Not necessarily. If the flow is slightly too high then you’ll get inconsistent results like this. I had this happen as well and it drove me nuts until I went through Orca’s flow rate calibrations like 4 or 5 times.

God that sucks. I’m sorry you have to deal with that. They truly are racing to the bottom.

The mainboards are unfortunately the common thread with all the issues I have with their printers. My Neptune 3’S mainboard has a well documented fault that they refuse to admit to and would not replace.

The Mars 5 Ultra that MC took back had a faulty board, and the replacement board was also faulty. It was three months of arguing, pics, video, and escalations before I told MC the story and they took pity on me and returned it. Elegoos concession was to send me the smallest bottle of their cheapest resin for a printer I no longer had.

I will never recommend an Elegoo printer after the last two I had. Both broke in unique ways and I got no support for either one. It took MicroCenter going above and beyond to resolve the issue with one by doing a return well past the return period. The manager was horrified when I gave her the extremely long and exhausting story of dealing with their awful support. The other printer is just a pile of parts now.

I picked up an Anycubic Kobra S1 and its been pretty great so far, though my bar is pretty low at this point, TBH.

That being said, they do use their own version of OrcaSlicer, but it works well enough for me, and you can flash some additional firmware into the printer to open it up more.

I’m glad there are 3rd party options. Elegoo shouldn’t be rewarded for making a modular device less so just to sell more bits at once.

It’s to force people to buy the whole hotend. More revenue for them. Elegoo has been speed running a race to the bottom in the name of profit, so this isn’t surprising to me at all.

After Elegoo provided the single worst customer service experience I’ve ever had, I strongly recommended anyone but them. To replace the Neptune that we had so many issues and lack of support with, we picked up an Anycubic Kobra S1 that’s been great. Would recommend for the price. Enclosed CoreXY, so it prints ASA and PETG very well without needing extra enclosures.

Avoid Elegoo like the plague. Horrible customer service. Literal months of fighting, explaining the problem over and over, and four escalations before the ticket was just closed.

We got an Anycubic Kobra S1 to replace the Elehoo junk and its been fantastic so far. They also have a 4.0 vs. Elegoo’s 2.3 on Trustpilot.

I’m not surprised. I’ve avoided Bambu like the plague due to their other issues with privacy and locking things down. I rolled the dice on Anycubic since they have a good Trustpilot score and it would be hard to be worse than what I’ve been put through with Elegoo. So far the Kobra S1 has been working pretty well for me.

I hope so as well. It definitely isn’t tied to their release. I’ve escalated four times and have gotten progressively worse customer service each time. I’ve never had to repeat myself so much before someone would actually read what I was writing. That includes Creality’s notoriously awful service.

Just pray you never need customer support from them. I’ve been dealing with three months of some of the worst service I’ve ever dealt with. Lies, false promises, offers that are taken back because they failed to check receipts, and no real apologies for anything they’ve done. Just be careful and prepared to handle your own issues. Especially with their motherboards, which are notoriously awful.