Appearance-wise, the BIBO 2 Touch Laser (which we’ll refer to as the Bibo 2) does look like it’s from a different era. Released in 2016, by remaining largely unchanged in that time the Bibo 2 reminds you how 3D printers have evolved over the years.

But, looks can be deceiving. Despite its ancient appearance, we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the Bibo 2’s performance.

Don’t judge a book by its cover

Budget dual extrusion tends to look one of two ways – either a Prusa-style frame with single-nozzle, dual-extruder setup, or like the Bibo 2, drawn from MakerBot’s 2012-released open source Replicator design. Released in 2016, the Bibo 2 – by modern standards – looks a bit frumpy. Outdated, even.

Scrutinizing the Bibo 2’s internals reveals that it actually checks most of the boxes you’d want from a modern desktop 3D printer and a dual extruder in particular.

The all-metal frame and compact enclosure give the printer rigidity, alongside a tidy look and small footprint. The 214 x 186 x 160 mm-sized bed travels through the Z-axis on a lead screw flanked by heavy-duty rods.

The heart of a dual extrusion printer is its extruder setup. In Bibo’s case, this heart beats from two direct drive extruders sitting in parallel on a print head that runs on the dual-rod reinforced X-axis. The extruders are accompanied by a part cooling fans in the front and back. These fans aren’t directed at the nozzle, and sit a little high for what you might think is effective placement, but throughout our time using the Bibo 2, we’ve found part cooling to be sufficient.

Loading the filament is a little tricky, and needs the materials to be as straight as can be. There’s a lot of open space in and around the feed mechanism that the filament will feed into instead of the hotend if you’re not careful. It’s irritating.

In general, direct drive offers many benefits for dual extrusion, namely better retraction of filament for the inactive nozzle, alongside wider filament compatibility and the reduced likelihood of slack in the feeding of filament.

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Direct Drive vs Bowden Extruder: The Differences

Speaking of retraction, this is crucial for multi-material printing. Improper retraction leads to oozing of molten filament from the inactive hotend, transferring to the print, and resulting in unwanted flecks of material on the printed object. This is a relatively common issue on this style of 3D printer – more expensive dual extrusion machines have methods to deal with the problem.

To counteract unwanted oozing, the Bibo 2 cools the inactive hotend down to about 175°C every time the extruders switch. This helps a little, and makes it possible to get acceptably clean prints, but comes at the cost of dramatically extending print time.

Bibo boasts in its assembly manual that the Bibo 2 ships with a level build plate, having been calibrated in the factory before shipping. We often eye such claims with skepticism, but, to Bibo’s credit, we found no need to even so much as touch one of the three bed leveling knobs.

Aligning tandem hot ends and acceptably leveling to both is challenging, so we’re grateful for not having to do it. If you were to need to level the printer manually,  there’s an assisted leveling function that whips the print head to various points on the bed for you to adjust the nozzle gap.

The Bibo 2 also ships with filament run-out detection and power out recovery mode activated as standard.

The additional laser engraving module is shipped separately and mounts to the X-axis gantry in place of the extruder. Power comes from one of the part cooling fan’s socket. Assembly is trivial, but the now unmounted extruder is still umbilically attached to the printer and has to rest awkwardly behind with its fans running. Should you use the laser module, take care not to let debris and other foreign objects enter the printhead, damaging the fans.

The 0.5W laser is suitable for cutting cardboard and paper as well as engraving other soft materials. The engraving area is the same as 3D printing at 214 x 186 mm, but the plate has no additional fixtures for the material to be engraved, so a little DIY-ingenuity is needed – double-sided tape is usually enough.

Printing and Usability

Pre-flight preparations for the Bibo 2 consist of mounting the extruder to the X-axis and the – more time-consuming – assembling the acrylic top cover. Mercifully, the Bibo 2 comes with atypically well-written and extensive instructions, complemented by videos, and troubleshooting guides. So hats off to Bibo.

The company provides configuration settings for Repetier, Cura, and Simplify3D slicing software, but most third-party slicer. will work for the Bibo 2.

We already touched on the Bibo 2’s capacity to handle multi-material prints rather well. Printing with both a purge tower and ooze shield – two print artifacts that you can toggle in the slicer when setting up a print – improve things further, giving prints comprising separate color objects a clean finish. Where prints merge the colors into one solid object is where the limitations of the design show. While certainly decent, it’s not as solid a performance as separate color blocks comprising a print.

Quite frankly, we would not have guessed the Bibo to perform as it did, not least of all because of its outdated look and feel. And, while we did focus on dual-color prints (duh), it should not go unmentioned that the Bibo also handled single extrusion prints as well as printing with soluble support to our full satisfaction.

If you think the printer’s overall design looks long in the tooth, wait till you see the UI on the pokey little color touchscreen on the printer’s front.

Hands-down, it is the buggiest printer interfaces we have encountered. As you might expect, it has all the vital functions, but be prepared to get thrown continuously out of your desired sub-menu or the interface not responding at all – just two of the many bugs we ran into.

Suppose you have the woosah-like patience to cope with the Bibo 2’s UI, good on you. For those of us without saint-like patience, the limbo of non-responsiveness is downright frustrating. The printer has been out for almost half a decade, a usability firmware update in that time wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Using the laser engraving module was a moderate success. Mounting the laser module is a trivial task, but calibrating it to the correct focal length and speed – at least in our case – was a drag. Laser cutting paper was problem-free, but for wood engravings, a bit more tweaking is needed.