Creality K2 Pro Combo 3D printer review: A polished performer

This one should have been first.

Tom’s Hardware Verdict

Creality’s K2 Pro Combo 3D printer is a mid-sized, four-color speedster with a lot of polish, but not quite as good as the earlier K2 Plus.

Pros

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  Four color printing

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  Impressive speed

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  Heated chamber

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  Step-servos on the X and Y axis and the extruder

Cons

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  Printing TPU is challenging

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  Long, high-flow hotend requires more purge waste

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  Cables to CFS are too short to allow installation anywhere but on top of the printer

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  Expensive

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The Creality K2 Pro is the smaller companion to 2024’s massive K2 Plus, which was Creality’s first foray into four-color Core XY 3D printing. We’ve been waiting a long while for the K2 and K2 Pro, which are a more manageable size and price. We first saw the smaller K2s at Rapid TCT this year, but only recently got our hands on one for review.

Creality’s naming system for the K2 lineup is misleading and confusing. The K2 is about the size of a Bambu Lab X1C, but bigger than the first Creality K1, which stuck to the old Ender 3 220 x 220mm build size. The K2 Pro is the size of a K1 Max at 300 x 300 mm, and the K2 Plus is a 350 x 350 mm-sized beast. Confused? So are we.

All that aside, the Creality K2 Pro really shows how far we’ve come since the old Ender 3. Now we expect printers to work out of the box and produce flawless multicolor prints, all without tuning, modding, or going through voluminous test prints with every change of filament. The K2 Pro with its CFS box did just that. It has excellent print quality, even though it produces a lot of purge waste due to its high-flow nozzle. Other than a bit of trouble with TPU, the K2 Pro pleasantly surprised me with a long run of perfect prints and no fails.

The list of features packed into the K2 Pro is impressive. The sturdy die-cast aluminum frame sits on squishy vibration-dampening feet. The machine is fairly quiet with the door closed, and the chamber cooling through the air purifier is good enough in practice to run PLA and PETG without the door open. Chamber heating does take some time to reach its maximum temperature of 60 degrees, but it makes printing ABS and PC (Polycarbonate) a breeze. Dual AI cameras for failure detection and flow compensation, a high flow hotend, step-servos on the X, Y, and extruder, smart auto leveling, which taps only the area to be printed on, and the CFS is the easiest loading filament system on the market.