Creality has dropped the price of its beginner-friendly Hi Combo 3D printer (was $599) now $449 - so if you’re looking for a starter set-up that prints color, this is worth checking out.
Our 3D printing expert Alastair recently re-reviewed the best 3D printers and ranked the Creality Hi as his top budget pick for beginners and enthusiasts.
“When I tested the Creality Hi, I had to recheck the price as it was difficult to mentally balance the price of the machine with the quality of the output,” he said.
He may need another rebalance after this. In Creality's back-to-school sale, this 3D printer is even cheaper since his review - but the clock is ticking. (Literally - there’s a big countdown timer on the page and everything.)
It looks like the sale isn’t limited to the US either - as in Canada, the Creality Hi Combo was CA$619 now CA$549, and in the UK, it’s down from £568 to £359 at Creality’s official store.
Today's top Creality Hi deal
Why the Creality Hi made the cut
Alastair and I recently updated our 3D printer guide - a full re-review and refresh.
The 3D printing landscape is shifting fast, so we were keen to see where the industry was headed and what new units were standing out. You can see what made the cut in our round-up here.
The Creality Hi stood out - in his latest update, Alastair called attention to the “surprising feature set and a build quality that only a couple of years ago would have been considered decidedly premium. If you're looking to get creative with color, then the Creality Hi is hard to beat at its price.”
The previous entry, the Creality Ender-3 V3 SE, is still an affordable 3D printer that’s really simple for new starters (it’s also in Creality’s sale from $219 down to $199).
But as a general purpose multi-color 3D printer that punches above its weight on that all-important price vs performance scale? The Creality Hi proved to be an exceptionally well-specced new addition to the market.
Here’s a few more highlights from Alastair’s review.
“The Creality Hi is an exceptionally well thought-out and robust 3D printer, with its traditional bed slinger design, which offers a very cheap single filament or multifilament option.”
“The end results are some of the most impressive that I've seen from any multiple-filament 3D printer.”
“After several days' worth of prints and the printer running non-stop, I was impressed with the general reliability.”
The base model Hi is the cheapest entry-point, on sale for $319, but if you want to print more than one color at a time, opt for the Creality Hi Combo. It’s more expensive, but more versatile.
The Combo bundles in a Creality Filament System (CFS) unit for four-filament printing, but also supports daisy-chaining three more of these modules for up to 16-color printing on what is supposed to be an entry-level machine. The unit even monitors internal temperatures and acts as a dry case.
At this price, you’re never going to get Prusa-levels of precision. This isn’t a 3D printer for professionals or product design, since the benchmarking highlighted an issue with the dimensional accuracy. Alastair found the prints looked and moved freely, but accuracy wasn’t as good as it could’ve been.
The other issue he struggled with was filament waste, which piled up to the point where the weight of the waste was almost level with the 3D printed model.
But not even that was enough to dent Alastair’s overall impression of a 3D printer deserving of the ‘best on a budget’ award.
Benchmarks showed him “a general-use hobbyist machine that will produce some of the best prints for the cost of any 3D printer on the market. When it comes to quality, this is one of the best printers that I've used for the price.”
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