Prusa MINI vs MK3S First Impressions

This is not a paid post, I bought two Prusa MINIs with my wife's hard-earned money :D     With that being said, let's get cracking...

A photo after they both finished 11 hour print jobs.
I managed to squeeze both of them on my Ikea table

Testing methodology (unless stated otherwise):

• Fillamentum light ivory PLA
• Default Prusa slicer Fillamentum PLA preset
• Default 0.2mm QUALITY MINI print preset (speed settings are at the bottom of the post)
• no post processing of the prints whatsoever
• I did not do any tweaking of anything. Two printers were assembled and off we went printing

Ask any questions in the comments down bellow!

Noise
I do not have any sound measuring equipment, so I've only used my ears. From my observation, mk3s and mini sound the same. They all have same amount of smooth rods and bearings and the same motors, etc...

Stringing

It is nonexistent... this is a photo of a stringing benchmark STL:

 Marble Machine Spiralicious Module ( PLA Extrafill Vertigo Grey & Mukha)

Marble Machine Track Pieces

Note #1: I suggest you open two windows side by side and examine pictures.
Note #2: Ignore the big elephant foot on pictures, I did not compensate for that in any way during testing.

Benchy printed on far left of the bed:

Benchy printed on far right of the bed:

 Benchy printed on MK3S:  (Prusa MK3 converted to MK3S: the printer has 1,965 hours on it and will need belt tightening in very near future)

 

XYZ Calibration Cube printed on far left of the bed with 0.25 MINI DRAFT settings

(Right click and click view image to enlarge)

 

XYZ Calibration Cube printed on far left of the bed with 0.2mm QUALITY MINI preset

 

XYZ Calibration Cube printed on far right of the bed with 0.2mm QUALITY MINI preset

 

 BRIDGING Test10-100mm wide, it printed it all very nicely... here are top and bottom pictures

 0.2mm QUALITY MINI preset:

0.25mm DRAFT MINI PRESET:

If you want to show support, here is a shameless plug of my Marble Machine :)  You can get the STL files here.Simple share or a comment will also suffice, 3D printing is my passion anyways :)

 

Unloading/loading of filament
it's very similar to the mk3 process... just a bit more difficult because it is Bowden system, so you have the tubes to work with...

The first time I tried loading filament it would not work and gears started grinding on it and they started making very unhealthy sounds, so I was panicking a bit, thinking its broken or I broke it. After some tinkering I managed to pull out the filament that was partially stuck in the gears. And from that point on I had no issues really, I think i just needed a few tries to get a hang with it.

Few other notes:

• I love how USB replaced SD cards...  great move
• It has thermal runaway, i tested it.
• Prusa MINI does the bed leveling with semi hot nozzle (170 degrees), so no dripping on the bed, unlike my mk3s
• A few bugs found so far, for example:
• if you have long file name to print, the text does not scroll, so you can only see the first 15 letters of the file name
• sometimes when MINI finishes printing, you need to restart the printer to select a new file to start printing
• Power shutoff resume function is not yet implemented... print fails if power goes out
• I wish that "remaining time" text was bigger on the display... it is super tiny and that is the most important information that I would like to see at a first glance