Falling within the classification we consider “mid-size” or “medium-format”, the Elegoo Neptune 3 Plus is a robust 320 x 320 x 400 mm build volume printer that outputs high-quality prints quietly.

As with the Neptune 3 Max, the Neptune 3 Plus shares a design and hardware with the Neptune 3 Pro, including a sleek gunmetal grey colorway.

Standout features include a PEI-coated steel print bed, which performs well and is perfectly grippy when you need it to be. Unfortunately, there aren’t guides or pegs to snap the print bed back into place, making it tricky to line up at times, but this is a minor grievance against the excellent value the printer offers.

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Automatic nozzle-based bed leveling takes care of first-layer anxiety (the Neptune 3 Plus creates an excessively thorough 49-point mesh), although you do have to set the nozzle offset yourself.

Elegoo Neptune 3 Plus

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Elegoo’s preemo “standard” size 3D printer, the Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro offers a step up on the Neptune 3 by way of a dual-gear direct extruder, dual Z-axis motors, and a more thorough mesh-bed-leveling routine.

Released in 2022 as part of Elegoo’s top-of-the-line filament printing options, the Neptune 3 Pro goes toe to toe with the likes of Creality’s Ender 3 S1 and Anycubic’s Vyper and Kobra series printers and generally comes out favorably.

It is a quiet, capable printer with smart flourishes, including tidy cable routing, a removable display, and flexible filament placement (with an adjustable filament sensor to match).

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The Elegoo Neptune 3 seems more like a mid-step between the Neptune 2 series and the current 3 Pro/Plus/Max machines that top Elegoo’s filament printing line-up today.

Certainly, the design is closer to that of the Neptune 2, with a slim aluminum extrusion for the Y-axis (not quite as stable as a wider extrusion offers the 3 Pro), plus a frame-mounted Bowden extruder feeding filament to the print head. The extruder is of the dual-geared type, though, pinching filament from two sides for stronger feeding, which is nice.

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Despite the older looks, you do get modern comforts in the form of automatic bed leveling that’s nozzle agnostic – handled by the strain gauge mounting for the hot end – plus a removable PEI-coated steel print bed, silent printing by way of TMC2225 stepper motor drivers, and a removable display.

Elegoo Neptune 3

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The Elegoo Neptune 2S shares a lot with the Neptune 3, design and feature-wise, with the only functional differences between the two being the Neptune 3’s automatic bed-leveling, upgraded UI, and detachable touchscreen.

In the Neptune 2S, which is still offered by Elegoo, albeit in limited quantities, you get a PEI-coated removable steel print bed, a dual-geared Bowden extruder, and a modern 32-bit mainboard.

Power outage recovery and a filament sensor for risky end-of-spool prints round out what was a pretty well-balanced desktop 3D printer.

Elegoo Neptune 2S

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This lesser-known variant of the Elegoo Neptune 2 has one distinct party trick up its sleeve: dual extrusion.

Featuring a two-in-one-out hot end, the Elegoo Neptune 2D can take two different filaments fed by its separate MK8 extruders and channel them sequentially through the hot end into a print. It’s a pretty common low-cost approach to dual extrusion printing, and requires printing strategies such as purge blocks or shields in the print in order to keep the color changes clean.

Elsewhere, the Neptune 2D has a 220 x 220 x 250 mm build volume, silent stepper motor drivers, print resume function and BuildTak-like print bed, all as found on the base Neptune 2 model.

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Elegoo’s first filament 3D printer, the confusingly named Elegoo Neptune 2, presented an assured low-cost option for printing hobbyists, with a 220 x 220 x 250 mm build volume, 32-bit mainboard with silent stepper motor drivers, power outage recovery and a filament sensor.

One feature Elegoo made sure to communicate about the Neptune 2 and its subsequent variants is their energy efficiency, with fans on the printer automatically shutting down when temperatures drop below 50 °C – if you’re at all familiar with the incessant drone the fans on most desktop 3D printers make, this is a pretty nice feature to have.

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A standout in the Neptune series for its unique frame style, the Neptune X is a CartesianXY-head printer, with the print head moving in the X and Y axes and the print bed moving only vertically through the Z axis.

