3D printers beta · Creality
Owners keep the Ender 5 because it produces solid prints and because working on it teaches them how 3D printers actually function, a trade-off most of them make willingly.
Print quality is the clearest praise owners return to. Several describe dialing in settings and achieving consistently good results, and a number of long-term owners say that addressing heat creep with an all-metal hot end turned an inconsistent machine into a dependable one.
Reliability is where owners are divided, not uniformly negative, but divided enough that it warrants attention. Some owners report that the stock hot end is the central failure point, with heat creep causing clogs until it is replaced. Others, after making that swap and tuning their settings, describe the machine as solid. The out-of-box experience varies more than the price suggests it should.
Pick up to three. You get a page with just those, side by side, on the subjects owners raised.
After the first few months, owners settle into a rhythm of incremental modification. An all-metal hot end tends to come early. After that, some add a BL Touch or dual Z-axis hardware. Owners who go through those steps describe a machine that holds its settings and produces repeatable results. The build volume gets mentioned often as something that keeps earning its place on the bench long after novelty fades.
What owners keep adjusting to is speed. At stock settings, 40 to 60 mm/s is where several say it runs cleanly, and owners who want faster output describe needing significant hardware changes to get there. For those who treat the machine as a project, that is part of the appeal. For those who mainly want finished prints, it is an ongoing calculation.
The hot end is the most reported failure point in the long-term accounts. Heat creep causes clogs, and several owners trace most of their failures to this single component. The consistent fix across accounts is replacing the stock hot end with an all-metal unit. Owners who do that describe the clogging problem as effectively solved, and several say reliability improved sharply after that one change.
Long-term accounts beyond one or two years are thin in this sample. The accounts that exist skew toward owners who are comfortable modifying hardware, so the experience of someone running the machine largely stock over multiple years is not well represented here. That gap is worth noting before drawing firm conclusions about longevity.
Nothing has a clear majority against it yet. Counted from the owners who raised each subject, not from everyone. A subject is judged once at least 4 owners raise it.
12 more subjects came up from fewer than 4 owners each, which is not enough for a fair reading. To see how it stacks up, compare it with another machine.
The same owner, asked again at each point. Fills in as owners answer.
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Public discussions we read and summarised in our own words. Nothing here was submitted to Still Kicks.
Counted from public accounts by people who said they own it, and summarised by Still Kicks in its own words. Not a manufacturer claim, a lab test or an estimate.
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