Carbon Fiber PLA vs META-PLA vs PLA+ vs PLA by Sunlu 

I've been buying a lot of Sunlu filament lately so this was perfect. Thanks for sharing

The best, and most honest filament reviewer. The only one i trust 100%. Great job as always, thank you!!

I print a lot of CF material. For your CF tests, I might suggest that you were not printing hot enough and were under-extruding. If you look at the cross section of the test subject, there are gaps, and the breaks occur along these gaps. I believe if you increased your flow by 5-10% and increased your temperature by 10 deg C, that the filament would perform much better. Would you consider doing that and adding an addendum to your video? As always, you do a great job and am happy to support as a Patreon.

I am so grateful for this video! I bought some PLA META on sale earlier and I've been scratching my head trying to figure out if/how it's quantifiable different than PLA+ (especially across different brands). Having this video and your website gives me confidence that I can know exactly what I am buying!

Cool comparison! I'm grateful you tested the Shore D hardness as well. And this PLA+ looks pretty good! Harder, stronger but tougher at the same time

I really appreciate your video comparisons. You are very methodical. I was considering Sunlu's new META PLA, but your video swung me back to PLA+. Subscribed!

Thanks for this comparison, I was really curious about how they stacked up against each other! I really like the roll of sunlu meta I got recently, will be buying more eventually! Hopefully they expand the colors some more

GREAT video and testing process

Nice test. Thank you

In my experience and talking to my plastics vendor at work, when CF is added to a material, it is to add rigidity, make it printable (reduce warping) or simply for aesthetics. As PLA is already a very rigid material which doesn't warp, the only real benefit of adding the carbon fiber is purely for the aesthetic properties it gives, so the carbon fiber that is added is usually powdered or at most, very short fibers.

Interesting as always. In my work we use a lot of ASA, for outdoor usage, and it is light wight material 1,07 g/cm3 for ASA contra 1,24 g/cm3 for PLA Thanks for sharing your results with all of us 🙂

Considering my stockpile of pla+ from sunlu and curiosity about meta, it was a nice watch. Thank you.

Excellent video. Very informative

Nice work, sub'd! I primarily print in PLA and looking to move to a PLA+ but was curious if someone has recorded the properties across a single brand and was really happy to find this. Thx!

Thank you for the in-depth testing. I ordered 5 rolls of pla + on sale ended up £40 including delivery 😁

Thanks Very helpful

As you mentioned several times, hotter temperatures produce better layer adhesion and worse appearance. To keep testing times short but also have more interesting tests, I suggest printing once more only the sample for layer adhesion at the maximum temperature, so that for layer adhesion you will have two values: the max and the usual one.

Printing with steel, vanadium, and tungsten nozzles I found that having the cooling fan on really reduced the nozzle temp. In addition to increasing the nozzle temp by 10C, smearing high temp silicon RTV on the sock to better cover the nozzle helped a lot, as did turning off the fan for everything but bridging.These changes gave much better layer adhesion and reduced underextrusion with the high temp nozzles.

great, thanks for sharing 👍

Exactly my thoughts when i got the filament. No branding on the spool. I had to write it on to avoid problems later. I would say i got a bit sceptic about the origin of the spool. Next issue is the holes, just as you mentioned. Finally, -and this might be a very bad news to those who don't own a filament dryer-,i had to dry the filament even it was just taken out from the vacuum bag because the stringing was crazy. Not even my 1 year old Eryone stringing like that. After the drying was everything ok and normal though

When there is neither a brand logo nor a brand name on a filament, it means the supposed manufacturer is just a reseller of a high volume filament manufacturer's product. I've seen this with Anycubic's filament as well.

Great research work. There are a new PLA super thought from eSun. It would be awesome to add to this experiments. It suppose to be very impact resistance.

Awesome as always, Igor. These are great tests for me. I rarely use PLA but for one of my projects PLA is the best choice. It is a small acoustic pressure chamber. The pressure is very low but the volume stability at constant temperature is important. Stainless steel chamber is great but at $16k I can’t afford another one. Aluminum was less stable but still good but still very expensive to have machined. PVC was not very good, even encased in epoxy. I tried 3D printing a chamber in PLA (based on your previous tests by the way) and it worked quite well. The chamber is useable and only cost about $20 in plastic. I wanted to redo it in PLA CF hoping to improve the tensile strength and rigidity. Based on your test here that would not be good. However I’m hoping, as others have mentioned, the poor layer adhesion may indicate a higher print temperature could improve the properties. So I support your idea of a follow up video.

i read some reviews about sunlu filament being wound badly on the spool , leading to issues like a tangle ..

Another filament with carbon "fibers" :) ty!

Hi, good video. Could you drop a link to your software setup for the ender 3 v2 with sprite extruder and BL touch? Or it is another model ? :) I was able to setup my machine only with official poor version of marlin.

I haven’t done much printing yet but have been using filaments from Overture. So far I’ve used an entire spool of their PLA and PLA Pro. I tried PETG but gave up on trying to figure out good settings for it and moved on to their ASA. The printer’s attachment for the Bowden tube broke shortly after I started printing the ASA and I haven’t installed the replacement part yet but so far it’s been the easiest to use, it only took a couple tries to nail the settings. We bought the printer for our aut1st1c son (RU-vid doesn’t like the word now that it’s starting to be used as a slur) because he really likes characters that we can’t find and even though he can’t communicate very well, he’s really good at designing houses, stores and city infrastructure so we split the cost of the printer and spools with his grandparents so that we could print out characters he likes and his building designs. It’s actually really sad about the aut1sm because he’d be a really talented architect or civil engineer 🥺 I’m thinking ASA is the way to go for him also for the heat resistance and am definitely interested in seeing your tests with the CF ASA you got. It looked like the finished surface of the CF PLA temp tower you printed was a lot nicer, was that just because of the color or lighting or something else? Definitely look forward to seeing your test results with the CF ASA and it would be great if you could compare it with regular ASA, ABS and PETG during the testing. Thanks for another great round of tests.

