This Was Almost a Dream 3D Printer… Until It Tested My Patience (2025)

Like the K1 Max predecessor, the K2 Plus is an enormous printer, offering a 35cm cubed build volume and top-notch build quality—and with the optional CFS (Color Filament System) in the Combo kit, you can use multiple colors of filaments in the same design. There’s a lot to love about the K2 Plus, but if something goes wrong, you may face a cascade of errors.

Creality K2 Plus Multicolor Printer

7/10

The K2 Plus is an absolute beast of a 3D printer, offering a massive build volume, impressive print quality, and a surprisingly smooth setup process. The CFS filament system adds multicolor printing, but it’s not without its quirks—when it works, it’s fantastic, but when things go wrong, you’re in for a troubleshooting adventure. While the hardware feels solid and well-designed, small issues can quickly snowball into bigger problems, especially with filament handling. It’s a powerhouse for those who want size and quality, but be prepared for some patience-testing moments along the way.

See at CrealitySee at Amazon

Price and Availability

The Creality K2 Plus Combo kit with a single CFS unit costs $1500. Additional CFS units, which each hold four filaments, can be purchased separately for $330—up to a maximum of four CFS units per printer. Without the CFS, the K2 Plus printer costs $1300.

Creality filaments are reasonably priced at $22/kg for HyperPLA with an RFID chip for automatic recognition, though it's compatible with any standard filament from any manufacturer.

Unboxing: Set Aside a Few Hours

Unboxing the K2 Plus is an … experience. The box has been elaborately designed with instructions on top and a series of plastic tabs that unlock neatly, allowing the entire top box to be lifted out. Or at least it would if the freight service hadn’t decided to cover the whole thing in another layer of tape, rendering all the clever plastic tabs a nightmare to get at. You’ll need two people to lift this out and a strong knife to get the industrial strength tape off.

The CFS unit—a separate device that holds up to four filaments for on-the-fly color swaps—arrives neatly packed inside the printer enclosure, screwed securely to some temporary cross bars to prevent movement. This is definitely one of the most professional transports I’ve seen. There are 14 screws you’ll need to remove (yes, remove) before you can start printing: which attach the CFS to the top and bottom transportation brackets, the brackets attaching to the case, and the print bed to the base. There should be zero issues from shipping, anyway!

There’s also a number of bits you’ll need to screw on, so don’t put down the toolkit yet. This includes the screen, the filament buffer around the back, and various tubes and cables to connect everything. While the manual to do all this wasn’t included in the box, I found it online easily enough, and all the tubes are individually bagged with clear diagrams on where they should go. Honestly, I’ve not encountered such a well-thought-out setup process so far in a decade of reviewing these things.

One final point on the unboxing: there are a bunch of spare parts and consumables in the box for replacements, such as the filament wiper. But one thing I particularly appreciated was the filament swatch, a small set of twenty or so printed sample squares from the Creality range of filaments.

Two people are needed to place the printer, as it weighs around 70lbs (32kg) and measures ‎19.5 x 36 x 20.3 inches (49.5 x 91.6 x 51.5 cm). This large, heavy machine generates a great amount of force when it slings the head back and forth. For good-quality prints, you need a stable surface.

Initially, I placed it on a spare desk, but there was a little wobble, and the quality suffered immensely with Z banding. After placing it directly on the floor instead, I ran calibration again, and the quality improved immensely. I can’t emphasize this point enough: ensure your surface is completely stable.

After powering on for the first time, you’ll need to connect it to your network (Ethernet or Wi-Fi), and run through initial setup, which takes about 15 minutes. This process is a self-test of basic functions, as well as “input shaping,” which measures vibrations to achieve the optimal print settings. You can make the Z-height adjustment live if needed, but there's no way to save the value as a default. If your surface is stable enough, you shouldn't need to—the sensor should automatically give you a perfect first layer.

Design: Big and Bold

The top and front of the unit are transparent smokey glass, while the sides and rear are acrylic or ABS. Around the rear, you’ll find the filament “poop shute”—don’t block this, and I'd suggest a waste container as a good first print! The frame is a one-piece die-cast aluminum, and along with the dual Z-axis motors, provides great sturdiness and reliability.

Out of the box, the CMS needs to be placed on top of the printer, resulting in a required 45 inches (115cm) total height clearance required. You’ll need to purchase an optional longer data cable to replace one of the CMS connections if you want to place it by the side instead, and even then, it’s tight.

Internally, you’ll find an enormous 350x350x350mm build volume. That’s just about enough for a full-size cosplay helmet. It's not the biggest printer I've tested (that accolade goes to the Elegoo OrangeStorm Giga with its nearly meter-cubed build volume), but it's the biggest with color-switching capabilities.

During printing, the K2 Plus is surprisingly quiet—except for during filament changes. However, when not printing, you’ll notice the louder-than-average fan hum and will likely find yourself reaching for the off switch. It’s not clear why the fan needs to run at all during idle; no other printer I have does that.

As a CoreXY printer, it’s as fast as you’ll get on a home printer at up 600mm/s, though you could probably DIY a faster one. Speed isn’t the real strength here; it’s the quality of the printer.

