For a long time, approximately 4 years I’ve been using Ultimaker’s Cura as my primary slicer for 3D printing, although it’s heavy leaning towards use with Ultimaker’s own printers it does a good job of supporting a wide range of other printers as well. When I initially received my CR-10 it was supported out of the box and there were a couple community profiles that made it easy to get good print quality out of the box.
I honestly haven’t had any major issues with Cura, it does what I need and I’m not using any of the advanced features that would make me want to switch. However, with the wealth of other slicers and optimisations they implement I thought it was worth trying out something new. My choice was Orca Slicer, based on a combination of Prusa Slicer and Bambu Studio, both of which are in the top slicers in use today with Bambu having a reputation for speed and quaality of prints.
One feature that really drew me to Orca slicer was the readily available tuning strategies that would generate testing profiles and gcode to print them. Combined with the guides on the Orca slicer’s Github page it made it easy to get started with tuning the slicer for my printer and filament. Before now I had only ever done generic tuning through the guides in the Klipper documentation and a few test prints here and there. However, with the wealth of tuning strategies I could properly try and dial in the settings for my printer and the new Hight Flow Elegoo PETG filament I had recently purchased.
It’s likely that I’ll be staying with Orca slicer for the next couple of weeks whilst I adjust my settings and get used to the new interface. So far I’m really enjoying the way that profiles and filament settings are managed over Cura, with intuitive menus and categories not sorted by feature but by use case. This makes it easy to find the settings I want to adjust without having to hunt through a long list of options.
I’m interested to see what the next big update for Orca Slicer brings as it seems to have a large number of utilites and features that are still being worked on and added to.