Elegoo Centauri Carbon review – a new benchmark in home 3D printing has arrived, it’s as simple as that

It’s about time. The most-talked-about new 3D printer in an age is here and Elegoo has really put the cat amongst the pigeons with its new Centauri Carbon FDM machine.

Where to start, where to start? Right up until last week’s official launch the word on the street (well, Reddit) was that users would be ready to jump on board and see this as a legitimate Bambu Labs competitor if the price was right and came in at anything under $500.

Elegoo kept the price under a closely guarded embargo, but from the second I saw it a couple of days in advance of the announcement, my initial thought was it was a typo. Then I convinced myself I had read it wrong and had to open the email again.

We wouldn’t normally start with the price, but here, the price is key so we will break with tradition and get going.

How much is the Centauri Carbon 3D Printer?

Bearing in mind the community would have been happy with anything under the $500 mark – still half the price of the Carbon’s intended market target, the Bambu Labs X1C, when Elegoo announced a price of $299/$299 there was actual shock out there.

Never have we had so much 3D printer for so little money. It’s borderline insane. We are now so close to being able to go to an actual shop, pick a 3D printer off the shelves, and give it to our stupid family member as a gift and not expect to have to deal with playing at being technical support for days on end. The Elegoo Carbon Centauri comes virtually print-ready.

For a fully enclosed CoreXY machine at this cost, does it mean the end of the old-fashioned bed-slinger? It should do.

Note: The initial batch of machines available at Elegoo’s website have all sold out but you can still pre-order. Elegoo is promising delivery before the summer though, so you may have a bit of a wait due to demand. Hopefully they can stock up quicker than that.

The sweet spot

Gone are the (recent) days at this price point of bolting gantries to bed-slingers. No more requirement for stuffing a business card under the nozzle and micro-turning bed screws in a hundred different places to get a level bed. Gone is the nerdish fascination with absolutely having to root the board to get software that is not a disgrace running on it.

This is the start of the future and it looks as though Elegoo has virtually nailed it.

These are bold words but the Centauri Carbon easily elicits them and more. Let’s put the caveat here that it is not perfect and there are things that I would (and mainly will) change) but more of that later.

I have had the Carbon for a few weeks now. Not quite as long as I would like as UPS managed to smash the first one up in transit so I had to wait for the arrival of the second while picking bits of tempered glass up after removing it from the box. Fortunately, box number two wasn’t transported by the Hulk and made it safely.

I don’t really know how it got so badly damaged because, as was evident from the second box the Centauri Carbon comes wonderfully packed and I struggle to see how it picked up the damage it did. I guess nobody reads those large fragile stickers.

Removing it from the box you need to be slightly careful of the tempered glass lid which lives separately from the printer itself in another piece of foam. Ironically it wasn’t this that was broken on the original, but rather the door was smashed from its hinges into a million fragments. Who knows?

Once out of the packaging you can open the door and remove everything there, unscrew the three bolts holding the bed to the bottom of the frame, clearly marked by red stickers, although, weirdly the rear-most and least clear of the three had no sticker on this second machine, whereas it did on the first. That could be confusing if you didn’t know what to expect. But that is it. You also need to connect the screen to the ribbon and twist the side-loading (praise the Lord) spool holder into its socket but other than that, let’s turn it on.

First boot Hello old friend

Upon startup, the Centauri Carbon will run some self-checks, level itself, set up its input-shaping, and all that good stuff. This process takes a surprising amount of time, half an hour to be exact, but once done, it’s done. If you ever want to run it again you can do so from the screen, but I haven’t felt the need.

The self-tests do give off some mega vibrations though and my table was shaking, so you might want to bear that in mind if you have those wine glasses your mother-in-law got you for Christmas perched on the end of it. We have had enough smashed glass for one day.

Once that’s complete you can print. You really can. There are a few models on the machine’s memory but you want to get it up and running on your network via the touch screen, which is decently sized and pleasant to use.

Then you can download Elegoo Slicer, which is the company’s new fork of OrcaSlicer, and control everything from your PC, including setting timelapses, choosing which of the double-sided build-plate you want to print on, and so forth. If you have used OrcaSlicer that part of the software is the same, but the Device tab gives you access to the camera and print settings. It’s very, very tidy. It’s not Klipper or Fluidd, and you can’t root it and install those (yet) but to be honest, I am still enjoying the out-of-the-box feel to the whole thing. Maybe my days of flashing 3D printers can actually come to an end.

