Monoprice MP10 Mini 3D printer review: A decent option for the price, with some caveats

3D press has come a long way since I commencement started playing around with the medium. We now accept a huge variety of 3D printers at every price point imaginable. The $300 printer market is a much sought after area to break into — and a common subject in the 3D printing groups on Facebook — with a lot of companies vying for their identify at the table.

Does the Monoprice MP10 Mini manage to break into this market and make a existent change? Sort of ... only information technology's a mixed bag.

A firm beginning

Monoprice MP10 Mini

$300

Bottom line: The MP10 Mini offers a lot of valuable features, with a stable foundation and some wonderfully avant-garde prophylactic features. In that location a few underlying issues, merely if you are patient and persistent, the MP10 Mini could be a actually cracking auto.

Pros

Great toll
Some overnice advanced features
Solid construction

Cons

Will demand a lot of tuning
No actually, I mean a lot of tuning

What y'all'll dearest nigh the MP10 Mini

The MP10 Mini is something of an bibelot. Originally based on the MP10 — Monoprice's large calibration printer, which in turn is based on the CR10 by Creality — The MP10 Mini is a cut-downwardly machine but featuring all the same design features as its large sis. So it'southward the small version of a large version, instead of the other way round every bit is normally the example.

The MP10 series uses a slightly different mechanism than most of Monoprice's printers. It uses the same extruded aluminum struts to create the frame, just instead of using greased rods to movement the build plate and z-gantry, it uses low friction rollers. This is something Creality has been doing for a while at present in its Ender and CR10 models, and it seems to work very well to reduce racket on the prints on these Monoprice variants, besides.

The MP10 Mini has the potential to be astonishing.

When you first accept the printer out of the box, it takes just a few screws to bring it all together, making an extremely sturdy printer. There are as well a lot of squeamish features on the Mini that you would await to run across in a much higher priced machine, features like automatic bed leveling, filament run-out, and, my personal favorite, a quick-release print head.

The print head itself is attached to the gantry with three very strong magnets. This turns out to exist extremely helpful in a number of ways. It makes changing the nozzle much easier, for example, simply information technology likewise means yous aren't probable to interruption annihilation if you get the settings wrong on your impress and you lot crash into the build plate or into the model. The print head only comes loose instead of bending or breaking anything.

I would also say that you desire to proceed an middle out on the filament run-out sensor. This one seems to be especially sensitive and doesn't really like bright colors like white, silver, or articulate. It doesn't work at all when you try to utilize clear. As I used the machine more and more, I chose to disconnect the filament sensor completely every bit all the false positives were making printing annihilation tough.

Despite these issues though, when I finally got the MP10 Mini dialed in and printing well, the results were as expert as whatever printer in its price point and even a few $100 to 200 options. At that place are some really dainty layer lines on the Cyclops model I printed by Wekster, and although I didn't get the number of top layers quite right on Captain Marvel (below), you tin can see the potential in this machine.

What yous'll dislike about the MP10 Mini

My biggest issue with the MP10 mini is the quality when you showtime unbox it. 3D printing isn't new, and affordable printers are becoming more and more common, so new printers should be capable of press excellent prints out of the box. This just wasn't the case with the MP10 that I used.

The starting time thing I print whenever I get a printer to review is the Gcode on the SD bill of fare that comes with it. For those who don't know, Gcode is the file that tells your printer how to print the model — STL, OBJ, or 3MF are the actual models — and near companies include one that has been tuned and generated to give the printer its very all-time chance to impress you. Unfortunately, the MP10 mini couldn't even successfully impress the fortune true cat that comes with the printer, despite several tries, and although the quality of the impress was corking, information technology doesn't affair if information technology can't become through it.

These kinds of problems brand the MP 10 Mini slightly tougher to recommend. In that location are plenty of people out there who dearest to have the time to actually fine-tune a printer and make it their own, and they practice an amazing chore. For $300, the MP10 is a dandy place to first on your 3D printing journey if you have the time, patience, and enough filament to really dial information technology in.

The potential is there, but if you are hoping to print excellent prints out of the box, there are other printers you can consider. The Monoprice Mini Delta works nigh perfectly out of the box, and although the build plate is small, the print quality is amazing direct out of the box.

So should y'all purchase the MP10 Mini?

I'm of 2 minds about the MP10 Mini from Monoprice. I think, given plenty fourth dimension, I could make this printer sit upwards and trip the light fantastic the merry tune of perfect layers, merely practice I desire to? In this day and age of cheap printers, should we have to work hard to create passable prints? Or should we be able to plug it in, press the push button and know that a decent print is going to happen?

If you are looking for a small, yet solid 3D printer for $300, you could do a lot worse than the MP10 Mini. If you stretched your upkeep only a little further to $400, you lot could get yourself the full-size MP10, though, and that has all the same features with a 300 mm x 300 mm build plate, 50 percent bigger than the MP10 mini.

Still, the MP10 Mini has the potential to exist amazing. You just need the patience to become information technology there

Budget printing

Monoprice MP10 Mini

A solid foundation

The MP10 Mini is in that sweet spot for first-time buyers. Information technology's cheap, only with some patience and difficult piece of work, it can produce some cracking quality prints.

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