SunLu PLA+ White - Review

SunLu PLA+ White - Review

I don't usualy do product reviews but was asked to try out SunLu PLA+ and since I had used their filament before with good results, decided to take use SunLu PLA+ again in some of my projects.

I've purchased the filament from Amazon UK with Prime next day delivery so I could get started printing ASAP.

Hopefully the review will be helpful to someone.!

Price
PLA filaments come in many different prices, from low price - £10 to more than £30 per Kilogram. At £17.99 I would say that SunLu PLA+ sits at more at mid range price than at the low budget range. For comparison HobbyKing White PLA is available for £13/Kg, Colorfabb Economy PLA 2.2kg results in a price of £17.54/kg and RigidInk white PLA comes at £31.96/Kg.

At this price tag, SunLu PLA+ price is very close to Colorfabb Economy PLA price range and that means it will have to perform at the same quality.






Packaging

The Filament comes packaged in a simple brown cardboard box width a small window to identify the filament colour. Filament comes sealed in in vacuum with Silica gel sachet. Would have been great to include a resealable bag for when the filament is not in use. Several brands of filament provide these bags and they are very handy to ensure your PLA doesn’t get humidity.

Settings

With new filament the first print should be a temperature tower to identify the ideal temperature for printing.
You can find the files and instructions for the temperature tower can be found @Thingiverse.com
SunLu recommended temperature range is between 210-250°C, the tower temperature shows that the range is around 190-200°C.

When printing my first models I found issues with bed adhesion. After tweaking the layer height and also researching some of the reviews suggest that the first layer is printed at higher temperature of around 230°C with the bed heated to 60°C. Once first layers are printed temperature was lowered to 200°C and bed set to 50°C.

After some adjusting of my default print settings, I was off to printing.
If not the issues with bed adhesion I would have rated SunLu PLA+ higher.

Print Quality

Filament reviews tend to use the the Benchy model – that can be found @Thingiverse.com and although I printed the Benchy, I wanted to give some samples of other models that demonstrate the quality of the prints with this filament.

The first model was Fortnite Llama found @Myminifactory.com. The print came out well as you can see. There was some minimal stringing but nothing to be bothered with.

Next up I decided to print a model that I purchased some time ago but hadn’t had the time to print: Mortal Kombat Scorpio by @malix3design.com

This model was printed in 2 parts, one composed of all the upper parts and the other one with the base and legs.

Due to the complexity, I used supports and raft to ensure support stability. I prefer quality and reliability to speed. The model was printed at 0.1mm layer height with 15% infill, 6 wall line count, 7 top layers and 7 bottom layers.

As you can see the quality of the print is more than acceptable, although there was much more stringing than on the Fortnite Llama and some artefacts

These issues were easily dealt with and the prints cleaned. Supports came out very easily and left very few marks on the print that were easily removed with some sanding paper.

The base and legs took 3 days to print at 0.10mm Layer height and while supports might not be needed, but I decided to use line support to ensure proper printing and avoid any issues during such a long print.

Unfortunately, as you can see there were some issues with some of the details on the leg due to failed supports.

I was able to clean the defects and with minor repairs it should be mostly fine.

Regarding colour, the SunLu White PLA come out closer to natural PLA with a yellowish tonality rather than pure white.

Due to some of the issues with the prints and the non pure white I can't give SunLu PLA+ a very high rating.

Printing Issues

Besides some of the issues referred above I have used almost the whole 1Kg spool and haven’t had any Jams or clogs, no tangled filament or any other issues.

Since most of the issues have been address in the Print Quality and there weren't any issues I can give SunLu PLA + 5 stars.

Final notes

Filament can become very expensive and the search for quality and acceptable price is not an easy one. SunLu filament fits well as a budget product compared to more expensive filaments.
The quality of the prints although not perfect is very good and with a bit of post processing most of the issues can be deal with. One of the big issues with lower price filaments is the potential for jamming and clogging and I haven’t experienced any issues with SunLu PLA+

Previously to testing the White PLA+ from SunLu I had already used Black PLA+ and the results were very good and was able to print again with no issues.

The final note – result of all the others comes back as 4/5 stars