I know that won’t be for everybody and some people may be outraged by this, but you can’t exactly do that on Bambu Labs machines either, and they have done alright in terms of sales.

The look

Before we get onto the printing side of things I want to talk about how great it looks. Who wouldn’t want one of these on your bench? The all-metal frame and tinted glass door and roof are more reminiscent of a network cabinet or (and this might just be me) a beer fridge. There is some decent weight to the box too, but the big win is that the spool holder is on the side from the start without mods. That has taken too long for companies to listen, but now, let us never go back to a spool holder at the back.

The door is locked with a strong magnet and feels quite stiff. It doesn’t open much past the 90-degree angle, but that’s fine for me. The glass lid rests on a lip at the top and, some have said theirs doesn’t fit correctly, being fractionally too large to sit flush, but mine was also fine.

The design is finished off with Elegoo’s industrial-looking white markings that we have seen on the Mars and Saturn resin printers of late. Could I live without it saying “Create the Future” on the side? Sure, but it doesn’t spoil things.

Printing This 3D Stormtrooper’s head had one of the best first layers ever

So to it then. How does the Elegoo Centauri Carbon print? The blurb promises a perfect first layer every time, no matter the material. With the printer being fully enclosed with a nice 0.4mm hardened nozzle you can certainly go for some more exotic materials here that you may not have tried before, but most people will be using PLA or PETG so that’s what I used here.

I was so impressed with the first layer I took a photo and posted it on X. I genuinely don’t think I have ever seen anything that good-looking before. And I have had that replicated with everything I have tried.

Playing with @Elegoo_Official 's new #CentauriCarbon – this is possibly the best first layer I have ever seen. pic.twitter.com/ICr7EZfIiu

— Paul McNally (@iampaulmcnally) February 19, 2025

You can see from the photos the prints are great and all these are with zero dialling in, just as a noob might do. So much so I don’t really feel the need to say much more about that. It just works. It just prints. And it just prints great.

One thing to note, I have extensively used and loved Creality’s K1C, and that always gave a warning before printing that if you were using PLA you should keep the door open and the lid off as the increased cabinet temperature could affect the print. You don’t get that here and many people may just close it all up because they assume you have to.

The Spiderman bust from Eastman looks glorious in Elegoo PLA

There is a fair bit of vibration, certainly at faster speeds. I have it next to my Saturn 4 Ultra 16K and I had left some things on top of the lid of that – a scraper and a funnel and they ended up on the floor. I noticed on Elegoo’s online shop you can pre-order some anti-vibration feet. I think I will be doing that.

Future improvements

Not everything is perfect, certainly on this initial batch. The timelapse feature is great but is let down by a poor in-cabinet light. I am going to add some LED strips to improve that, but it would be nice to not have to. The camera is also not as good as it could be, but when you look at the price point, this is perhaps one of the areas that had to be cut back.

I am currently printing a riser for the lid to sit on that has channels for LED strips to go into. While on the subject of the lid, would a hinge kill to add on? By making the lid fully removable I have to find somewhere to put, and not break it. I’d like to be able to just fold it back when I don’t need it closed.

My family all made comments along the lines of, “Is that a new printer, it seems louder than the others.” And I think they are right. Even running silent mode we were a long way from silent. I think there may be some vibration in the frame so I may try some soundproofing to fit my own use case. Many people won’t need that though.

Finally, and this is huge, the Bambu Lab P1 offers its AMS for multi-color printing so will we get multi-color for the Centauri Carbon? Yes we will, later this year we will get a multi-material system and I am told we won’t have to wait long. That is when this machine truly wins 3D printing, for now at least. If Elegoo pulls that off with the panache we see here, then wow.

Conclusion

If like me, you were hoping above hope that the Centauri Carbon might be the printer that finally took what Bambu Lab has been doing and brought it down into a price bracket that everybody was comfortable with, you will be delighted. Whether you are running some kind of Etsy print farm or are just a hobbyist, this is a machine that makes you feel like 3D printing has finally come of age.

It’s probably 18 months since I first got my hands on Elegoo’s last FDM printer, the Neptune 4 Max, and how far the company has come since this is astonishing. No, it’s not perfect but not is your Tesla or your Windows 11 PC.

This is the last thing Bambu Lab needs at the moment. The wolves are at the door.

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