Light and compact; this printer is ready to go straight out of the box, nothing to bolt together and no connectors to connect. It comes with a single Allen key although this can only remove the touch screen, the rest of the screws are all Philips head of varying sizes. The chassis is excellent with very little movement whilst printing, and the move from SD to Micro SD keeps the small form factor throughout.
The touchscreen is a massive improvement over the Maker Select Plus, and has simpler interfaces with less that can be accidentally touched or reset. The only annoying thing is the close button on the print screen, being small and in the top right corner will make it awkward to touch if you have larger fingers.
The filament loading is great. The feeder is on the top and securely fastened to the chassis of the printer and takes it through a tube to the hot end. The only issue of this is that if you run low and the filament goes past the feeder, it can be a pain to extrude or retrieve. The tube does unclip from each end which makes it easier to get at the filament. Just be careful if running new filament in if you haven’t removed the old one as it can easily jam. I ran out during a print and had another roll of the same filament ready to go and put it on to chase the end through the pipe; they caught each other and it jammed.
The addition of Wifi is greatly appreciated, although the companion app leaves a lot to be desired and a camera only really features on much higher end printers. It makes checking the status of the print a lot easier when the printer is in another room or building and you don’t want to keep making the trip to check on it. It took a few attempts to connect but didn’t lose connection once it had.
One downside I have found is that the auto leveling is not the most accurate, and from what I know at the moment; this can’t be over-ridden. The overall height of the build plate can be, but not the individual corners. I’m not sure why this is, perhaps the magnets are the cause. The build plate seems to be a serious issue with these; mine came both warped, and upon further investigation, also cracked. This appears to be an alarmingly common issue with these printers, as well as the Wanhao printer it’s a rebrand of. Which highlights two flaws of Monoprice; firstly (again) their quality control, these are genuinely nice printers and print beautifully – if only they worked properly. Second; their customer support is atrocious. Buy directly from them at your own risk, they highlight that you should email them if you have any issues rather than the reseller (I bought through their Amazon page – yay Prime!) it took them a week to respond to my emails and eventually said it wasn’t their problem and they couldn’t help. Amazon took 30 seconds. But it keeps the cost down of having minimal employees so it’s a trade-off, and make of it what you will.
I really like my Select Mini V2 and would recommend it over the Maker Select Plus. I would say it prints more consistently and the build plate heats up better and more uniformly than the larger plate of the Plus. If you can live with the smaller build area, and get lucky enough to be shipped one with a straight plate, this is one of the best printers around for £200. Its size makes it ideal for a desktop printer. If you really need the bigger build volume, the Maker Select Plus is a great start for not much more moolah.
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