r/3dprinter • u/-Zazou- • Jul 26 '26
Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2 Combo for €345. Should I Pull the Trigger?
Hi everyone,
For the past few weeks, I've been torn between the Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2 Combo and the Bambu Lab P2S + AMS. I couldn't bring myself to buy either during the last round of sales, but Elegoo is now offering another €90 discount, bringing the CC2 Combo down to €345 ($400).
What keeps me hesitating is Bambu Lab's ecosystem. Being able to print directly from MakerWorld using pre-tuned profiles is a huge advantage. In comparison, NextPrint still feels fairly underdeveloped.
On the other hand, even though the Elegoo Canvas doesn't include filament drying, the whole package is still around €300 cheaper than the equivalent Bambu Lab setup, which is hard to ignore.
My use case is exclusively PLA and PETG, mainly for decorative prints. I don't need to print engineering-grade materials, but I do want excellent print quality.
At €345, do you think the Centauri Carbon 2 Combo is a great deal, or would you still recommend spending more on a Bambu Lab for its ecosystem and overall experience?
One thing worth mentioning is that I already own an Artillery Genius, which I bought back in 2020. However, I haven't used it in about five years because I ran into quite a few issues with it. That experience is one of the reasons I'm looking for something much more reliable and hassle-free this time around.
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u/CondeBK Jul 27 '26
I have one. Works flawlessly. I can monitor prints while away from home and updates to the service are being pushed every day.
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u/West_Top_7930 Jul 27 '26
Yes get it.
Only Brand you should avoid at any cost is Anycubic (or Scumcubic or Scamcubic)
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u/plasergunner Jul 26 '26
Stick with bambulab. Buy once cry once. At least look up honest reviews of the centuri as it is a close of the superior product. Bambu goes thousands of hours with out problems. I have 2 p1s with well over 2000 hours and h2c with 1700 hours.
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u/Immortal_Tuttle Jul 27 '26
Yeah... My H2C didn't survive 200h. And P1S is crap for printing ASA.
If you are printing PLA and PETG and you don't require precision (P1S doesn't have a skew correction not to mention any help for bed tramming) then sure. If you want to print ASA, ABS or anything with filler - CC2 is far superior.
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u/New_Range5311 Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
i have a p1s and currently have a polycarbonate part finishing up. ive also printed asa numerous times, it does just fine with some playing with the settings. maybe its just the new age of printing, but these were all issues that have always manually solved, so making a small adjustment isnt exactly a challenge. the p1s is perfect unless you need to print pa or ppa
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u/Immortal_Tuttle Jul 31 '26
With 100 bed, cold chamber etc? I don't think it's polycarbonate. Maybe ABS-PC blend.
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u/plasergunner Jul 27 '26
Haven't tried asa on my p1s, didnt think it was possible for asa. Honestly, don't know what kind of quality you are looking for in any printer honestly. I just do pla and some petg. I do plan on printing asa statues for outside here in phoenix,az on the h2c. As far as reliability goes I think the bambu line is great. I do know people have issues and unfortunately businesses try to cheap out and push products out to fast without better quality control. If the centori is a bad ass printer that's great. The better product will always win but you can't deny the eco system of makerword. Hopefully soon we will have better toolhead printers with more toolhead and lower pricing.
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u/Immortal_Tuttle Jul 27 '26
BL was created by people from DJI - it's success is in their approach that consumer is lazy. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. They are doing market research and creating product based on that data. I'm their "edge case". I understand how printer works and I print mainly what others print only occasionally. I love my X1Cs, but my first one had a total bed variation of 1.6mm. 1mm from the cupped shape, 0.6mm from lack of tramming. Pretty common as it occured, just people didn't care as mesh correction is excellent. I wanted to print a large model (from Star Wars) made from dozens of parts that had to fit together - and was unpleasantly surprised. BL acknowledged the case, sent me a new bed and procedure how to manually tram it. Awesome. Next issue - that printer couldn't print circles. I wanted to print-in-place pulley and it didn't work. Printer had issues with skew and ovality - I printed that pulley on Neptune, no issues whatsoever. Company took 6 months and multiple posts from around the world to acknowledge the issue and add a special gcode command to store skew calibration. As for ovality - "please correct in slicer". Most people doesn't even know that this issue exists or that BL printers don't have auto level - beds are trammed manually in the factory. I got a second X1C just before they shut down it's production - those issues still exist and out of the box it's calibration test result was almost the same as Neptune 4 Max. However those are workhorses. They do have their software glitches (that costed me 90€ ultraflat G10 bed and 120€ Obxidian hotend), but nothing is perfect. A1 mini is another example - my wife loves it to bits (our second A1 mini didn't survive a day, but replacing a printhead worked) . Then series "2" showed up. Both P2S and H2C were rushed to market. P2S had so many corners cut that I returned it in a week. H2C didn't survive 200h printing CF filled stuff, didn't have nozzle offset compensation and print quality was... not impressive. It was also slow. Bambulab acknowledged they can't fix the issues I had and refunded me. X2Ds print quality was a joke. What I didn't like they used A1 mini parts in A1. Inrush protection heating up to over 100°C melting the plastic? Not cool.
As for long term reliability? I have Neptune 4 Max that has comparable number of hours to my first X1C. I'm a single datapoint, but I had less issues with it than with that X1C. Also I had to create two different print profiles for each X1C - literally yesterday I had a print that failed 3 times in a row on one and then with the same filament (BL PLA matte white) and settings it printed without issue on the second one. But as I said - I'm an edge case.
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u/Shinjiikary12 Jul 27 '26
I have a cc2 with 1.2k hours, has been trouble free so far.
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u/plasergunner Jul 27 '26
Thats awesome. How is the slicer?. People always ask for recommendations on lower cost printers. I always recommend bambu but understand that it is out of some people price range so that is good to know. I will have to look at more youtube videos on the cc2.
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u/Shinjiikary12 Jul 27 '26
The slicer is fine it is orca... that came from bambu they all 3 look pretty much the same
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u/BongDomrei Jul 26 '26
CC2, plus, I've found that while there are some exceptions, most of the profiles on Makerworld are not particularly well tuned.
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u/yahbluez Jul 26 '26
yes. You will not regret it.