ZIRO Translucent PLA Filament 1.75mm, Translucent Blue

Good filament at a good price!

I ordered the Transparent Purple and Transparent Blue. Since buying I have also read a lot of comments and reviews and wanted to clear some things up.

It prints like PETG. It prints okay at PLA temps, but you would never know it prints like PETG unless someone called it out or you did some serious testing. You would print it like PLA and then blame bad quality on the filament, the manufacturer, or maybe think it was your own printer.

Below are some common misattributed problems.

Clogging the Extruder, Wrong Temperature, Cloudiness, Brittle Layers, Bad Bed Adhesion:

Tish Rader was right in his reviews, IT IS NOT PLA, IT IS PETG (or at least, it prints like PETG). I was printing (somewhat)fast on the Neptune 4, (at 100-200mm^s and 220 degrees Celsius) and the supports (Since they were printed the fastest) were under extruding, leaving, what I call, the chain-link fence effect, characteristic of print temps being too low, and characteristic of a clogged nozzle. I also printed a model with supports, they were harder to remove than the supports on the PLA version of the model, so much so that I had to reprint it with a support distance of .4 at a .2mm layer height. All that being said, it did stick to the Elegoo black and Sunlu silk black PLA I printed it on top of on the Decepticon symbol.

**I do feel I should mention, as PanzerWeiro pointed out, that it does stick to other PLA. I have printed it on to of MatterHackers black PLA and SUNLU Silk black PLA and it has stuck perfectly with absolutely no problems (so far, at least). So, while this filament does require PETG temps, overhang and support settings, it does stick to PLA perfectly with no problems.**

The prints at this temp and speed (180-220 at 100-200mm^s) were also cloudy, as many of the reviewers probably attributed to the wrong causes. That said, the filament became visibly shinier, less cloudy, and more transparent (The blue and purple showed less of their respective colors and more white light when white light was shining through them), when the temps were upped and the speeds stayed the same (255 degrees at 100-200mm^s). I have not tried printing at higher than 255 deg, although I may to see what the effects are.
However, I got the best, shiniest, strongest, and translucent results when printed at sub-80mm^s (normal, non-fast printer speeds) at 250 deg C. This being said, this was done on the stock Neptune 4 (with a custom slow profile), and I haven't been able to print this filament at all (it always turns out horrible) on the Neptune 3 Max and I don't have another printer (yet) to see if it is just the N3M being weird.

I recently ran a temperature tower test and also found that prints printed at PLA temps (180-205 at 100-200mm^s) had really brittle layers (I could easily, even accidentally, pull apart those layers), with the layer adhesion becoming like regular PLA at 210-215 degrees. The filament itself is pretty brittle, it has snapped multiple times while I was trying to weave the filament through the tiny hole on the spool (It has not snapped while just sitting there, either on the printer, sitting on the spool, or even while printing, which is pretty much all I care about). The brittleness is not annoying, just slightly inconveniencing, it is no reason not to buy this filament

Printing at too low a nozzle temp can result in bad bed adhesion, many reviewers attribute this to the filament, but it is actually them printing at too low a temp because ZIRO advertised this as PLA. So raise your nozzle temp, (210-215 is a good temp) and don't complain that it has bad bed adhesion, complain that they don't give the right printing preferences.

They transmit light well (DO NOT BE FOOLED, in some photos the purple looks deep purple, but it is more pink than it looks, you can see the actual shade and color in the picture with the non-lit, side-by-side rock comparisons. However, the photo with the Decepticon symbol is an accurate photo, probably because it was printed with more layers and walls). The purple looks a bit pink at times, which I understand seems characteristic of some of the colors, like red looking orange.

This filament is not a bad buy, ZIRO has just advertised it as PLA when it prints like PETG, leading to some confused customers and bad reviews they could have avoided. That said, I don't think that I would've bought this if I knew it prints like PETG, I was specifically looking for transparent PLA, and didn't want to deal with the hassle of printing PETG (Little did I know it would happen anyway XD). ZIRO probably knows this and won't be changing the labels anytime soon.

I cannot speak for what I don't know, so I wanted to clarify. All this testing was done on the Transparent Purple PLA and Transparent Blue PLA, I did not test and cannot speak for any of the other colors. I did not receive a tangled, broken, or otherwise damaged spool when I bought these two colors. That is not to say it cannot happen. However, it is my un...

After the first quarter of the spool, it jams up constantly because the spool was wound poorly.

Edit: Ziro saw this review and offered me a refund. I will give their filament another chance and update.

Those two objects in the foreground are mathematical models of things called "Platonic solids" and they're both supposed to be closed objects more or less like soccer balls. Both would have taken 28-30 hours to print, but in both cases the Ziro filament broke at about 20 hours, ruining the prints. In many hundreds of hours of printing, these are the only two times I've had a filament break in the extruder.

I dont write many reviews but I had to for this, honestly I was pretty impressed with the quality of the filament but you know what really put this product over the top? They give you free cleaning filament with every spool, and to put the icing on the cake sample filament and a resealable bag. I MEAN WHAT!?! This should be a example for every company out there, this is how you treat a customer