Which free slicer is best? Slicer battles - best quality print?

Hey guys, TechNiverse here. About to fire up the Ender 3. We're going to print off the same model with the same specs from four different free slicers and compare them. Now the important things to note here are the layer heights are all going to be 0.2 millimeters, infill density is going to be 20 percent, the temperature is going to be 217, and basically they're all saying they're going to take about an hour to print. We'll judge the difference, I did put support, regular support, on each model depending on which slicer it was sliced in. The support will be different, so we'll see that difference as well, as well as the interface of the support with the model. So the basic idea here is not to see which slicer looks the best graphically in my computer, but to see which slicer does a better job of slicing a quality model and a decently fast print. Now all the print speeds are set the same, so any variable in timing should come down to just the slicer's software. At the end of the video we'll compare all four models and see which one we think looks the best. And here we have four very very tiny models. Now don't let the size fool you, they are very detailed as you can tell from this one here. This is going to be our PrusaSlicer, that is MatterControl, this is IdeaMaker, and this last one is Kira. So right off the bat you can tell the PrusaSlicer uses a lot more material for a brim, as does Kira, so that should add to both of their times, not much but slightly. MatterControl had almost no brim at all, I don't know what happened there, it just didn't use one, and IdeaMaker had a very tiny one. Now time-wise PrusaSlicer was 1 hour 13 minutes, I suppose that probably has something to do with the fact that it has all this built-in support that is the longest time of any of them. MatterControl was the second one I printed, that one took about 56 minutes, again a fair amount of support. The support looks kind of funky, I'm curious to get it off of there and see what it looks like underneath. IdeaMaker was the shortest time with 41 minutes, pretty fast, it didn't use much support, and it seems to have come out still pretty well detailed, pretty nice. When I clean out that little part under there I'm curious to see how clean it comes, but so far so good. And then you have Kira. Now Kira was pretty minimalistic in the support side of things, but there was quite a lot more buildup here under the chin than with the natural supports for IdeaMaker, so it did use a little bit more time and it came in at 58 minutes. So if we were to go fastest to slowest it would be IdeaMaker, MatterControl, Kira, and then PrusaSlicer. So I guess IdeaMaker is winning in the speed department, we'll have to compare quality as well, but so far it's not looking too bad. Let me get the supports off and we'll take a closer look at the models. Alright, I've now removed the brims and support, and each model is sitting next to its respective pile of wasted plastic. Basically in terms of as far as waste goes, the IdeaMaker is going to win again. There was less material used, and as you can see in all the models here, the quality is not too far off for any of these, so we'll get into that more in a bit in a minute. But I do have to say that for as little support as the IdeaMaker used, it was just under the chin there, and getting it out of there caused me to actually break the head off. So strength-wise, the support seemed to be stronger than the model, not necessarily your best option. Second best in terms of waste, these two were probably tied. Kira's supports came off very nicely, as did these ones here, pretty easy to remove. So I would definitely put Kira and MatterControl in the top as far as support ease and removal and waste usage goes. This one I kind of disqualified because all these models should have the same strength, and if I had to pry on that support hard enough to bust that head there in the same spot that I pried on all these other models, it just doesn't make me comfortable with the quality of the inside of this print. So going with either Kira or MatterControl would be fine. I'm going to go ahead and sweep away this remainder here, and we'll get a little closer look at the actual quality. Now the support in PrusaMaker, or PrusaSlicer, excuse me, the reason that this one didn't win is because even though there's a nice skin between the model and the support, there is a little too much contact in some places, and it left the most burring on the model. Plus there was a lot of wasted plastic with their over-extensive support system. So next was the MatterControl. This one is very nice. Very little support was actually in contact with the model. It looked like really, really tiny tree supports almost, like branches. They weren't pillars. They were just built up right where they were needed, and it was quite nice, although that did leave a few contact points underneath the chin as well. This model came out looking amazing for how little support it actually had, showing that I could have probably printed all of these with no support and not had any problems, and gotten a little bit better idea of the quality of each model itself. However, if I had done that, I wouldn't have learned about the amount of waste used by each one, and I wouldn't have learned that this model is a little inferior when it comes to strength at that particular point. The last one here is going to be Kira. Kira, always nice. This came out very beautiful, very detailed. You can see the hairline. You can see the nose, the eyes, the chin, the ear, pretty much everything in there, and had just a little bit of support under the chin, but had the least contact of all of them. So I would have to say that Kira probably wins as far as the support goes for strength, but this one was a little easier to remove. So again, I'm going to call this a tie between Kira and Matter Control, because they both did a really good job of keeping the quality of the print without sacrificing strength or scarring from the support that was built into the program. Well, since we know we have two winners, print quality was roughly the same between the Matter Control and Kira Slice versions of this particular model. I'm going to go with the time, and the time on Matter Control was a measly two minutes faster. And while that doesn't seem like much over the course of printing a lot of these, you're going to save quite a bit of time without sacrificing any quality. And the support removal time was honestly about the same. They were both grab and pull. So I'm going to say Matter Control takes this one, and let's move on to the next section. We're going to check out the actual interface of these software programs and see how they compare as well. And because I know the camera doesn't do justice to the details, I am going to mix these up. I have already mixed them quite a bit, so I'm not sure at this moment what exactly is where, but I am guessing that from their defects, I'll be able to pick them out and put them back in the original order that we had shown them, which was Prusa Slicer, Matter Control, IdeaMaker, and then Kira. So let's see if we can do that. Face them all toward the front here. And let's see. Well, right off the bat, I can tell you that the Prusa Slicer one is already in the right place. That's this one right here. And I can tell because of the little defects around the brim and the amount of scarring that is not below the chin, but also around the cheeks. So I'm betting that's Prusa Slicer. Let's see what else we have here. I'm going to bet that this one is Kira because I see a little bit of leftover support from the chin there. So we're going to put that all the way on the end over here. That means this must be Matter Control and IdeaMaker. Now, this one here actually has some support structures left and this one really has none. So I'm going to assume that this is Matter Control, which means that this one here would be IdeaMaker. So now let's see. And the point of this is because I know you can't see the fine details as well in the camera as I can with my eye now. So I'm just kind of just proving that these little marks that I'm talking about are really there and I'm not just imagining things. So Matter Control, IdeaMaker, and Kira. So that's four for four. Yeah. Overall, like I said, Matter Control and Kira for printability and speed. Those are going to be your top two. That's going to do it for this episode of Slicer Wars. Don't forget to catch the next video. We're going to be talking about the interfaces of these four slicers and checking out some of the capabilities. Most of them are pretty similar and capable of doing the same things. There are, however, a few standouts. So stay tuned. And as always, guys, I am Technivorous. Thanks for watching this video. Don't forget to hit the like button. You can subscribe right here by clicking on the icon. And I put a couple of videos up in the corner. One of them is going to be my latest video, my latest upload. And the other one is going to be what YouTube recommends for you. So feel free to check those out. Don't forget to hit that bell for notifications down below. And we'll see you guys next time. Transcribed by https://otter.ai