If it were us over at Tronxy’s marketing department, we would have espoused giving this printer an entirely new name – such is the difference to its predecessor.

Tronxy seems to have taken the feedback from its users to heart and tried to tick off the wishlist point by point on its way to creating the XY-2 Pro.

Before we dive in, note that there are two different versions of the Tronxy XY 2 Pro. A standard one, which we reviewed, and an upgraded version, which features a Titan extruder and silent stepper motor drivers.

A Real Pro

Where the Tronxy XY-2 employs a simple design with all-black aluminum extrusions serving as the structure and the tracks on which its axes travel, the Tronxy XY-2 Pro makes improvements across the board.

Gone are the puny 40 x 20 mm extrusions for the chassis – the Pro has been working out and boasts of 40 x 40 mm extrusions, for the most part. The extra space beneath means the XY-2 Pro has squeezed the power and electronics into a base-mounted box, tidying the overall appearance.

The gantry system, on the other hand, remains mostly untouched, except for an increase in print height. Another change for the better is the slimmed-down wiring. Half of the XY-2 Pro’s electronics are confined to a single ribbon cable, again, tidying the appearance. The other half, including the heated bed wiring, print head, and the PTFE Bowden tube, neatly funnel through protective sleeves. Undoubtedly not a one-of-a-kind feature, but a welcome one nonetheless.

Where the Tronxy XY-2 Pro does stand out is its bed leveling sensor and touchscreen interface, which we briefly touch on here. It’s responsive, well laid out, and gives easy access to all of the printer’s vital functions and settings. You couldn’t ask for much more in a printer’s UI.

While the XY-2 also used a touchscreen UI, the XY-2 Pro’s features a slimmed-down frame that appears to come at the cost of relocating the microSD reader to the rear of the printer, which is precisely what you don’t want. It seems like the “To-Do” list got mixed up with the “To-Keep” list on that one. A shame.

A prominent addition to the XY-2 Pro’s print head, and a rarity at its price point, is the bed leveling probe. Despite claims of auto-bed leveling, this probe and Tronxy’s implementation of it results in assisted-bed leveling.

The probe will measure a mesh of 16 points across the print bed and show you the differences in levels, and where you need to adjust the four bed leveling knobs to compensate. A highly useful feature, our one gripe is that even with precise measuring you can only attain a perfect level to a certain point, as you only have those four corner points to adjust.

A little hiccup with the auto-leveling is that the bed-holding binder clips, no matter where you place them, get in the way of the extruder moving along the plate to measure the outer rim.

These clips keep the flexible print bed in place. Compared to the old, non-removable BuildTak-like plate on the Tronxy XY 2, it is an improvement, but an ever so slightly one.

The problem with the flexible build plate is, in case you haven’t perfectly leveled the bed (this happens even with automatic leveling), the nozzle will abrade the surface. In addition to gouging the print bed, this can fuse filament into the surface – making removal a pain in the… wrist, shortening the lifetime of the plate and in all likelihood, give you first layer problems down the road.

If you get a decent bed level on the XY-2 Pro, the flexible print surface works well.

The 24V heated, insulated bed, heats quickly and is a feature complemented by the likes of power out recovery, and a filament run-out sensor.

Setup and Printing

Like many budget printers these days, assembly of the Tronxy XY-2 Pro consists of mounting the gantry to the base unit (which comes with the bed attached,) tightening some eccentric nuts and belt pulleys, and plugging in the cables. In all, we’d estimate it as a ten-minute job to set up and be ready to print.

Whereas we generally like Tronxy’s thinking of including numerous test prints on the microSD card, these prints take forever to print. For running a quick job to check your level and other such tweaks, avoid these prints and slice your own.

Unfortunately, the Tronxy XY-2 Pro does not come with profiles for popular slicers. It does ships with Tronxy Slicer – a proprietary skin of Cura (15.04.06) that, despite its rudimentary appearance, can be tweaked in the preferences to give you greater control over your prints. Especially for support structures, we would recommend ticking some of those boxes for better fine-tuning.

All in all, the Tronxy Slicer is not bad, but we would have wished for profiles for the most widely used slicers nonetheless.

Printing quality-wise the Tronxy XY-2 Pro has a decent out of the box quality. However, we did notice a little bit of stringing and some zits and blobs – even after altering retraction settings and printing speed, the hot end seemed to struggle ever so slightly with oozing.