Nice photo! What lens? That look is👌I have a few modern primes and the bookeh is nice but it’s never this uniform.

I can’t speak for other printers, but my X-Max 3 has an absurdly thick aluminum plate

The stock 350mm Voron bed is 5/16" (8mm) thick. It’s quite hefty lol

DTW has areas that look much the same way too. The parking structure can get you quite a distance from the terminal.

What OP meant was volumetric flow, not the extrusion multiplier. Volumetric flow caps the volume of plastic the slicer will ask your extruder to deliver per second. Fiddling with this value can help prevent under extrusion.

What you did by reducing speed is similar, but you could run into issues if you were to modify extrusion width or layer height.

Thanks! I should have looked.

ISO 51,200 is pretty high, which is why there’s the grain/noise. I wonder if whomever took the photo also tried with a somewhat longer shutter speed and/or wider aperture. Both would reduce ISO and thus noise but come with trade-offs. Longer shutter speed can result in light streaks due to motion and a wider aperture will give less depth of field.

Less grain than a shorter exposure? Absolutely. Due to motion you still have to cap exposure duration to a somewhat small number or you’ll start getting light streaking. It would be very interesting to see the exif information for this photo.

I’m a week late and others have already given you some good answers, so here are some quick thoughts.

• compact has two components: the body itself and the lens
• smaller sensors usually result in smaller bodies, but some modern micro four thirds cameras cameras use full frame bodies (looking at you Panasonic) and some full frame bodies like Sony’s A7c are very compact
• Lenses designed for smaller sensors will be more compact for an equivalent focal length, but you’ll only maximize the size benefits if you get a lens designed for the sensor. For example, you can put full frame glass on an APS-C sensor and it will fully function but if you can find an APS-C native lens it will be smaller. This is actually a strike against Canon, Nikon, and, to a lesser extent, Sony as their current mounts are biased towards full frame glass
• Low light has two main components: how slow you can let your shutter go and your lens aperture. If your subject is still you need not worry much about low light assuming you can keep the camera steady via stabilization hand holding or a tripod/monopor. If your subject is moving you’ll need to gather light more quickly. There are two ways to gather light more quickly: more sensor surface area and a wider aperture lens. A full frame sensor generally gives you a two stop advantage in terms of noise, so say a f/1.4 lens on a micro four thirds camera would yield similar results as a f/2.8 lens on a full frame body
• If you consider the prior bullet you can actually make a pretty compact full frame setup. An A7c with sonys 50mm f/2.5 lens is nearly as small as a GM5 with Panasonic’s 25mm f/1.4 lens and the two will achieve pretty similar low light performance. This won’t hold up if you want more reach though. I’m lugging an A9ii around with Tamron’s 150-500 and it’s way bigger than my old D5300 + 70-300 despite similar equivalent focal lengths
• Some of the most compact cameras are out of production. The greatest camra ever made is a GM5 and it fits your form factor well. The smallest interchangeable lens camera I’ve personally owned was a Nikon J5
• Older cameras absolutely still take great photos but tend to give up video capability

I was happy with the performance of my D5200 so it’s a good benchmark and should be easy to beat i think

The amount of ISO you can get out of somewhat newer/higher tier sensors is great. A fast lens on your D5200 would probably help a ton with low light, but being able to push 12,800 ISO combined with a fast lens means that I don’t own a flash for my current body. As a bonus, mirrorless lenses are generally more compact than their DSLR counterparts

For the trip we currently just have our phones which are an iPhone 16 Pro and a Google Pixel 5a 5G that both take pretty decent casual photos. The camera I’m looking for doesn’t need to replace that, but needs to offer significantly better image and video quality.

Cellphones take totally serviceable photos and video given adequate lighting, slow subjects, and “normal-range” focal lengths. I still use a dedicated camera because I have kids that…

• like lower light situation, especially during the winter. Think museums and other indoor attractions, the holiday displays at the local zoo, etc
• play sports. You need both good autofocus and reach for this. I’ve been defacto team photographer for four seasons now

I also find that a dedicated camera puts me in a more creative mood.

That extends beyond just terminal but completely agree that their stock experience is… not great.

Let me assure you this is already happening.

Apologies for the delayed reply, it’s been a week.

