or smaller 500g reels for $xx. That's pretty average for reels of this size, and there are besides PLA filaments bachelor that include materials such as carbon fiber and metals, so this is less of a limitation than it might showtime seem to be. Even flexible PLA filaments (such equally this Soft PLA) are now available.

Setup: Simple, with Some Manual Effort Required

The C2 is a fairly simple printer to ready upward. All you need to do is to unpack the printer, remove the numerous retaining clips that held the printhead in place during aircraft, plow on the device and load the print filament. You feed filament into the feeder tube and the printhead, then lookout until the melted filament comes out of the printhead.

You also accept to set up the Z-offset, so the printer knows where the impress bed is. This is the manual function, and it involves putting a piece of newspaper between the printhead and the print bed, then adjusting the print bed height with the bear on screen until the paper is caught between the two. This only needs to be done once, though, unless you move the printer or alter the plastic encompass of the impress bed. Information technology's not complicated to pull off, but we prefer automatic systems like the LulzBot Taz vi or Ultimaker 3 that do it automatically every time you start a print, making them less decumbent to error. Of grade, those models are also much more expensive than the C2.

Interface: Several Easy Options

You've got ii ways to control the C2: either via the software or the touch-screen interface. There are two software options: a version of Cura, tweaked for use with the Robo C2, or MatterControl, a plan written past Robo 3D itself.

In our testing, nosotros used the open-source Cura, a simple-to-use program that provides a straightforward and clear way to load a 3D model and prepare it for press. Cura also offers a huge range of features and controls for tweaking this procedure to control how the final print is created, including changing the amount of infill (fabric inside the impress that supports it) and how quickly the material is laid down during printing.

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You can also use touch-screen controls to operate the C2. Unusually, the C2 can prepare a 3D print past itself: Y'all can load a 3D model downloaded from a website such every bit Thingiverse onto the printer, and the C2 will set the model for printing, slicing it into layers and creating the path that the printhead volition follow. This ways that all you demand to print objects on the C2 is a web browser, since the printer includes a web interface for loading files.

Print Process: Uncomplicated, Error Gratuitous

In one case the C2 received the print file from the software (or from the built-in slicer), information technology began the printing procedure. The printer was a trivial noisy, though, especially earlier we added extra grease to the mechanism.

Still, we establish the print procedure to be more often than not error-free. Nosotros only had i failed print, where a piece of filament stuck to the printhead and damaged the impress. This was the exception, though; the rule was that the prints completed without issues, sticking nicely to the print bed, and they were also easy to remove when done.

Print Speed: Tiresome

The Robo 3D C2 is not a fast printer. Our Thinker test model took between 10 hours and 3 minutes (at depression quality) and 23 hours and three minutes at high quality to print. That'due south much slower than similar printers similar the XYZ da Vinci Jr. ii.0 Mix, which took from 5 hours to a little more than than 9 hours to complete the same-size print at like quality settings.

Print Quality: Fantabulous

Nosotros were impressed with the print quality of the C2. It produced fantabulous-quality prints, with layers that blended together well. Even especially tough prints like the geometric sculpture that we apply were well-printed, with clean, precipitous points on the sculpture once nosotros removed the supports.

Our gears test model was also well-printed. When nosotros removed all of the parts, they fit together correct away: We did not have to clean the prints or remove any excess material. That's unusual: Nearly prints of this model require some cleaning or sanding to fit together, just this impress didn't need anything.

Lesser Line

At that place's a lot to like in the Robo 3D C2. It produces excellent-quality prints using PLA filament, and the software and interface are flexible and easy to use. The power to impress straight from 3D models on the printer itself is also unusual, and that might exist useful in a setting where computer use is restricted (such as in a school).

There are a lot of competing products that target entry-level users, and several, like the $399 XYZprinting da Vinci Jr. 2.0 Mix cost less than the C2 is a chip of a slowpoke compared to its competitors.

Slowness bated, the C2 produces better-quality prints than the da Vinci, and it tin can employ PLA filament from any source. That makes information technology an appealing pick if yous're looking for a high-quality printer aimed at beginners and don't mind waiting for your prints.

Richard Baguley has been working equally a engineering writer and journalist since 1993. Every bit well as contributing to Tom's Guide, he writes for Cnet, T3, Wired and many other publications.