Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2 vs Centauri Carbon: Is the Upgrade Worth It?

Elegoo replaced its best-selling budget printer in January 2026, and then did something that settles the comparison on its own: it stopped selling the old one. The Elegoo Centauri Carbon is now discontinued — its ELEGOO US page returns a 404, and the global store's listing shows it sold out at $438.41 — while the Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2 has come down from its launch prices to $349 standalone and $399 for the Combo with the CANVAS four-color unit included. That reframes the question. For a gen-1 owner it's still "should I replace a printer that works?" For everyone else it's "is a secondhand original plus a $55 kit still cheaper than a new Carbon 2?" This guide answers both from confirmed specs and live store prices. AunChecked is a used-goods marketplace first, so both picks link to what's purchasable right now.

What actually changed in the Carbon 2

The short version: nothing that determines what the printer can make. Build volume, speed, acceleration, flow rate, bed temperature and the CoreXY gantry are all carried over unchanged. Every gen-2 improvement is either comfort (noise, screen, filtration, belt tensioning), instrumentation (19 body sensors against gen 1's runout-and-power-loss pair), or chemistry at the extreme end — 350°C instead of 320°C. That is a good update for a new buyer and a thin one for an owner, which is exactly how the two outlets that tested both generations framed it.

The two printers

Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2 — $349, or $399 with CANVAS in the box

The Carbon 2 launched Combo-first on January 26, 2026 at $449, with a standalone "Multicolor Upgrade Ready" version following at $399. Both have since been cut: Elegoo's US store lists $349 and $399 today, with $359 and $449 shown as the struck-through prices. That matters more than any spec on this page, because most reviews still quote the launch numbers.

Reviewers liked it for the same reason they liked its predecessor — price. How-To Geek gave it 9/10 and a 2026 Editor's Choice, writing that there's no cheaper entry point, after a four-color torture test that ran past 30 hours and 1,100 filament changes. TechRadar scored it 4.5/5 and 29/30 on print quality, measuring dimensional errors averaging 0.055 mm. Against the obvious step up, the Bambu Lab P2S Combo at $799, the Carbon 2 Combo now undercuts by $400 and runs a hotter nozzle, while the P2S answers with faster color changes, less purge waste and AI failure detection.

The gen-2 problems are new ones. The base plate is injection-moulded plastic where gen 1 used metal, and it cracks at around three points near the front door on some units — sometimes before the box is opened, and it's structural, carrying mainboard wiring and the Z hardware mount. The toolhead's USB-C port carries 24 V on Vbus rather than 5 V, so plugging anything else into it destroys the toolhead. And firmware 02.00.02.00, from May 2026, stripped SSH access and blocked installing anything older than itself, closing the rollback route gen-1 owners still have.

Elegoo Centauri Carbon — discontinued, so used only

Elegoo's first enclosed CoreXY printer was revealed at RAPID + TCT 2024 and released in February 2025 at $299.99, a price that barely moved for eighteen months — $309 on the US store, sales to $279, Micro Center around $279–299. It earned the reviews to match: How-To Geek gave it 9/10 and an Editor's Choice, calling it market-disrupting; 3D Printing Industry scored it 95.65/100 on its own benchmark after 180 hours of testing, among the top three results that outlet had ever recorded, with average deviation of 0.025 mm, clean overhangs to 65° and functional threads down to M4.

The gap everyone flagged in 2025 was multicolor, and it closed on April 28, 2026. The $55 CANVAS kit for the original mounts four spools, feeds them through PTFE tubes into a shared hub at the toolhead, and installs in about an hour and ten minutes — All3DP found the build quality similar to the Carbon 2's own unit and the printed results as expected. The equivalent kit for the Carbon 2 costs $120 without a cover, or $150 with one, so the retrofit is the cheapest route to four colors Elegoo sells.

