Snapmaker U1, Reviewed: Make Haste, Not Waste

The Snapmaker U1 sounds like a dream so far, doesn’t it? I think the U1’s massive advantage right now is that it drops a reliable solution to the biggest issue of multicolor printing in your lap. That it’s a pleasure to operate, just works, and for barely much more money than the rest, sums up to an impressive package.

Don’t sleep on its multi-material capability, though. The filament pathing is generous enough to accommodate flexibles and brittle fiber-filled filaments, too, letting you combine up to four materials types in a print, not just colors.

We typically test a mix of the manufacturer-provided materials with their profiles, plus “generic” material profiles for the glut of random filaments we have in the lab.

Of course, we’re clear about the fact that these things can be tuned, settings changed, et cetera. The Snapmaker U1’s baseline print quality, while good, for the most of our testing suffered with some motion-based layer inconsistency issues.

We can see the print bed moving a lot to maintain a level layer, and frequent rerunning of the bed leveling routine seem to be necessary to keep a good squish for first layers. It stands to reason that issues should creep in from there. A firmware update late in January seemed to fix the layer inconsistency issue, which was great to see.

Are such things a deal-breaker? No. I don’t think anyone is interested in the Snapmaker U1 because they necessarily expect the prints to beat out something like the H-series from Bambu Lab. You are interested in the U1 because it banishes mid-print purge poop to the dustbin of history and it achieves this spectacularly.

Not needing to purge each nozzle at filament change because each filament has its own nozzle is exactly the convenience you would expect it to be. Across our printing, comparing from time to time against competing systems such as the Bambu Lab P2S and Creality K2 Pro, the Snapmaker U1 consistently trumps them both for print speed and material wastage.

These benefits are not exaggerated. A nozzle- or toolchanging system will simply beat a single nozzle system in every single comparison; swapping the tools instead of withdrawing the filament, to feed a different one and then purge the nozzle for the next clean layer is quicker, and necessitates less waste. Fact.

We can’t put a fixed number on how much better it is – Snapmaker says up to 5x, but the efficiency doesn’t scale linearly. Your mileage will vary. The only other printers on the market that offer that kind of efficiency cost multiples of the U1, with the closest in terms of design being the Prusa XL ($3,899 for five toolheads). Ironically, the U1 bests it for sheer convenience of use when it comes to actually interacting with the printer, like loading filaments. The Bambu Lab H2C ($2,399 for seven active nozzles) looms large as the only current alternative, which costs more, can do more, albeit at the marginal sacrifice of nozzle change speed. It’s also shipping right now, which, at the time of writing, the new orders of the U1 won’t be for some time still.

For preparing prints, Snapmaker has turned to the popular community-run Orca Slicer as the basis for its slicing software. Anyone making the jump from Bambu Studio, PrusaSlicer, or, well, Orca Slicer itself, will feel at home in Snapmaker Orca.

The device management page offers basic control over the machine, as well as direct access to the U1’s storage, camera based fanciness like timelapse recording and, as of an update pushed to the machine late in our testing, “AI” spaghetti monitoring which. From our limited contact with it, it works.

The camera feed isn’t a smooth video, but is reasonably crisp. It’s certainly enough to check on prints.

Logging in to a Snapmaker account is required to connect and bind the printer to your profile. There’s a LAN mode too, letting you take the printer off the internet and restrict it to your local network. You can also forego all that and shuttle prints to the printer via USB (not provided).

The expected app is present, too. Available on Android and iOS, the Snapmaker app gives you an at-a-glance view on the connected U1, provided you have the printer bound to your account. At the time of writing, the behaves a little unpredictably, asking you to log in even when you technically already are. You can use single sign-on (Google, Meta, or GitHub) to register into Snapmaker’s ecosystem here, which is convenient and keeps things a little more secure.

Helpfully, you can dive into video tutorials for maintaining the machine and replacing components – it’s quicker than navigating the company’s website, even if the information is just opening in an in-app pseudo-browser. A support ticket system is present, too, letting you keep tabs on issues and your history of interaction with the company about your machines.

Of course it is. If you’re not prepared to shell out for the Bambu Lab H2C or wait for (and then also shell out for) the Prusa Core One+ INDX, then the Snapmaker U1 is your only option for this kind of multi-material efficiency right now. And at around half the price of those systems, it more than delivers, achieving its core promise of cutting the waste of multicolor printing and then some.

It’s pleasant to use with enough thoughtful touches to make you appreciate it as a daily driver over other printers you may have standing next to it. The build volume is ample enough to tackle larger projects like face masks and helmets (the gold standard of “is my printer big enough?”), and the count of four filaments for active use in a job tracks with the “basic” level of capability set out by AMS-style multi-material units.

The hard cap on usable filaments might be a dealbreaker for hardcore color printerers. Other brands do let you go to much higher total filaments counts, but at the cost of additional hardware and waste when printing. The general print quality from our testing seemed okay enough, but is still evolving.

Snapmaker will improve it through updates. We’ve experienced this first-hand during our time with the U1. And even if they didn’t, they hand you the keys with the “advanced mode”.

Snapmaker isn’t new to the game, despite how fresh the U1 feels. Once third parties jump in and start making nozzles and other accessories for it (dare we say it, but toolheads?) things will really get interesting. The ball is in Snapmaker’s court to make the most of this momentum, because I can guarantee that beyond what’s publicly known, the other brands that operate in the U1’s price point are making moves on their own toolchangers.

Snapmaker U1

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