Creality K2 Plus review: a 350 mm heated cube

Buy the Creality K2 Plus for the box it prints in, and treat the four colors on top as a bonus. It heats the chamber around a 350 by 350 by 350 mm build volume to 60°C, the setting Creality gives ABS and ASA. As a multicolor machine it is slow and wasteful next to a printer that swaps whole nozzles.

So the buyer is somebody printing car brackets, enclosures or cosplay armor in one piece. If that is not you, the 3D printer shortlist has a smaller enclosed Bambu that suits most people better and a Snapmaker that changes toolheads for color work, and its ABS pick is the QIDI Max4, set against this one below. The K2 Plus Combo is the printer plus one Creality CFS, a four spool feeder, and four 500g spools of Creality's RFID filament.

We read Creality's spec sheet and parts pages, three hands-on reviews, and the comments under nine YouTube videos about Creality's K2 printers, where 29 people name a K2 Plus as their own (how we count).

K2 Plus build volume: a 350 mm large format 3D printer

The printer alone is 495 by 515 by 640 mm and weighs 35 kg net. With the CFS on top it stands 916 mm tall, and the Combo ships at 51 kg gross. Plan on two people to lift it from the carton.

Look at the lid before you look at the bed. Tom's Hardware found the cables in the box too short to put the CFS anywhere but the glass lid, and lifting that lid for maintenance means powering down and unplugging the CFS first. With those cables the printer and CFS stack to 916 mm, and spools drop in through the top of the CFS, so leave headroom above that or buy Creality's longer CFS cables or its CFS workstand.

Motion system: step-servo CoreXY

FOC step-servo motors drive X, Y, Z and the extruder, with acceleration rated up to 30000 mm/s² and the belts tensioned by a pressure sensor. Two independent Z motors correct bed tilt, and the printer rechecks its level before each print. Tom's timed a speed Benchy at 15 minutes and 56 seconds and still saw the machine jiggle on fast prints.

Hotend and max temp: 350°C, and a long melt zone

A dual gear direct drive extruder with hardened steel gears feeds a tri-metal nozzle rated to 350°C, with a hardened steel tip for carbon filled filament. Creality rates 40 mm³/s of ABS at 280°C. The nozzle is proprietary and does not fit the K1, though Creality and Amazon both stock it.

That long melt zone is also what makes color changes expensive, which the CFS section below counts.

Heated bed: 120°C, and the 15 minute soak

The bed reaches 120°C, a textured PEI sheet on a magnetic 5 mm aluminum plate. Its quirk is warm-up. Tom's needed a good 15 minutes of heat soak for a clean first layer on large prints, a flaw it had not noticed on small ones. Let the bed sit before a print that fills the plate.

Creality CFS: four spools, and the purge bill

One CFS holds four 1 kg spools, 197 to 202 mm across and 42 to 68 mm thick, in a sealed box with desiccant and a humidity readout on its front. It does not heat them. Up to four CFS units chain for 16 colors, and the Combo includes one.

Every swap purges, and the K2 Plus purges more than its rivals. On a three color dragon head with 206 color swaps, Tom's found Creality Slicer 6.0 needed 121.7 grams of purge against 99 grams from Bambu Studio's default settings on a P1P, and a full size dragon threw away 207 grams of waste, plus 17 more in the purge tower, to print a 205 gram model. That was before Creality Print let you set purge volumes color by color, which Tom's later K2 Pro review says it now does, though light colors still need a hefty purge.

HowToMechatronics printed three hearts weighing 83 grams and swept up 350g of purge. TechRadar came away thinking waste was reduced, but the grams above are what the scale said. Plan on the purge outweighing the model when a print changes color on most layers.

Color costs time on a single nozzle. TechRadar's standard Benchy took around half an hour and its four color one 8.5 hours. Against other single nozzle machines it is quick, and Tom's dragon head finished 56 minutes ahead of the P1P.

Batch several copies on the big plate and the purge per part falls, because the waste follows the number of swaps.

