Old thread, but perhaps still worthwhile to respond.
I have been 3D printing close to three years. That might not sound like very long, but in that time I have made over 3000 prints and almost 15000 hours. Many of those were prints that took more than 24 hours to print.
I have several printers, two of which are Creatbot DE Plus printers. I bought them because I wanted/needed a big printer. I did bombard Creatbot with lots of questions about their printers before making the jump because there are few reviews on the Creatbot printers and some of those are actually not that positive.
I have no experience with the Creatbot DX printers and I cannot comment on those, but these seem to be an older design with a different print head construction and a fairly standard X/Y-axis movement system. The construction on the DE/DE-Plus printers uses very solid guide rods and a very smart movement system (without separate X-axis rods).
My first DE Plus printer is now six months old. That’s not that much, but it has already accumulated 2570 printing hours.
My second DE Plus is less than two months old (57 days as of December 27th, 2017), but it already has 991 printing hours.
(That’s printing 13 hours & 17 hours on average per day respectively, 7 days a week). Most likely, that is much more than most 3D printer users will be using their machine.
So far, my Creatbot printers have proven to be extremely reliable and sturdy. I have had very few issues so far. The extruder works very well and the printers are relatively quiet. I have had a few clogged nozzles, usually after changing material types (ABS to PLA or PETG to PLA or vice versa). Or using too much retraction (on the Creatbot, 3-4mm should be enough).
Print quality is actually better than I expected.
I did remove the Builtak surface from the printbed though and prefer to print directly on glass using 3D Lac for adhesion. This works very well.
Even though these are big printers (the build volume of 400x300x420 mm is SIX TIMES larger than a UM2), I use the printer for small prints as well. For example, early November, 2017, I finished a large order consisting of 3200 small ABS parts that took more than 700 hours to print.
Although the Creabot printer lack some of the features that some new printers have like WiFi, camera, touch screens etc, they have two features that have really proven themselves. The first is a filament problem/out detector and a power off restart function. In practice, I have found these to be very usefull. If your filament runs out (or breaks), the printer will pause and wait for you to correct the problem. When you have a power outage, the printer also allows you to continue where it stopped. Both functions have proven their value to me.
I have looked at the Ultimakers several times and though the quality is excellent, I have always found them to be quite small and some parts seem to be rather thin/fragile looking.
For the record, I have been satisfied with the Creatbots in such a way that I ordered my third Creatbot this month (the DE model with the 400x300x300 mm build space) and am expecting delivery this week.
When it arrives, it will be put to work almost immediately.
