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With my 3d printer arriving soon I’m looking to buy quality filaments in the netherlands. But on the internet every store says the same (good quality, small tolerances).

How is for example pla from colorfabb compared to form futura or a no brand from 3dfilamenten.nl ?

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Hi,

i have just printed with Colorfabb’s PLA/PHA and had perfect results with this material. The tolerances in the diameter are very good. I can just assume that form futura prints as good.

The problems you might have with cheap PLA are, that the tolerances are larger, therefore you have to adjust the diameter in your settings, if you don’t do this you can have under- or overextrusion in the middle of your print.

Cheap PLA can be oval instead of round in the cross section, then your extruder gear can loose grip and skip on the filament, this would cause the printer to stop extruding.

As last the colors in cheaper PLA can vary a little from spool to spool, also they could change a little if you print at maximum temperature.

I had some other cheaper PLA and what i noticed is, that when i broke a part the color (in this case it was blue) had a white shade at the breaking point.

If you snap the filament you can see the same. As i broke some colorfabb PLA/PHA parts they had the same color on the inside of the print aswell as on the outside.

Also especially PLA can be brittle and cheaper PLA filament can break (the filament breaks, not the print !).

Colorfabb had added PHA to their PLA to make it a little bit more flexible and less brittle, i had issus with breaking while using cheaper PLA but never had such problem with PLA/PHA.

As last i want to mention, that i am not a salesman of Colorfabb or am affiliated with them in any way. I just have not yet used any other premium filament beside theirs, thats why i allways mention them.

By the way you get a discount on Colorfabb order when you have a hub, if you dont have one yet i can send you a code of mine (10%).

-Marius

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I am happy this conversation is being had. While dimensional tolerances and print quality are key issues raised by filament quality there is also a case to be made on the material composition quality. For instance I have been studying the printing reproducibility of one of our printers on two materials; Laywood and Laybrick. An accidental outcome of this study is that not all that is in Laywood or Laybrick are wood and ceramic dust. Foreign particles or contaminants were identified. Can we hold our material producers accountable for quality?

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Worrying indeed! Tony, would you be willing to share some of your results with the community? Thanks

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I’m really happy with form future’s easy fill PLA.

It works on my up! and flash forge with no problems.

I use it also for my Silver investment castings, burns away perfectly.

I had a few colorfab samples, as it works fine on my flash forge(still a bit tricky to keep it sticking on the the printed), it doesn’t work on the up! for me.

Never used it for the investment castings jet.

Maybe you can ask for some samples from both companies to see which is best for you ?

Kevin.