From a frustrated Plus 4 owner to testing the Plus 5 — QIDI seems to have fixed a lot
More than a year ago, I bought a QIDI Plus 4 together with the QIDI Box as my second 3D printer, after my Bambu Lab X1C Combo.
My experience with the Plus 4 was, frankly, exhausting.
In a strange way, the Plus 4 taught me a lot about how a 3D printer works — mostly because I spent so much time troubleshooting it.
I had issues including:
- The print head crashing into the bed, even on the first print.
- Inconsistent first-layer spacing.
- Bed behavior changing significantly at higher temperatures.
- Problems with the piezo sensors.
- Belt/pulley issues.
- Reliability problems when printing engineering materials in a heated chamber.
I tried many things to fix these problems: preheating and heat-soaking the bed, modifying the springs supporting the bed, and even bonding parts of the piezo sensor assembly with high-temperature adhesive.
None of these solutions really solved the fundamental problems.
Eventually, I became frustrated and gave up. I didn't think it made much sense to keep modifying a printer that, in my opinion, had too many problems built into its original design.
I had basically decided that my next printer would be a Bambu H2D.
Then QIDI contacted me and asked whether I would be interested in public testing one of their new printers. They offered to send me a QIDI Plus 5 for testing. I could provide feedback directly to them, and if I wanted to, I could also share my experience publicly.
I agreed, although I had some concerns.
As far as I understand, there was no obligation for me to post anything positive — or even to post anything at all. But at the same time, I really didn't want to spend another few months debugging an unfinished printer.
After receiving the Plus 5, however, I started to change my mind.
1. The packaging is better
The packaging feels noticeably improved compared with my Plus 4.
That is a relatively small thing, but it was my first indication that QIDI had paid more attention to the overall product experience this time.
2. Build and assembly quality are significantly better
The build quality of my Plus 5 feels much better than that of my Plus 4.
For example, the sheet-metal parts supporting the heated bed appear noticeably better made.
My Plus 4 also seems to have a pulley or shaft-alignment problem. After running for some time, wrinkles develop on the surface of the belt, and a noticeable amount of black belt debris accumulates around the pulleys. My guess is that one of the pulley shafts is not perfectly perpendicular, causing the belt to rub against the edge of the pulley.
On the Plus 5, when I manually move the toolhead, the motion feels very smooth. I also don't see the belt rubbing against the pulley flanges.
Of course, this is something that really needs longer-term testing before I can draw a final conclusion.
Another improvement is the front door.
My Plus 4 had a very obvious gap along the left side of the chamber door. When printing materials such as ABS, I ended up needing an additional printed door-seal part to improve chamber sealing.
On the Plus 5, QIDI has clearly redesigned this area, and the door seals much better. For ABS and similar materials, I no longer feel that I need to print an additional door-seal modification.
3. The GUI and mobile app have been redesigned
QIDI has reworked both the printer GUI and the mobile app.
The new printer interface looks much more polished and responds quickly.
If I describe the Plus 4 GUI as something that felt like a prototype, the Plus 5 GUI feels much closer to a production-ready consumer product.
It now feels much more comparable to the interface experience on my Bambu X1C.
4. The new QIDI Box is a much better design
QIDI also redesigned the QIDI Box.
One of my biggest complaints about the original QIDI Box for the Plus 4 was maintainability.
If filament broke somewhere inside the Box, servicing it could become a very unpleasant job because you might need to disassemble a large part of the unit just to reach the filament path.
The new QIDI Box has an access panel on the bottom secured with screws.
I haven't needed to open it yet, but just from looking at the design, it should make maintenance significantly easier.
The filament-feeding mechanism also works differently.
On the Plus 4, the QIDI Box actively drives the filament, and its motion is not perfectly synchronized with the printer's extruder. During long prints, I found that this could put stress on the PTFE path and eventually cause failures at some of the tube connections.
The stepper motors inside the old Box also became extremely hot because they were running so frequently.