What you live with on gen 1 is polish, and now availability. The enclosure panels aren't structural and buzz at speed — roughly 55 dB, which How-To Geek likened to angry bees. Chamber LEDs are dim behind tinted glass, so camera monitoring is poor. The firmware is Klipper-based but closed, with no Mainsail or OctoPrint, and early builds crashed twice in 100 hours of How-To Geek's testing; that and a bug pushing around 28 GB of idle network traffic over 48 hours were largely patched during 2026. Spare parts are still on Elegoo's store — motherboard $49.99, assembled hotend kit $19.99, runout sensor $14.99 — which is what keeps a secondhand unit a reasonable buy rather than an orphan.

Head to head: every spec that changed

Why the newer printer isn't the faster one

This is the finding that decides it for existing owners. Popular Mechanics tested the Carbon 2 Combo against the original at identical settings and measured the original printing up to 10% faster — and Elegoo confirmed that a CANVAS-equipped gen 1 changes filaments faster than the Carbon 2 does. Nothing in the spec sheet predicts that, because nothing in the spec sheet changed.

Both generations also share the same gap between the headline and the useful number. The 500 mm/s figure is reachable on either machine, but flow can't keep up and surface finish drops: VoxelMatters put gen 1's quality sweet spot near 200 mm/s, and Tom's Hardware's Carbon 2 tests ran at typical averages of 100–160 mm/s — a multicolor model at 160 mm/s took 4 hours 55 minutes, polycarbonate utility knives at 100 mm/s took 6 hours 6 minutes. If you were hoping gen 2 finally delivers the 500 mm/s number, it doesn't.

What multicolor costs on either machine

CANVAS works, and it wastes filament. How-To Geek's four-color test completed, but more material ended up in the purge than in the model. Because a single nozzle has to purge on every change, expect 10–50% filament loss and print times up to double a toolchanger's — one model took 32 hours against 14. Multi-color jams cluster after five or six swaps, filament snapping at the hotend-to-extruder gap, and TPU won't feed through the Bowden path at all without the official adapter, though the direct-drive extruder prints 95A TPU cleanly when fed straight in.

All of that applies equally to both generations. The difference is the entry fee: $55 bolted onto a printer you already own, against $399 for the Combo or $120–150 for the Carbon 2's own kit. If your interest in multicolor is exploratory rather than settled, the gen-1 retrofit is still the cheapest way to find out whether the purge waste bothers you.

So should you upgrade, or buy the kit?

If you already own a Centauri Carbon, keep it and add the kit. How-To Geek's conclusion was blunt — the improvements aren't enough to justify buying a whole new printer — and the measured speed result points the same way. There's no trade-in, no parts upgrade, and not even a shared hotend, so "upgrading" means owning two printers or selling one. Spend $55 instead and you match the Carbon 2's headline feature while keeping the metal base plate and a firmware you can still roll back.

If you're buying your first enclosed CoreXY, the price cut has decided it. When gen 1 was $279–309 new, a secondhand one plus a $55 kit was the obvious value play. Now gen 1 is discontinued and the Carbon 2 Combo is $399 with CANVAS included, so the used route only wins if you find a gen-1 unit well under $300 — and you're taking a private sale with no warranty on a discontinued printer whose spare-parts supply won't last forever. At $349 for the standalone, the new machine is the safer buy.

If noise or fumes are the problem, that's the one real upgrade case. A printer in a bedroom or a shared office is where sub-45 dB and HEPA-plus-carbon filtration stop being spec-sheet lines. Even then, temper the number — one owner measured 72 dB at half a metre from a Carbon 2 — and note that neither machine has an actively heated chamber, so neither is the answer for large ABS parts. For how these sit against Bambu's cheaper range, our Bambu Lab A1 vs Elegoo Centauri Carbon comparison covers the budget-versus-budget matchup.

And check the used market either way. Gen-1 printers have been shipping since February 2025 and are now secondhand-only, so used units and used CANVAS kits both turn up regularly. Elegoo runs its own pre-owned channel too: a good-used Carbon 2 Combo is listed at $349.99 and an open-box one at $375.99, which means the manufacturer's used Combo costs the same as a brand-new standalone Carbon 2 while including the multicolor unit.

Verdict

FAQ

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