The QIDI Q2 Combo ships in two boxes and arrives mostly assembled. The printer comes with the touch screen detached, an external spool holder, Ethernet and power cables, a toolkit, flash drive, and a paper quick start guide.
The QIDI Box comes with two quick start guides, one for adding the box to the QIDI Plus 4 and one for Q2. The Box comes with a Plus 4 extruder upgrade that is not needed or compatible with the Q2. It also comes with 5 PTFE tubes, the filament hub, power and signal cords, filament tube guides, and desiccant.
The QIDI Q2 is almost fully assembled from the factory. The touch screen must be plugged in and attaches without tools.
The filament hub attaches to the rear of the printer with two screws. The four pin signal wire runs from the hub to the QIDI Box along with the four filament tubes, with the single filament tube on the right running up to a connector to the extruder.
A second signal cable runs from the back of the printer to the back of the QIDI box. The result is actually a fairly tidy design, with all the cables naturally staying to the rear of the printer.
Leveling and input shaping on the QIDI Q2 is done as part of the initial calibration and at the start of every print. The printer taps the nozzle against the build plate using a load cell sensor for feedback. This system gave me excellent first layers with a perfect Z offset.
The QIDI Q2 Combo has a direct drive tool head with a built-in filament runout sensor. When using the QIDI Box, filament is loaded by inserting an inch or two into the port in front of the spool. The box will slurp up the filament with a sound disturbingly reminiscent of a roller coaster clanking its way up a hill. Normally, a sound like means filament is skipping in the extruder, but it is perfectly normal in this case.
Unloading filament has to be done from the printer’s screen, as it remains locked in gear and can’t just be pulled free. QIDI brand filament has NFC tags to automatically identify the type and color. When using third-party spools, you need to enter the information from the printer screen and then sync with the slicer.
The QIDI Q2 has a steel frame covered in plastic panels with a glass door and top cover and plastic side windows. The interior panels are flame retardant and the machine is certified by MET for product safety in the US and Canada and IECEE CB internationally.
The motion system is Core XY with a linear rail for the X axis and two linear rods for the Y axis driven by two stepper motors connected by a 1.5GT custom belt. There’s no bottom cover for easy access.
The Z axis has two lead screws driven by two independent stepper motors and runs on four linear rods.
The tool head sports a hardened steel, dual geared extruder feeding into a 370°C capable hotend, with a screw in bimetal nozzle that has a hardened steel insert. For parts cooling, it has a large, bottom-mounted blower fan. There is an additional large blower fan mounted to the right side of the case.
The QIDI Q2 has active chamber heating up to 65°C and air filtration with a G3 pre-filter, H12 HEPA, and activated carbon.
The machine is quite loud, and we’re not just talking fan noise. There’s a lot of clatter from the QIDI box loading and the filament cutter clunking too.
The top cover has a really nice feature: it slides back like a sunroof. This allows excellent ventilation for PLA, PETG and TPU. It has two tabs that can lock it into place and is perfectly stable even with QIDI Box perched on top.
The QIDI Q2 has a very nice camera to use for both monitoring and time-lapse video. It’s easily viewable both from the device tab of QIDI Studio, and directly from the Fluidd interface when the IP address is entered into a browser on the same network as the printer.
Like the Bambu Lab AMS and the Creality CFS , the QIDI Box has four individual extruders, one for each filament. Since there is no external release for the extruders, the printer’s screen must be used to unload filament. The QIDI Box has an excellent built-in filament dryer that heats up to 65°C and can dry while printing. There is a rubber plug at the rear of the unit that needs to be opened for drying, though I often forget this step.
Unfortunately, the filament path is too sharply curved, which causes the filament to bind up in the tubes. Despite printing a riser to give it more headroom, the machine constantly jammed while attempting multicolor. When printing single color, the extruder had enough power to keep the filament going, but the Box couldn’t hold up its end to push the filament through the Bowden tubes. Hopefully, there will be a firmware update or replacement part to let the QIDI Box be more than just a dryer.
The QIDI Q2 comes with a copy of QIDI Studio, which is based on Bambu Studio. The stock profiles are pretty good. There’s one annoyance: the filament choices on the printer screen and within the slicer do not match. When sending prints from QIDI Studio, the system will not let you proceed if the filaments don’t match, even if you’ve manually input the correct parameters.
The QIDI only comes with a small sample of filament. To fill up that QIDI Box, you’ll want to check out our guide to the best filaments for 3D printing for suggestions. While I did not have much luck printing multicolor, the machine behaved itself when limited to a single color. Everything I tested – except TPU – ran through the Box.
I don’t have any multicolor prints to show off, as none were able to complete.
Key considerations
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/qidi-q2-combo-review#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.