AstroPrint’s 2019 3D Printing Reliability Awards

AstroPrint is announcing today the awards for best-in-class 3D Printers, based on usage from our awesome community. This past year the AstroPrint servers have been VERY busy, thanks in-part to the more than 100 new, highly passionate, 3D Printer users that joined each day!

With nearly 1 Million prints & 80 tons of filament printed in 2019, we are proud to announce the awards go to…

Best 3D Printer
Best 3D Printers 2019

Most Reliable 3D Printers (by % of successful prints)

1/ Taz 5 by LulzBot – 77.6%
2/ Replicator by Makerbot – 76.3%
3/ TAZ 6 by LulzBot -74.5%
4/ RF1000 by Renkforce -73%
5/ Creator Pro by FlashForge – 68.6%

Honorable Mention: The Select Mini by Monoprice scored 68.0%, and almost made the top 5. For such an inexpensive 3D printer, that’s pretty good!

Award Criteria: For statistical reasons, we only included printers with more than 500 prints on AstroPrint during 2019.

More Honorable Mentions: The below printers have some very impressive stats, but did not have over 500 prints during 2019. Keep your eye out for these moving up the list for 2020!

1/ Scalar S & XL by 3D Modular Systems. Scalar S & XL score respectively 95.2% and 85.7%.
2/ The R1 by Tresdpro -83.7%
3/ Wanhao Duplicator 4 -81.5%.

The global print success rate for this year is 61.7%.

Reasons for Print Failure (by reason given)

1/ Object detached 43%
2/ Bad quality 27%
3/ Other reasons 22%
4/ Not enough material 8%

Some of the common “Other reasons” include: Printer test, incorrect object size, configuration issues, bed calibration problem, and temperature issues. Our personal favorite reasons: “I don’t want a raft. I’m not on a river!” & “I just f!@#$d it up. LOL”. Glad it wasn’t our fault!

A Few More Interesting Stats from 2019:

Note: The numbers below are stats related to HOME USERS of 3D Printers. We will publish stats for PROFESSIONAL use in another posting. Obviously, professional users print A LOT more.

The average printer prints 2.6 objects per month.
The average printed object weight is 87g.
The average 3D printer is busy 11 minutes per day.

So, you can see that for home users, more small objects are printed than large objects.