By the looks of the test subjects your printers are all under extruding and leaving gaps in the plastic, you may also want to increase your overlap percentage to remove the gaps between your infill and the walls because there appears to be gaps in that interface as well. Fixing that will defiantly bring up your layer adhesion and remove some more of the imperfections in your results. Great job testing all these filaments though, its really interesting seeing your results!

Stumbled on this video because I was looking for carbon fiber PLA from sunlu. I think you may have under extruded, and had too-low a print temp. Maybe more flow and higher hotend temp would help with strength. I am very curious if CF is stronger in many aspects, because it is also a comperably cheap filament from sunly.

So it would seem the only difference in all the PLA's is the marketing hype! And that using CF is a waste of money unless you really want the nice textured finish it offers.

Very interesting and well made video. Sunlu must have known how weak their CFPLA was and knew it would look bad during your tests. I use CF filament for very rigid parts, not necessarily for strength.

I wish you add one more type: PLA matte :)

gotta say I am supprised how much carbon fibre weekens pla's mechanical property expect bending strength

The reason I use META is that it allows me to print about 30% faster than any regular PLA. It flows about 50% more than regular PLA. The downside is that is a little more susceptible to high temps, but if it is a print used indoors, that's fine.

Very good video, thanks for the valuable info! Do you have more videos comparing other filaments? PETG, nylon, ABS, ASA?

That PLA+ is just twice as strong for impacts, so as "+" is not so good, most other PLA+ improve by far more than 2x.

Liked your tests, Thank you for the confirmation i was looking for, tought also carbon 'fibre' would be worse; it is carbon powder not fibre, just like glasfibre, the strenght is in the cross-fibres and not in the substance or whatever, and carbon by itself a 'particel' that is harder than most of it's surrounding 'material, it wil brake of more easely; hardness of crystal glas is harder then ordinary cheap glas but brakes faster due to its vibration of hardness, i ! great watch ! , subscribing! grtyz. from Belgium and Espana, Carlos

I have just bought pla tough and can not get it to stick to my ender 3 glass bed any ideas

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I think for Carbon Fiber filaments you should purchase Hardened Steel Nicked Plated nozzle with copper alloy. I saw comparison of strength of prints with brass and harden steel nozzle and difference was huge. It could be the reason and the maybe carbon fiber will be better, I am not sure but this difference is pointing me to print issue

Hi, I have an ender 3 S1, and I have problems when printing sunlu Black PLA normal, with the stringing, what main features do you use? temperature, retraction, flow, etc?

I can’t print with PLA+, it lifts up, edges is not clean and leaks everywhere. Any advice?

There are a lot of different tests, comparing different brands of carbon PLA-s and to common. Most of them are pointing out that Carbon filaments not stronger but even weaker compare to regulars.

Is the patreon 80€ per month? I really want to see the list of fillament results, but can't pay that much.

i see why they didn't want to send the carbon pla to begin with, but to be honest, i think carbon is supposed to be cured after printing isn't it??

Next time please try to use the same colours. The pigments do have an effect on the filament.

carbon powder will only weaken pla. it only works if there are carbon strings, this is what makes carbon infused objects strong. in 3d printing its only for asthetics, looks pretty cool. ripoff if you ask me, for some added ash :)

The only goddamn PLA we need is a more temperature stable PLA for a low price!!! 😒😒😒

eSun offer detailed filament settings on their website. Sunlu offer NOTHING. I find it frustrating that a manufacturer today in this market is publishing no guidelines on the important factors from nozzle temp to flow rates and retraction. I know there is variance in machines needs etc but there are fundamentals that materials have for a starting place or "safe" print and Sunlu should step up their game on this. Incidentally, I notice eSun sell as "High Speed" PLA (ePLA-HS) touted as being a faster and better print material. I examined their spreadsheet of settings for their materials - and they use all of the same settings for ePLA-HS, PLA+ and many of the other PLA derivitives. So... is there no difference or are their published settings just junk data using Machine Manufacturer default profile information? Any thoughts on how to progress toward assessing this? The reason I ask is that I have recently undertaken a task of trying to get the community on the Prusa Forum to begin establishing and contributing to a database of optimised print profiles for various materials and brands. With so many types now, this is necessary and there is NO central repository established anywhere.

Might be fake carbon or powder and not actual chopped carbon fibers

...😜👌

The addition of carbon fiber will indeed make Filament brittle, which is an inevitable material characteristic. All carbon fiber Filaments are just mixed materials with carbon fiber powder added, not real carbon fiber. Maybe everyone will buy it because of its touch and look, because not everyone needs to use carbon fiber to print high-strength parts~

Meta is some of the most disappointing filament I’ve ever bought. I’ve gotten multiple rolls that couldn’t produce a single quality print. It’s supposed to be high speed but the adhesion is so poor you run the risk of knocking your print over if you speed it up. Give me Sunlu Pla+ all day every day.

thanks for saving me 30 dollars not buying carbon PLA

so nothing special about meta, just marketing

Sunlu is the worst company to deal with for anything. I highly recommend no one ever buy their printers. Their filament is good but man if you ever have an issue they will fight you over their product even though it’s garbage.

dude your accent is super had to understand are you asian?