Vorons are capable because the base design is pretty good out of the box and because the design is open source. As other companies come up with cool ideas you’ll usually see a mod to adopt them to a Voron. It wouldn’t surprise me if this idea is adopted. Until very recently, things like hot ends were commodity parts made by third parties and not the printer OEMs. This made part availability fairly guaranteed and also feels more open. The good news is that it looks like Bambu will sell these parts at some point.

As for existing options in Voron land, there three popular mods out there for multi-toolhead: StealthChanger, TapChanger, and Mad Max.

It’s normal

This is disappointing. Not because it’s normal, but because so many photos of prints you see on the web extolling print quality are in ideal lighting. It’s misleading at best. I will say surface quality is oodles ahead of my old I3 clone, but this has always miffed me.

I think it’s more visible the thicker your layers are

I do tend to print in chunkier layers. Also thicker extrusions and nozzles…

If you’re printing with ASA, perhaps you could use some light acetone smoothing

It doesn’t really bother me as my prints are functional, but there’s always been this nagging thing in the back of my head regarding surface quality relative to what folks on the internet present they achieve. The photo in this post is guilty of this TBH. The print looks way worse on the bed thanks to a taller printer with top mounted lights resulting in a steep lighting angle relative to vertical surfaces. It’s like going on a picturesque trip only to find out that all the photos you’ve seen online take a lot of liberty with timing (ie super early/late in the day) and/or framing.

Eh. The days of DIY printers both costing less and out performing are a thing of the past. I would argue that Vorons are more capable than say a Baubu, but I digress.

2.4 R2 owner chiming in. I built mine about 3 years ago after window shopping for a year.

Why Voron in 2026?

• They’re fully open source. This has a couple of benefits such as (basically) guaranteed repairability in the future and super easy modability. Basically all the parts are standard, so you should have no problem sourcing replacements. Want to change something? Download the official CAD and remix
• Being open source means there’s a huge quantity of official and unofficial mods available, as well as tons and tons and tons (and tons and tons, but I’m getting tired of digging up links) of commercial hard parts if you want to tinker. Yes, commercial printers also have mods available, and even some hard part swaps, but Voron is next level if you like to tinker. Even if you don’t like to tinker, some mods are fantastic from a quality of life perspective and of course there are many many vendors that will sell you kitted parts
• The printer itself is highly capable in ways that go beyond just being CoreXY. Both the 2.4 and Trident can mechanically get their bed and gantry in plane because they use multiple z-steppers to move the bed (trident) or gantry (2.4) up/down. Bambu’s printers use a single stepper and a belt to connect things
• Even if you buy a BOM in the box you’ll learn a ton building the printer

Why not Voron?

• No official store or kit means you’re going to either rabbit hole who to buy a BOM-in-a-box from or spend a lot of time self sourcing. I personally went with West3D’s configurator
• You’re building a printer from literal nuts, bolts, linear rails, and extrusions. It’s not a hard build, but it is a long build. If you can put together IKEA furniture you can build a Voron, but it’s going to take 20-40 hours
• They’re not the budget proposition they once were
• You’ll spend more time thinking through the build up front (who to buy from, what components to swap, what out of the gate mods, etc). Easy example: want to tune for resonance compensation? Gotta mount/wire up an accelerometer on the toolhead, unless you use one of the many tool-head PCBs that include one
• Cable chains look dope, but wire breaks are real. They’re easy to repair, but they’re annoying. Granted, you can just go umbilical out the gate. LDO’s Nitehawk SB is dope
• You want to go even bigger. You can stretch a Voron taller, but Rat Rigs go quite a bit bigger

Edit: final thought. IMO I do not find myself wanting for “tech” and there’s really not much missing from a Voron out of the gate. Nearly anything a Bambu can do is easily adopted to a Voron if you want to.

Self designed very specific objects are where it’s at regarding 3D Printing IMO. Once you get into the habit of realizing that you can print a part for <x> you’ll find yourself doing it again and again.

