We are firmly in a new era of desktop 3D printing, an era punctuated by smarter, faster, and easier to operate printers. The AnyCubic Kobra 3 just a few short years ago would have turned the entire industry on its head. Taking some of the best features from Voron, Bambu, and Prusa, the Kobra 3 feels less revolutionary and more like it shows exactly where the bar should lie.
The Kobra 3 I tested came with the ACE Pro accessory, an external box that holds up to 4 spools of filament and feeds them into the Kobra 3 providing multi-color/multi-material capabilities. If 4 colors isn’t enough for you, 2 ACE Pro units can be linked for up to 8 colors. While your filament is in the ACE Pro waiting to be printed, don’t worry about it absorbing moisture, the device doubles as a filament dryer.
Unpacking and setting up this bed slinger is fast and easy. Following the on screen prompts the machine will use its collection of sensors to set up the printer for your first print. There is no bed leveling or setting a Z offset, the Kobra 3 uses direct nozzle to bed bed leveling. Other sensors test the resonance of the printer so it can be tuned to run fast (600mm/s print speeds) and accurately without the ringing that used to be so prevalent in 3D prints. Sensors built in can detect filament tangles and nozzle clogs pausing the print for user intervention (something I successfully experienced in a longer multi-material print). There are plenty of other fun aspects to this machine that at some point feel silly going into detail about (quick change nozzles, PEI bed sheets, RFID filament detection, etc) but in the end this just piles on to a great machine.
If I need to find fault there are a couple items mostly around the ACE Pro I would love to see changed. The cable connection between the Kobra 3 and the ACE Pro is on the front of the Kobra and the back of the ACE, this just makes for awkward placement of the two items and a cable that just feels in the way. My biggest complaint would be about the system for dealing with filament changes when doing multi-color prints. People joke about the “poop shoot” on the Bambu machines but the Kobra 3 might better be named the Capuchin as it has a “poop flinging” mechanism to deal with the filament change waste. This can be a bit entertaining at first but when you wake up in the morning with your floor covered in little filament twists, the joke ends quickly. I also don’t see a firmware source for the Kobra 3 either which feels questionable because it’s almost undoubtedly based on Klipper.
At $449 with the ACE Pro and the ease of setup I would easily recommend this printer as a first printer for someone who was looking for something beyond the basics, in fact I would say it’s a steal at that price.