If you’ve been reading up on the BIQU Magician, chances are you’re aware of the machine’s quirky solution for bed leveling.

Instead of integrating some kind of fixed probe, the BIQU Magician uses what appears to be a force sensitive resistor, which is affixed to the machine’s cold nozzle and connected to a port that piggybacks on the end effector.

Packaged as a separate accessory with the printer, you are provided with two sensors plus a handful of spare foam cushions for fixing it to the nozzle.

It’s an unusual approach to bed leveling that we haven’t seen before. And you know what, it just works.

Setting the BIQU Magician up necessitates running the bed leveling procedure and, save for the finicky connecting of the probe to the print head, the feature runs without a hitch.

Once secured on a cold nozzle (heating it up will melt the cushion that secures the sensor), and hitting level on the BIQU Magician’s touchscreen, and the print head descends for a four-point leveling sequence, touching three “corners” and the center of the bed before rising back up ready to print.

The thickness of the sensor itself looks to be an approximation to a sheet of paper, so the level should be in the ballpark of your typical manual leveling.

The BIQU Magician’s bed is static and doesn’t heat up, so there’s no reason to think you’ll need to re-level all that often, making the inconvenience (if you’d even call it that) of setting up the probe a once in a long while occurrence.

Laudable bed-leveling aside, we’re jumping back to the QC side of things for the BIQU Magician. As mentioned above, the SD card provided with the printer contained several versions of BIQU’s customized version of Cura for slicing files.

So far, so normal — it’s standard practice for a 3D printer to come with some form of slicing software — except that the installation files provided with the BIQU Magician simply do not work.

Compound this with the lack of printer settings provided by BIQU for you to manually configure a slicer of your own choosing — the assumption being you are happily slicing with the privded software — and anyone completely new to 3D printing might be left with a rather elaborate looking paperweight.

Handily, this isn’t our first rodeo, so inputting the specs we know about the printer suffices for outputting perfectly printable files.

For your reference, we found creating a new profile in Cura 3.4.1 with the bed volume at 100 x 100 x 150mm and “Elliptic”, plus “Origin at center” checked works just fine for the BIQU Magician.

Some printers are focused for one thing — one material. The BIQU Magician is just such a machine. With no heated bed, you’re pretty much stuck to printing PLA.

Depending on how you look at it, limiting the printing to PLA alone could be seen as a concession. But with a removable bed system that grips PLA well (when coated with a very fine layer glue from the provided stick) it’s hard to argue with how well it all works.

Considering the sheer breadth of choice in PLA filaments these days, there’s next to no color or special finish off limits. If you only plan on printing decorative items, gifts and the like, and can tolerate the small build volume, then the BIQU Magician will likely serve you well.

With a stock nozzle of 0.4mm, the BIQU Magician can handle layers heights as fine as 0.05mm well.

We likey.

The BIQU Magician is an oddity of a 3D printer. Packing a competitively low price point and high-end features that are implemented differently from the competition, the expectation is likely to be of a printer that aims high and falls short.

But, after using the BIQU Magician for some dozens of printing hours now, we can confirm that this little machine packs a surprisingly mighty punch.

The removable bed and bed-leveling work like a charm, and for churning out small (really small — the print volume is tiny) PLA prints at fine layer heights, the BIQU Magician is a veritable wizard. It’s a joy to use, whizzing between prints, peeling the bed off and seeing first layers go down with nary a hint of a problem.

It’s unfortunate then, that apparent lapses in quality control and build quality mar what would otherwise have been a remarkable printer for its $200 price tag. It’s one thing to have a mini workhorse of a printer crank out respectable print after print, but another to legitimately wonder if the next print will see the thing disintegrate.

Two cracked leg mounts seem to be less than a coincidence, and given that our issues with the BIQU Magician likely came from different areas of the production and packing process, we suspect our test unit may not be a one-off and others will difference experiences from ours.

Bottom line? Yes, you’re limited to printing PLA, but for day-to-day trinkets and small gifts, the print quality is there to make the BIQU Magician a viable option.

If you can overlook the possibility of it shipping incomplete and cracking at the seams, that is.

BIQU Magician

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Make: BIQU (Big Tree Technology)
Model: Magician
Technology: FDM
Frame: Delta
Year: 2018
Category: Desktop, budget, beginner
Print area: Φ100 x 150mm
Max. bed temp: n/a
Nozzle size: 0.4mm
Max. nozzle temp: –
Max. Z-axis resolution: 100 microns
Z-axis accuracy: 0.1mm
X/Y-axis accuracy: 0.01mm
Max. print speed: 70mm/s
Max. travel speed: –
Printable materials: PLA
3rd party material compatibility: Yes
Interface: 2.8 inch TFT touchscreen
Connectivity: SD card, USB
Boxed size: Φ316 x 450mm
Printer size: 220 x 250 x 420mm
Packaged weight: 9kg
Printer weight: 4kg
Power input: AC 100-240V
Features: Auto bed-leveling, Titan extruder (newer models), removable print bed, 32-bit mainboard

At the time of writing, you can pick up a BIQU Magician from many of the usual suspects for cheap 3D printers. Check out the links below if it has caught your interest.

BIQU Magician

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