After playing with the Printrbot Jr. for about a year, I decided it was time to get a slightly higher-end printer to start experimenting with.

Chris and Cyndi recommend the UP! Plus and UP! Mini 3D printers, so I figured I’d get one of those two. The UP! Mini was on sale through Amazon Prime for $829, which seemed like a reasonable price for a pre-assembled printer.

Here are some pictures from the initial unboxing.

One of the things I noticed immediately was how much stuff the printer came with. Gloves, tons of wrenches, a set of wire snips, a scraper, and a bunch of other accessories came in the box. The printer also comes with a small spool of white ABS, which was a pleasant surprise.

The set-up process is pretty painless. The UP! had a bunch of foam inside the printer that was used to stabilize the internal parts during shipping. Removal was easy, and pretty funny, because of all of the weirdly translated Chinese-to-English labels.

Most of the shipping clips and many of the internal parts of the printer are 3D printed, which is pretty cool!

The extruder is designed really well, and is WAY different from the extruders I’ve used on the Printrbot.

Setting up the software was pretty straight-forward, which I was happy about. I had read that there were issues with OX 10.9 Mavericks, which is what I run on the Macbook Pro I use to control my printers. Luckily, everything worked well, although there were more funny translation issues with the software prompts.

Something I wasn’t really prepared for were the “rafts” that the UP! printers use. Instead of printing directly to a platform, they will print a “raft” of removable material onto the platform, and then print the model on top of that. The material peels off easily enough, but it seems very wasteful.

My first print went great! This octopus model generally takes about an hour and a half on the Printrbot, and the UP! finished it in under 40 minutes! I was blown away with how fast, accurate, and efficiently the UP! printed this model.

Overall, I’m really impressed with this printer. Having learned on a kit printer and being used to open-source software, I immediately noticed that the UP! software allowed for much less overall control of the printer. Repetier allows for complete control of the servos, extruder temp, etc, while the UP! software really isn’t nearly as comprehensive.

Have you ever used an UP! printer? What are your thoughts on the software as it compares to software like Repetier?