Printing time and size

Some of printers are faster than others but none are fast.

We have to face the fact that 3D printers just aren’t very quick currently, not even moderately so, and although speed should be taken into consideration when choosing your printer, you shouldn’t base your purchase on it. More important are the print quality options, and all our printers offer different preset quality settings and these can vary the print time from a low of one hour to well over eight.

Three of the printers: LulzBot Taz 6, Ooznest Prusa i3 and the Ultimaker 2 Extended all manage to produce prints using PLA at the lowest settings in around one hour and at the top settings the times stretch out to around four hours. The Ultimaker has one higher quality setting that increased the printing time to six hours.

The XYZ Printing at the lowest setting matches the three printers using Cura software with a low-quality print taking an hour and high quality being achieved in four hours. The Form2 stands out with its print times. On its lowest quality print, it took just over two hours and high quality print took a staggering eight hours.

The other big influence on speed is, of course, size and despite the difference in physical footprint between all printers the print volume isn’t quite so big. The FormLabs Form 2 is relatively small at 145×145×175mm, the LulzBot offers a huge dimensions at 280x280x250mm, the Prusa i3 is 200x200x175mm, Ultimaker 2 Extended is 223x223x305mm and the XYZ has a very regimented 150mmx150mmx150mm for the XYZ.