Hatchbox is the most popular filament brand on the market today and for good reason. The Hatchbox team has worked hard to streamline every aspect of its operation.
Hatchbox filaments have received over 50,000 positive reviews on Amazon.com and widespread praise from experts across the 3D printing community. One independent poll of 287 3D printer owners showed a staggering 99.65% approval rating for Hatchbox.
Hatchbox does everything perfectly:
- Fantastic tolerance = +/- 0.03 mm
- High-quality filaments, including PLA, ABS, and PETG
- Dozens of colors to choose from
- Low price
In a hurry? Check out Hatchbox on Amazon now to read customer reviews and find out what all the excitement is about.
Preview | Product | Rating | Price | |
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HATCHBOX 1.75mm Black PLA 3D Printer Filament, 1 KG... | $25.99 | More Info |
Hatchbox Filament Review
One of the most important things about Hatchbox is that it appeals to both experts and beginners, but especially to beginners.
Here’s why:
Everyone wants good quality filament at an affordable price. But beginners also need to learn how to use their new 3D printer. If beginners start out with low quality filament, they will spend all of their time unclogging their extruder instead of learning how to print.
Thankfully, Hatchbox allows beginners to learn without wasting all of their money.
Also, we want lots of colors. We all have lots of ideas, and not all of them are going to look good in black. Hatchbox offers more than 30 different colors to choose from.
This mix of affordability, high quality, and broad color range is the main factor that allows Hatchbox to dominate the filament market.
Hatchbox Filament Price
Hatchbox nails the price-to-quality ratio.
The problem with many other filaments is that the cheaper filaments clog your printer or don’t print well, but the expensive filaments don’t give you as much filament to work with for your money.
Hatchbox has solved this problem by offering a consistently good quality filament at an affordable price. In fact, Hatchbox produces some of the highest quality filaments available for a very reasonable price.
That is a very compelling offer to customers who are tired of choosing between either buying poorly made, inconsistent filaments or shelling a lot of money for only one spool of a premium filament.
The price-to-quality ratio that Hatchbox products offer, combined with all of the other good things about the company, helps to explain Hatchbox’s immense popularity.
Check Price Of Hatchbox Filaments
Hatchbox Filament Color Range
As a general 3D filament brand, Hatchbox offers dozens of colors, from neon green to light blue to various metallic colors (copper, bronze, silver, and gold). Hatchbox also provides satisfying versions of all of the prime colors, as well as a super deep black and a solid white.
In general, the colors are exactly as advertised. The color doesn’t always match the label on the box, but that doesn’t matter much. The important thing is that the colors are the exact shade of the color you ordered.
For instance, the red filament is REALLY red. It could be described as deep “jolly rancher” red. And the neon colors are nice and bright, which is exactly what you want in a neon color.
The one exception to this would probably be the Performance Red, which is closer to salmon red than true red. All the other colors are on point.
Hatchbox Filament Prints
Hatchbox prints are superb. The color of the filaments translates very well into the prints. The prints are also opaque, even at tapered edges.
Hatchbox filament smells just the way you would expect it to. One example is the wood filament, which has a nice woody fragrance. And the flow is smooth as butter through the extruder.
Hatchbox adheres to the printer beds nicely without any bed adhesion materials. It also adheres well with common bed adhesion materials, such as blue painter’s tape, extra strong hairspray, glue stick, and ABS slurry.
Hatchbox PLA is hard and resists bending. Even the edges of objects are rigid when infill is high. As a result Hatchbox filaments will work well for most projects that require a moderate to high strength, such as hooks or screws.
Another great aspect of Hatchbox filament is the high glossy finish of its ABS. Printed objects have a very shiny, smooth surface finish compared to other brands. So if you are looking for that in your projects, this is a great brand to use.
Hatchbox Filament Quality
So just how good is Hatchbox filament?
Out of the box, you can literally feel the quality. The raw filament is very smooth compared to other poor quality filaments.
The tolerance is also very consistent. One customer found the average diameter of one of their PLA spools to be closer to 1.69mm than the advertised 1.75mm, which is just outside the +/- 0.05mm standard. But for most spools, the average diameter along the length of the spool is pretty much dead on the 1.75mm or 3.00mm mark, which is very impressive.
Also, the filament is very round, with low ovality. This contributes to the low clog rate that Hatchbox is known for. And you get fantastic detail resolution with Hatchbox PLAs is. With all of the Hatchbox filaments, the layers are straight and perfectly uniform. The PLA doesn’t string at all, and even the wood filament has great detail resolution.
PLA
Hatchbox PLA is easily the best PLA in its price range and by far the most popular product that Hatchbox sells, which you can see from the thousands of positive customer reviews on amazon. It is everything you could ever want in a PLA: it is strong, flows smoothly, and has no problems with supports or stringing.
The tolerance is great, the colors are vibrant, and it is flexible, yet strong for a PLA. It also has a sweet smell just like pancakes. And the detail resolution is amazing. For that reason, we included Hatchbox PLA on our list of best PLA Filaments brands.
Print Settings: Print PLA at 200°C for the first 1 to 3 layers, then drop the temperature down to 190 – 195°C for the rest of the print. Heated printer bed 60 – 80°C, Fan: ON, Infill: 50 – 80%, Print Speed: 50 – 60mm/sec for PLA
ABS
The best ABS filament comes from Hatchbox, hands down. If you take one look at the literally hundreds of five-star reviews that customers have left on Amazon for Hatchbox ABS filaments, you will see just how much people love this filament.
