The XYZprinting da Vinci Mini sells at a bargain price for a 3D printer, $289.95, but provides a more-than-satisfactory user experience for the newbies for whom it's designed. The da Vinci Mini is easy to set up and use, and in our testing consistently printed objects of good quality for the price, with no misprints. Its build volume is modest, its software occasionally stumbled when I tried to launch a print, and completed prints were sometimes difficult to remove from the print bed, but none of these are serious problems. The da Vinci Mini's combination of rock-bottom cost, easy setup, and good print quality and consistency are enough to make it our first Editors' Choice consumer 3D printer.

Pricing

Of the handful of consumer-oriented sub-$500 3D printers we've reviewed, the da Vinci Mini is the best. It is priced even lower than the XYZprinting da Vinci Jr. 1.0 ($463.48 at Walmart) I reviewed last year, and has the same build dimensions as that machine but slightly better print quality and less-serious software issues. The Mini is more reliable in printing than another budget model, the New Matter MOD-t 3D Printer ( at Amazon) , which had several misprints in testing despite having excellent print quality for the price. The M3D Micro 3D Printer ( at Amazon) is tiny and cute, but unloading filament from its internal bay proved surprisingly onerous.

Design and Features

The da Vinci Mini, colored a bright pumpkin orange with black trim, measures 14.2 by 15.4 by 13.2 inches (HWD)—slightly smaller than the da Vinci Jr.—and weighs 24.3 pounds. Its build area (5.9 by 5.9 by 5.9 inches) is similar to those of other budget 3D printers we've tested, and only marginally smaller than the 6.0-by-6.0-by-6.2-inch build area of the LulzBot Mini ( at Amazon) , our Editors' Choice midpriced 3D printer. The da Vinci Mini has an open frame, with no window or door in front; the build plate is set on a carriage that slides in and out beyond the edge of the frame when a print is in progress.

Despite the open frame, the extruder nozzle is located behind the extruder assembly and is hard to reach, helping to protect you from accidental burns. The da Vinci Mini is relatively quiet, and should not bother people seated in its vicinity.

One nice convenience feature of the da Vinci Mini, which we also saw on the da Vinci Jr. and several other recent 3D printers, is that it automatically levels the print bed before each print. A downside is that it is sometimes difficult to remove finished objects from the print bed. XYZprinting packs with the Mini several squares of tape that are just large enough to cover the print bed, but even using the included scraper it was not easy to remove objects without damaging the tape. Covering the tape with a thin layer of glue from a glue stick before printing didn't help. I recommend instead covering the print bed with blue painter's tape, a common technique with 3D printers.

The Mini uses the same proprietary "smart cartridges," which detect when filament is low and needs replacing, that we saw in the da Vinci Jr. As with that machine and some other low-priced 3D printers we've looked at, the Mini exclusively uses of polylactic acid (PLA) filament. A 600-gram (1.3-pound) cartridge lists for $27.99, considerably less than the same-size "smart" cartridges used by the CEL Robox, which sell for $49.99 for acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) and $54.99 for PLA.

Setup

With the help of the included quick-start guide, hardware setup is pretty straightforward. Once you unpack the printer, you install the extruder module and then the filament guide tube. Before loading the filament spool, you have to unscrew its cover and seat a board containing the spool's sensor chip. You then just feed the filament, which is automatically pulled into the extruder once the tip is inserted in the extruder module. Then download and install the software, connect the printer, load an object file, and you're ready to print over either a USB or Wi-Fi connection.

Software

The software, downloadable from the XYZprinting website once you set up a free, password-protected account, is the company's XYZWare. With it, you can load an object, rescale it, move it on the build platform, save it to the company's 3W file format, import the file to the printer, set the resolution, and add a brim or supports to keep the object secure while printing. Pressing the Print command brings up a dialog box that lets you choose between resolutions. The default setting, Good, is set for 300 microns (where a micron is 0.001 millimeter), while Normal is 400 microns and Excellent is 200 microns. As 3D printing resolution is a measure of layer height, the lower the number, the higher the resolution. From the Advanced tab in the dialog box, you can access an even higher resolution (100 microns).

My experience with XYZWare, which the company recently updated, was a lot smoother than when I tested the da Vinci Jr. last year. The long hang times are gone; in fact, XYZWare is now quicker than many programs I've used for slicing objects (mapping their individual layers in preparation to printing). There were also none of the software crashes I experienced with the previous version.

Printing

I did most of our testing (six objects) at the Good resolution, and printed one object at Excellent. The da Vinci Mini completed all the prints it started and had no operational issues during printing. Print quality was slightly better than with the da Vinci Jr.—especially with one test object consisting of geometric shapes and raised text protruding from an almost-vertical surface—and is about average among the 3D printers we've tested. Several, including even the comparably priced New Matter MOD-t, have produced higher-quality prints, but none have combined solid print quality and misprint-free consistency at anything approaching the da Vinci Mini's price.

The only software issues I had with the Mini occurred when I tried to launch prints. Twice after completing one object and loading another, I received a message when trying to print that the da Vinci Mini was busy. Several times when I tried to launch a print, instead of seeing the normal Print dialog box that lets you change resolution and other settings, a dialog box for reconnecting to the printer would pop up and not respond when I tried to connect. Every time either of these issues occurred, turning the printer off then on and unplugging then re-plugging in the USB cable corrected the issue.

Conclusion

My main issues with the XYZprinting da Vinci Jr. when I tested it last year were its inconsistent print quality and poor software experience. Both have been improved with the da Vinci Mini. Its print quality proved solid, and although the software sometimes balked when I tried to launch a print, the issues were easy enough to resolve. The Mini packs a winning combination of easy setup and use, misprint-free printing, good print quality, automatic print-bed leveling, and a price that's little more than you'd pay for the extruder alone on some high-end 3D printers. The XYZprinting da Vinci Mini 3D Printer earns our Editors' Choice—our first for a consumer-oriented 3D printer.

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