Examples I’ve designed and printed include:

• two bluetooth speakers. I’m getting ready to print my first subwoofer
• tons of replacement parts (parts for kids toys, replacement knobs for our stove as the oem ones are $50/pop, etc)
• wheels with TPU tread and pockets for bearings for a fold up wagon. We’ve used that to cart our two kids around for 3 years now

You also find yourself being more adventurous with modifying other things knowing you can print interface parts. For example, our outdoor table had a 1.5" hole for umbrellas. We wanted a larger umbrella, which requires a bigger hole, so I cut a portion of the metal center of the table out and made a plastic adapter. I’ve also done lampshades and a bunch of other odds/ends around the house.

lol, I see. Printer tuning is a very real struggle for some and it happens that tree supports are one of the things that you can run into.

If you’re moving and it’s not windy -20 doesn’t sound that bad. -35 sounds pretty brutal. -20 would also be pretty rough if it’s windy.

I’m a yank whose been stuck between daily highs of 0 F (-17 C) and 15 F (-10 C) for the past month. It’s always amusing shoveling my driveway in the evening after the kids are asleep and I start taking off layers due to body heat + sweat despite it being properly cold. I can’t imagine trying to dress appropriately where you can’t easily retreat inside and try again if you got it wrong the first time. I imagine that sweat is the enemy when you’re out in the elements like that.

In my experience, broken tree branches come from:

• Crazy angles on the supports. This happens when a support needs to ‘grow’ over the print in order reach the thing it needs to support. This ultimately comes down to part geometry, so there’s not a ton you can do here if you can’t change the geometry or orientation of the part
• Poor bed adhesion causing the trunk to separate from the bed. Clean your bed with dish soap and dry it with paper towels. Make sure you have a good first layer by getting your your bed and gantry in parallel planes and double check your z-offset. Bonus points if you can do a bed mesh between prints
• The extruder catching on a branch and breaking it off. This is usually due warping or over-extrusion. Warping can be its own rabbit hole. Over-extrusion is easy to tune for, especially if your slicer has built in calibration aids (eg OrcaSlicer, SuperSlicer, etc)
• An ambitious slicer not making the supports themselves very strong. Slicers these days seem to avoid thin/tall trees, but they’re still usually single perimeter. I’ve configured my slicer to use 0.6mm thick walls on supports
• If you have a bed slinger, tall supports can wobble. Slowing down acceleration/jerk is really the only way to combat this

Obviously, these can all be a bit interrelated.

The support in this print is basically vertical (no crazy angles), I generally have great bed adhesion/my printer can mechanically make its gantry in plane with the bed/I run a bed mesh every print/I use klipper_z_calibration to get a consistent first layer, nothing’s warping and I’ve tuned my extrusion multiplier for this spool of filament, the support itself is strong due to its girth at the base and wall thickness, and CoreXY means that the support doesn’t really move unless the extruder is dragging some.

I agree. In fact, that’s what I tend to do - slice up a design by splitting the body/bodies and printing test pieces where tolerances matter. Things like latches, hinges, pieces that have to fit with one another, etc. I’m not sure how practical this approach would have been for this print due to its final orientation, but it’s a really good practice.

I think I got a bit too comfortable with things going per plan over my last batch of designs :( I’ll also admit to being in a bit of a time crunch. No deadline, but I have younger kids so time to model and print is somewhat limited. This is a good reminder that rushing can actually make things take longer in the end.

Massaging this print to fit wasn’t practical. Despite being off by 1% that’s still 2mm of material to remove over some pretty big spans. I did take a chisel to the cutout, but man is ASA tough. PETG is much easier to do that with lol.

Thanks re: print looks great. It’s super solid, so I’m very happy in that regard. I don’t know about you, but lighting greatly impacts how the surface quality of my prints look. Hard/direct light at a steep vertical angle makes the faces look pretty rough, but more diffuse light coming from the side makes the parts look great. I am not sure if this is normal, especially for a larger CoreXY with long 6mm wide a/b belts, or if this is something I can dig into and improve.

I put this in another reply, but I know not everyone will pop back into the thread so…

I completely agree with your approach and that’s what I would usually do. The print is probably off by 1%, which over these spans is 2mm. Massaging this print to fit isn’t really practical :(

Sadly, almost is relative. The dimensions were off by say 1%, but over larger spans that’s 1-2mm.

I am not at all opposed to taking heat and/or tools to prints to massage them vs tossing the first go and printing fresh, but that wasn’t practical here :(