Enclosed and heated to 60°C, and PLA with the door shut

An active heater holds the chamber at up to 60°C, behind a glass door and lid, with an air purifier, and HowToMechatronics printed an ABS bench vise at 260°C nozzle, 100°C bed and 50°C chamber.

The catch runs the other way. Tom's found the PLA chamber default is 35 ℃, the chamber would not reach 30C with the door shut, and a clog came from testing PLA closed. Its advice is to close the door only for ABS or nylon. If PLA is most of what you print, expect to run with the door open, because the closed box holds its heat. HowToMechatronics describes the printer holding PLA around 30 degrees by itself, but Tom's measured that it could not get there closed, and we follow the measurement.

Materials it runs, and what the CFS refuses

Creality lists PLA, ABS, PETG, PA-CF, PLA-CF, PET, ASA and PPA-CF, and its tested list adds TPU90A and TPU95A. The printer's page says the CFS feeds PLA, PETG, ABS, ASA, PET and PLA-CF, Creality's CFS store page adds PA-CF, and both rule out flexible TPU and damp PVA.

TPU feeds from outside the CFS, through the printer's single filament entry, and the bolt-on side holder is for a spool that does not fit the CFS. Tom's jammed a stiffer TPU in the CFS tubing, then printed it fine from a freestanding spool once past a slicer bug over the external spool's color.

What 29 owners report

Eleven of the 29 report a fault on their own unit. Two had a bearing go: one at six months and 200 hours, which ended with Creality replacing the whole printer, and one on a printer now at 3397 hours, which needed a full teardown and was fixed with free parts. Two report extruder trouble, one whose unit "completely fails to retract filament, such as in color changes". One has a bed bowed by at least half a millimeter that will not hold a first layer. The rest are a clog, a jam, a CFS part sent for repair, color prints that errored from day one, a failure after two months and early faults since resolved.

Seven of the 29 report CFS errors, quirks or repairs. Support splits evenly, five good and five bad, and three say a part they needed is not sold.

The long runs are real too. One owner is past 5,000 hours with every early issue resolved, and bought two more. Another has run one for 14 months and calls it perfect.

Creality runs a Klipper fork with root access and a Fluidd web page. The cloud is optional for files, which also go over LAN or USB. Failure alerts on your phone need Creality Cloud and its app.

K2 Plus vs K3, K2 Pro and QIDI Max4

Creality's K3 is on preorder with four nozzles. A nozzle change takes 4.8 seconds and a color change 15, and Creality says that with four colors or fewer it skips most of the purge, a lab figure for a printer still on preorder. It builds 260 by 260 by 260 mm, and its chamber seals only with a Top Cover sold separately. For color work on parts that fit 260 mm, wait for the K3. For bigger parts in ABS, the K2 Plus ships closed and heated.

The K2 Pro shrinks the idea to a 300 mm cube at 20,000 mm/s², with a 300°C nozzle, a 110°C bed and step-servos on X, Y and the extruder only. Tom's rated it a touch below the Plus and easier to live with, but its TPU prints came out under-extruded, even fed from the external spool. Tom's did run PLA and PETG in it with the door shut. If 300 mm fits your parts and you need neither TPU, a nozzle past 300°C nor a bed past 110°C, buy the Pro.

The QIDI Max4 Combo is the nearer rival: 390 by 390 by 340 mm, a 370°C nozzle, a chamber to 65°C, and a QIDI Box that dries filament with heat, up to 65°C, while it prints. On bed size, nozzle heat, chamber heat and drying it wins, which is why it holds our ABS slot. Its Polar Cooler, an external unit that blows cold air onto the extruder to help PLA in a closed chamber, is sold separately on Amazon.

Smaller and simpler, the Bambu Lab P2S Combo has a 256 mm bed and an AMS 2 Pro that dries spools between prints. A buyer who prints PLA and PETG and nothing bigger than a shoebox will be happier with it.