CFS: The Most Advanced Color-Swapping Yet

It’s worth talking about the CFS separately, as it makes a few improvements over existing systems like the BambuLab AMS; in theory, anyway. Firstly, it has a nice screen on the front showing relative humidity and current temperature. Printer apps will tell you this information anyway and warn you if it's too high, but it's useful nonetheless. Secondly, there’s a pressure bar at the top, which means as the rolls get lighter and more prone to skipping, the pressure bar pushes them down to avoid issues.

The CFS includes an automatic filament recognition for Creality-branded rolls via RFID chips, but in my testing, it only identified one of the three ID-equipped rolls that I inserted, and even that was recognized as being in a different slot the first time. The CFS also made an attempt to identify how much of the roll was remaining but got that wrong on one of the rolls, too. Ultimately, it’s not a big deal as you can easily choose the color from the software or touchscreen, and the remaining filament is only a guide.

I also found the Creality CFS much less tolerant of oversized, warped, or cardboard filament rolls, which led to endless frustration. Attempting to print with the leftover pink silk PLA that I've been happily using on my Bambu P1S for several prints, the Creality CMS somehow managed to strip the filament, which then took an hour of cleaning in the middle of a 48-hour print.

At this point, the drawbacks of such a complex system became apparent in a series of cascading failures. Half an hour later, it jammed again, so I swapped out for some red standard PLA instead just to finish the print.

An hour or so later, another mysterious error appeared, and while attempting to remove the filament, which was now stuck in the rear buffer, I apparently managed to strip the Bowden connector on the extruder module. The small metal teeth from the connector got stuck inside the extruder, which then caused the magnet for the cutter to stop working—but at that point, it didn’t matter because the Bowden connector no longer held onto the tube, and I was left with a functionally useless printer.

I’m still not entirely sure what caused the sequence of errors, but I’m not the only one who encountered this. Someone even designed a replacement extruder connector you can print and bolt over the original. I received some spare parts and printed (on my BambuLab) one of these improved connectors to go with it; it took a few weeks, but I was back printing again.

Others suggest the problem lies with the filament buffer and recommend taking it apart and cutting part of the spring off.

Creality Print: Not Quite There

For best results, you’ll need to use Creality Print, a customized version of OrcaSlicer. I also tried OrcaSlicer, though it’s not at parity yet and has some issues with color swapping. Though familiar, there are some aspects of Creality Print that are inferior to competitor’s software. I found the Mac version would experience frequent visual glitches (which neither OrcaSlicer nor BambuStudio suffer from).

The articulated fox that I downloaded from Creality’s own store wouldn’t even load correctly in Creality Print—the color separations were discarded—so I had to open it in BambuStudio first, then save it again as a generic 3MF project and open it from there.

I’m sure these bugs will be worked out in time, but these small points of frustration can make all the difference in user experience and overall satisfaction.

Should You Buy the Creality K2 Plus?

I’ve been equally impressed and frustrated with the Creality K2 Plus. Is bigger always better? In this case… maybe. It’s an outstanding printer when it works. But as I found out, there are a lot of parts that can go wrong, and once you experience one issue, it can cascade down and cause a series of critical problems elsewhere.

The drawbacks of the Creality CFS are the same as any other filament-changing system. It’s most useful for printing larger objects where filaments might normally run out or swapping midway to another color without physically needing to be there. For truly multicolor mixed-layer printing, you’ll be wasting a lot of filament during the change and purge process—which can happen multiple times each layer. That’s what the poop shute around the back is, and if you forget to put a box there or your waste bag falls over, you may come back to find a new plastic carpet under your feet.

Just as with BambuStudio, you can lessen the wastage by purging into infill or another object (if you don’t particularly care about its color), but it’s still perhaps double the amount of filament actually used in the model.

I’ve never had issues with a Creality machine before, and I’ve reviewed a fair few. In every case, they’ve been durable, quality-built, and reliable machines that just work. Creality has firmly cemented itself, in my mind, as one of the big three home 3D printing companies, alongside Prusa and Bambulab. The K2 Plus is a result of listening to community feedback and implementing the most requested features—that’s brilliant to see.

However, in this case, the added complexity of the CFS seems to expose a couple of weak points in the design, in the buffer and extruder module. It’s not a dud by any means, and you may be lucky to have perfect prints every time and never face any issues. But if you do hit a snag, you can quickly find yourself facing a multitude of errors that you can’t trace the root cause of.

Creality K2 Plus Multicolor Printer

7/10

The K2 Plus is an absolute beast of a 3D printer, offering a massive build volume, impressive print quality, and a surprisingly smooth setup process. The CFS filament system adds multicolor printing, but it’s not without its quirks—when it works, it’s fantastic, but when things go wrong, you’re in for a troubleshooting adventure. While the hardware feels solid and well-designed, small issues can quickly snowball into bigger problems, especially with filament handling. It’s a powerhouse for those who want size and quality, but be prepared for some patience-testing moments along the way.

See at CrealitySee at Amazon