Quick filament review: BASICFIL PLA Blue

There are far too few reviews of 3d printer filament. For this reason I’m starting a series of quick filament reviews: short filament reviews, some remarks, some findings, and whether I’d buy it again. For this second installment: BASICFIL PLA Blue.

BASICFIL

BASICFIL is a filament brand sold on Amazon.

Packaging and spool

BASICFIL comes in a basic non-vacuum plastic shrinkwrap.

The product as displayed on Amazon

The spool itself is quite basic and not reusable nor recyclable.

Printing

The color of the filament is blue, and on larger prints I’m of the opinion that it the blue looks pretty cheap because the color saturation is not very strong.

This filament change cone printed on the Anet ET4 Pro came out pretty good

On any print except this one I had only trouble, including warping and stringing. I tried different hotend and bed temperatures, all without any effect.

Sunshine two cylinder engine benchmark came out quite stringy

I needed to print a mount for my BigTreeTech TFT screen and it was impossible to print without warping.

Warps right at the corners. This is regardless of bed surface I used - even print beds which normally don’t exhibit issues can’t prevent this filament from warping.

I had no other choice but to print this on a giant raft - but this came at the cost of print quality

Pro’s / cons

Pro’s:

• A little bit cheaper than some filaments

Cons:

• Too expensive for the quality. Due to the warping not even usable as a cheap prototyping filament.
• Quite stringy.
• Warps unless you use extreme bed adhesion promoters like 3DLAC.
• Color looks “cheap” on larger prints.

Would I buy this again?

No - I would not buy this again. It is unusable.