You don’t need to zoom in much to see that my old Ender 3 Pro did a better job, with nice clean lines all the way up. The AnkerMake surface just doesn’t have that smooth consistency the company promised, regardless of whether I speed the printer up or slow it down, tighten my belts and wheels, or even adjust the Z-block tension. The 3D printing community calls these lines “ringing” or “ghosting,” and it’s typically blamed on a printer’s high-speed vibrations affecting the print quality. I see this effect on almost every part I’ve tried, and I’m not the only one.

In almost every other way, the AnkerMake’s print quality is good! I really like my Legend of Zelda sword, and I was impressed by the M5’s results on the Autodesk Kickstarter Geometry Test; it’s a little weak at overhangs, but with good bridging, dimensional accuracy, and very few excess strings of plastic spiderweb hanging off its pointy little spires. Yet AnkerMake claims it got a 25.5/30 on that test with a perfect score on vibration, and that’s not what I saw: my printers only managed a 21/30 using Anker’s own pre-sliced model and a brand-new roll of the specified filament.

As you’d expect, those vibrations can get worse if you run the printer in the new “500mm/s” fast mode that Anker introduced this month. Here’s a couple 3DBenchys so you can see what that looked like for me:

Surface quality isn’t the only disappointment. I was looking forward to keeping this supposedly quiet printer in my house, but I quickly had to move it to the garage because of the constant fan noise even when idle — not to mention how the printer inexplicably performs its homing maneuvers by noisily smacking its parts around.

I also haven’t had a single timelapse video worth sharing. Here’s the promise vs. the reality:

Anker’s timelapse feature is not smart enough to do the bare minimum: It doesn’t even wait until the bed is in the same position before snapping each shot, so what you see is a print jerking around. (It’d also be real nice if it briefly turned on the printer’s built-in light, so you could see the object I’m printing is blue — not white.)

But for me, Anker’s biggest broken promise is its “AI camera,” which has not worked even a single time in my months of testing.

Anker advertises that its camera should be able to detect three distinct types of issues:

• “Bottom Layer Adhesion Failure” (when your print slips off the bed)
• “Spaghetti Messes” (when your print turns into a pile of plastic string)
• “Extruder Jam” (when filament stops coming out of the tip of the nozzle)

In order to detect any of these, you currently need to use Anker’s own slicer, which creates an AI model that it supposedly passes along to the printer, so it can — theoretically — constantly check whether the image it’s getting from the camera looks like the right shape.

To put in mildly, the camera did not stop my prints when they slipped off the bed, nor when pieces broke off mid-print. I literally printed spaghetti on purpose and the camera did not detect it, to say nothing of the time a print accidentally became plastic pasta.

And of the four times my filament stopped coming out of the extruder (one of which was a jam; three of which were because the filament got caught on the reel, which unfortunately can’t trip a printer’s filament runout sensor), the AnkerMake M5 spent all four times merrily printing nothing in the middle of the air. The camera never noticed anything was wrong.

The only time error detection stopped my prints, it was for false positives, like when my black TPU ball’s first layer was perhaps not what the camera expected. So it doesn’t surprise me a bit that one of Anker’s firmware updates turned off timelapse video and error detection by default.

And I could live with that, but for one nagging fear — that because of some poorly designed or manufactured part or some new firmware update, I will one day wake up to a printer that failed so catastrophically it’ll need to be repaired.

I haven’t had that happen yet, but there’s some reason to worry. AnkerMake’s subreddit and Discord groups contain numerous horror images of failed prints exploding into a mushroom cloud of plastic that penetrates the entire print head, some right up to the circuit board. While some have luck melting it off with careful application of a hair dryer, a few find the hot plastic has melted critical components and it’s time for an entire replacement extruder.