With a boxy, cube-shaped frame, the Neptune X gives the appearance of being a high-speed CoreXY-style printer — but it is not. The design should afford some stability to the printing, although we’ll note the print bed carriage is cantilevered, driven from one side along a single leadscrew and flanked by two rods for support – not optimal to avoid sag on the bed.

The Neptune X has the series’ characteristics of quiet printing thanks to voltage-modulating stepper motor drivers. The X also features a 32-bit mainboard, a frame-mounted Bowden extruder, and supports printing from a full-size USB stick.

Elegoo’s contemporary batch of Neptune 3D printers all feature near-fully automatic bed-leveling. While the outcome is the same, there’s a slight difference in the probes used.

The Neptune 3 uses a strain gauge-based system that registers a point of physical resistance – the printer’s nozzle meeting the print bed – as its method of probing. The Neptune 3 Pro, 3 Plus, and 3 Max all use an inductive probe, which sits alongside the hotend on the printhead and detects the metal of the bed.

The former style of probe is arguably better since it’s nozzle agnostic and doesn’t require recalibration of your offset should you change your nozzle.

For the mesh, a grid of points is measured across the breadth of the print bed, with the number of points changing depending on the particular printer and its print bed size. The Neptune 3 probes a 4 x 4 grid across its 220 x 220 mm build area for a 16-point mesh. The Neptune 3 Pro, despite only having a marginally larger build area at 225 x 225 mm, probes 6 x 6 for a 36-point mesh. The implication here is that the Neptune 3 Pro offers a more comprehensive bed level for better first layers.

As the build volume increases, so does the number of mesh points. The Neptune 3 Plus measures its 320 x 320 mm bed with 7 x 7 readings for its 49-point mesh, while the Neptune 3 Max, with its gargantuan 420 x 420 mm bed, takes a 7 x 9 grid reading for 63 points.

While all of the printers capture a map of the bed and know where to pitch up or down to accommodate inconsistencies in the bed surface, you will still need to set the appropriate bed offset when setting the printer up.

There’s one further, slight difference between the Neptune 3 Plus, Neptune 3 Max, and the rest of the Neptune 3 printers, with those machines and their much larger build plate carriages also featuring spring-tensioned nuts (corners for the 3 Plus, and a grid of 6 for the 3 Max) for an initial leveling before the mesh routine is necessary. This slightly increases the setup work for the two printers. It could be argued that it also increases the risk of inadvertently warping the beds, but the opposite could also be said, helping to counter any warping on the parts as they come from the factory.

All older Neptune series 3D printers do not feature automatic bed-leveling and instead come with corner nuts with springs at each corner of the bed for you to adjust the build plate level. With that said, firmware updates are available from Elegoo to accommodate an aftermarket bed leveling sensor.

From the Neptune 3 Pro and on, Elegoo uses a direct extruder with a dual-gear layout that grips the filament strongly from two sides. The hotend is PTFE-lined, with a maximum temperature of 260 °C – common across all Elegoo Neptune models – and compatible with MK8-style nozzles. There’s a relatively short filament path, making the newer Neptune machines decently compatible with flexible filaments.

The Neptune 3, 3 Pro, 3 Plus and 3 Max are further distinctive for their use of a board in the printhead to simplify the printers’ connections. Instead of having to loom cables from all of the electronic components in the printhead a long distance to the mainboard in the printers’ bases, they instead connect to a board locally in the printhead, which channels all signals and power through a single cable. This can make upgrading components a little easier.

The extruders for the Elegoo Neptune 2, 2D, and X differ slightly, using the MK8-style extruder commonly found on low-cost 3D printers. Their mounting of the extruder varies from printer to printer, with it riding the X/Z carriage on the 2, mounted to the frame for the dual extrusion 2D, and fixed statically to the frame for the X.

Both the Neptune 3 and Neptune 2S use a metal dual-gear variant of the MK8 extruder, which offers better grip, improved durability, and less chance of skipping and slipping when feeding filament in challenging conditions.

With the Neptune series of printers, you get one of two kinds of print beds. From the Neptune 2 through to the Neptune 2D, you get a grippy textured sticker on a fiberboard. These surfaces stick well to materials but are easy to “bake” filaments into with poor bed leveling. Prints that stick too well can stretch and deform the sticker as you pull at the print. It’s a decent enough low-cost solution, but one that’s mercifully been replaced on most printers by flexible, PEI-coated metal print beds, which is exactly what can be found on the Neptune 2S, 3, 3 Pro, 3 Plus, and 3 Max.