The Plus 5 Box appears to use a mechanism more similar in principle to Bambu's AMS: filament movement is largely driven according to demand from the printer rather than having the Box continuously push filament.
Most of the time, the motors inside the new Box are idle.
That seems like a much more sensible design to me.
5. The piezo sensor / first-layer problem appears to be greatly improved
This was one of the biggest problems I had with my Plus 4.
In practice, I could reliably use that machine mainly for PLA and PETG.
When I increased the bed and chamber temperatures for materials such as ABS or PA6-CF, I sometimes experienced the print head crashing into the bed.
The bed also didn't behave consistently as it heated up. A first layer might look fine during the first quarter or third of the print, then gradually become worse as the thermal state of the machine changed.
So one of the first things I did with the Plus 5 was deliberately stress-test its first-layer stability.
I ran a full 315 mm × 315 mm first-layer test three times consecutively without allowing the machine to cool down, using:
- SUNLU ABS
- 90°C bed temperature
- 55°C chamber temperature
The results were quite good.
This kind of test was basically impossible for me to complete reliably on my Plus 4.
Test model:
https://www.qidimaker.com/zh/models/detail/2088527090723897345?profile_id=2088527091306905601
6. PA6-CF with ABS supports also worked
I also tested the QIDI Box by printing PA6-CF with ABS as the support material.
This was another scenario where my Plus 4 frequently failed.
At high chamber temperatures, when repeatedly switching between PA6-CF and ABS, I sometimes experienced lost steps on the X/Y motion system.
So I deliberately tested a model on the Plus 5 that requires many filament changes during the print.
This time, the Plus 5 + QIDI Box handled it quite well.
Test model:
https://www.qidimaker.com/zh/models/detail/2089880627127595009
7. The electronics don't appear radically different
I haven't disassembled the Plus 5 to inspect the mainboard and individual components.
However, based on printer.cfg, the motor-driver configuration looks quite similar to the Plus 4.
Both appear to use:
- TMC2240 drivers for the X and Y motors
- TMC2209 drivers for the Z1 and Z2 motors
Personally, I don't think the motor drivers themselves were ever the limiting factor in building a modern, reliable 3D printer.
The more important differences seem to be in the mechanical design, assembly quality, calibration, firmware/software integration, thermal behavior, and overall system engineering.
8. The Plus 5 is still not perfect
There are still things I don't like.
In particular, the bed mesh on my unit does not look very good, especially when I run my high-temperature ABS first-layer stress tests with both the bed and chamber hot.
I'm not yet sure whether this happened during shipping, or whether the printer simply wasn't mechanically calibrated very well at the factory.
Interestingly, I have intentionally not manually adjusted the bed yet.
I'm pretending that I know nothing about bed leveling and using the printer the way a normal customer might use it out of the box — basically the same way I approached my Plus 4 when I first bought it.
Despite the imperfect bed mesh, the Plus 5's software compensation seems to work surprisingly well. The first-layer results are much better than I would expect from the measured bed flatness.
I will probably mechanically level the bed later, but for now I wanted to see how well the machine could compensate on its own.
Conclusion
So far, my answer to the QIDI Plus 5 is yes.
For the first time, I feel that this is a QIDI printer that may actually deliver what its specifications promise while also being reliable enough to use as a tool rather than as an ongoing engineering project.
That is a significant change in opinion for me, because after my experience with the Plus 4, I had more or less decided to leave the QIDI ecosystem.
I still want to put many more hours on the Plus 5 before making any conclusions about long-term reliability. There are also areas — such as the bed flatness on my unit — that I think could still be improved.
But my experience so far has been very different from my experience with the Plus 4.
And that's something I honestly didn't expect.
Disclosure: QIDI provided this Plus 5 to me for public testing at no cost. I was not required to post a review or say anything positive about it. The opinions above are based entirely on my own experience with the machine.
Also, English is my second language. I wrote the original version of this post myself and then used ChatGPT to help revise it into clearer and more natural English. I reviewed all of the edited text afterward to make sure it accurately reflects my own opinions and experience.