Elegoo Centauri Carbon: Genuinely Good Hardware, Firmware Still Catching Up

PLA Prints Are Genuinely Excellent

Even at the fastest speed setting, PLA prints came out clean, with stringing and shadowing comparable to other popular printers in this price range. For a budget CoreXY machine, that's a genuinely strong result and suggests the core mechanics, the part most expensive to get wrong, are solid.

The Hardware Punches Above Its Price

Hardened steel extruder gears and nozzle mean abrasive filaments are usable without extra wear, and the hotend reaches 320 degrees Celsius with a bed up to 110. Automatic bed leveling, a filament runout sensor, power loss recovery, WiFi and a 4.3 inch touchscreen round out a feature set that's genuinely generous for the asking price.

Reliability Is the Real Weak Point

Testing turned up file upload failures, interface connection errors, and screen freezes during normal use. One PETG print failed with an unclear error message, though the same file succeeded on a retry, suggesting an intermittent rather than a fundamental fault. This is the kind of inconsistency that matters most if you're relying on unattended overnight prints.

ABS and PETG Need More Care Than PLA

Elegoo's own PETG Pro filament printed well, but an older third-party PETG looked notably worse, and a large rectangular ABS part warped because the chamber didn't get warm enough. If you're planning to print mostly PLA, this is a non-issue. If ABS or PETG are a regular part of your workflow, expect more trial and error getting there.

A Genuinely Strong Value, If the Firmware Catches Up

Priced well under the Bambu Lab P1S it's clearly aimed at, this could be one of the better value CoreXY printers on the market if the reliability issues get resolved through firmware updates, which is common for a newly released machine. Going in aware that you may hit the occasional freeze or failed print is the realistic expectation here, not a dealbreaker on its own.