The PEI-coated print beds magnetically attach to the print bed carriage and can be removed with a firm pull. The Neptune series makes use of sturdy metal plates, which do well enough to resist warping on large, plate-spanning prints.

While the PEI surface feels smooth to the touch, up close, it’s a craggy, rough, pitted, and pocked surface that allows the molten filament to sink in and anchor to the plate.

By nature of being flexible, when a print is complete, you can pull the plate off the printer, give it a quick flex, and, if it hasn’t already from shrinkage as it cools, the print typically will jump free. It’s best to wait until the print has cooled before removing the plate. Warm plastic deforms, so any remaining bond to the plate could deform the print before giving way.

Elegoo’s first filament 3D printer, the Neptune 2, could be said to have been a bit progressive with its choice of mainboard, with the current top-line Neptune 3 Pro, 3 Plus, and 3 Max – a handful of printers later – all rocking the same board: the Makerbase Robin Nano.

A 32-bit board, the Robin Nano is open source, and easy to find replacements or documentation for. Indeed, documentation is one of Elegoo’s strong suits with this line of affordable printers, with everything from bills of materials to schematics and wiring diagrams available for most (it varies a little from printer to printer). We normally have a nightmare of a time investigating this stuff, but Elegoo, to its credit, publishes many of the details of what it makes on GitHub.

No board remains static for too long, though, so while the board series has remained the same throughout Elegoo’s Neptune series, there are different board versions at play, which is crucial information for configuring firmware updates.

The Neptune 2 launched with the Robin Nano V1.2, which carries a STM32F103VET6 microcontroller unit and two TMC2225 and two A4988 stepper motor drivers. It supports Marlin 2.0 firmware and a touchscreen display. Its stepper motor drivers operate in STEP/DIR mode, meaning it’s not possible to utilize advanced features like sensorless homing, or linear advance.

The Neptune 2S and 2D shipped with the Robin Nano V1.3, with the primary difference being a processor bump and more EEPROM memory.

On the Neptune 3, however, we saw a full version jump up to the Robin Nano V2.0. (Later units jump up an iteration to V2.1.) Also 32-bit, the V2-series of boards offers similar benefits as mentioned above with the V1.3, including greater EEPROM memory to accommodate storing settings locally on the printer, as well as support for a rotary encoder (though the Neptune 3 doesn’t include one) and SPI/UART support for the stepper motor drivers, allowing for features like sensorless homing.

Meanwhile, the latest Neptune series printers, the 3 Pro, 3 Plus, and 3 Max, all use the Robin Nano V2.2. It’s not clear what the difference between earlier Robin Nano V2 boards and the V2.2 is. We’ve reached out to Elegoo for details, but have yet to hear back at the time of publishing this guide.

It’s worth noting that all of the Elegoo Neptune series 3D printers’ mainboards have the capability for Wi-Fi connectivity using a separately purchasable adapter, but it is not a stock feature. Elegoo offers a firmware update to enable Wi-Fi for the Neptune 2 subset of printers, with the X and Neptune 3 3D printers seemingly missing out.

Where upgradability is concerned, all of the Elegoo Neptune series of printers run at 24v, meaning any electronic components you plan to replace should match. All stepper motor drivers are soldered to the board, too, meaning no swapping out to newer or alternate drivers, if that’s something you desire in a 3D printer.

All Elegoo Neptune 3D printers use a version of Marlin, a popular and widely used firmware.

While the printers come preconfigured and ready to print, manually updated firmware may be necessary. Elegoo offers the most recent firmware for all of the Neptune 3D printers on its support web pages.

It’s possible to update new features on the Neptune 2 machines, with forks of the firmware available to add mesh bed leveling and the use of a bed leveling probe.

Firmware updates on the Neptune 3 subset of printers can be a bit intrusive, requiring you to open up the plastic housing of the detachable touchscreen display. Typically though, the firmware update process is one of copying files to the root directory of a microSD card and then booting the printer with the card inserted. Instructions are provided on the Elegoo support web pages.