Hatchbox ABS filament has great color and a high gloss finish that most people love. While it tolerates the use of acetone for post-processing purposes very well, you don’t often need to improve the surface finish. Even without post-processing, it is still some of the glossiest and most lustrous ABS filament available in this price range.
There is absolutely no warping and no stringing, and the filament is very strong. All in all, Hatchbox ABS filament is the best quality ABS available at this price range, which is why it made our list of the best ABS filament brands.
Print Settings: Print ABS at 210°C, Heated printer bed 90°C, Fan: ON, Print Speed: 30 – 100mm/sec
ONE CAVEAT:
We hate to say this, but we cannot confirm the purity of Hatchbox ABS filaments. While the PLA melt temperatures suggest that the purity of Hatchbox PLA is high, the same cannot be said for all Hatchbox ABS filaments. We found strong evidence that some Hatchbox ABS has other chemical agents mixed in, possibly HIPS, due to the fact that it doesn’t completely dissolve in acetone, as all ABS should.
The other clue that there might be something up with Hatchbox ABS filaments is that they are way shinier than other ABS filaments. This is especially true for Hatchbox Black ABS Filament, as one Amazon customer pointed out. However, none of this can be confirmed until a chemical purity test is performed.
Wood
If we could give Hatchbox wood filament 6 stars, we would. It is the best wood filament for the price we’ve ever found.
As one customer put it, their printer began printing and smelled gloriously of burned wood. They kept saying to themselves “I can’t believe this, I can’t believe this.” That might sound like an exaggeration, but there are many comments like this about Hatchbox wood filament across the internet
The bridging is great, but it is still important to keep the infill at atleast 30%. Below 20% infill, the filament starts to feel brittle. Post-processing is also top notch. You can sand it and carve it just like actual wood, and it looks convincingly like the real thing.
There are a few minordrawbacks, such as that support material sometimes leave marks, although not often. Also, if you try to etch it with something hot, it tends to melt instead of burn. But other than that, Hatchbox wood filament is fantastic.
Print Settings: Print wood filament at 215 – 220°C, Infill: 25 – 30%
PETG
Hatchbox also supplies some of the best PETG filament available. Hatchbox PETG filament is gaining popularity as people realize how easy it is to print with. And PETG has the strength of ABS, so it can be used for functional parts.
It has no adhesion problems or stringing. It is also almost as strong as ABS and just about as flexible as PLA when printed thin. Plus there is no smell! What could be better than that?
Print Settings: Print at 235 – 250°C, Retraction: 3mm, Print Speed: 45mm/sec
Website, Packaging, and Spool Design
Hatchbox’s success can be explained partly by the fact that it has incredibly streamlined business operations. The company relies on the Fulfilment by Amazon program. This program allows sellers to send prepackaged products to Amazon warehouses. That way, when Amazon makes a sale, the package can be shipped immediately.
This program allows Hatchbox business operations to be quick, reliable, and efficient––so efficient, in fact, that until recently, Hatchbox didn’t even have a standalone company website! Instead, it relied mainly on its Facebook brand page and Amazon webstore for its online presence.
Additionally, due to efficient and reliable sourcing methods from the supplier in China, Hatchbox has been able to maintain high availability of its products on Amazon even as demand has grown quickly. You can almost always buy the filament you are looking for. Because of this, Hatchbox has positioned itself as the current leader in 3D printer filament sales on Amazon.
Website
With the launch of www.hatchbox3d.com, the company has taken on a more active role in reaching out to its customers. The website features a nice layout with promotions, an e-commerce store, and a contact form for customer service requests. However, the website is still being built and there are several issues that (at the time of this writing) have not been resolved.
For instance, most Hatchbox products are not available on the store and the section for “guides” is empty. Another problem is that the page called “cookie policy” still has ‘Lorem ipsum’ filler content or ‘coming soon’ on it instead of actual content, which is very strange. There are other smaller mistakes too, such as grammatical errors and broken links that give an unprofessional vibe to the site overall.
These issues will probably be resolved as the website is updated, of course. But until then, we recommend staying away from the e-commerce portion of the website and instead purchasing Hatchbox products through Amazon.
Packaging
Hatchbox packaging is superior to all other filament companies. The spools come in a normal cardboard box with the Hatchbox logo on it and clearly legible labeling.
But the label on the box includes one important piece of information that no other filament company provides: the pantone number of the color you just bought. The pantone number allows you know precisely what color you are printing with, which is necessary for certain prints. Why other filament brands don’t do this is a mystery.
The rest of the packaging is standard. Inside the box, each spool is packaged in a vacuum-sealed bag with a desiccant pouch to prevent moisture from affecting the filament quality.
The vacuum-sealed bag is especially tight and well done, so you can immediately see if it has been punctured during delivery. If it has been punctured, there is a chance that moisture got inside, and you can contact Hatchbox to get a replacement spool.
Hatchbox Spool Design
The spool itself is designed perfectly, and it is hard to see where they could improve it.
You might be surprised to learn that, until recently, Hatchbox spools had a crucial flaw: the center holed used to be too small, at around 1.25 inches. That meant that you had to print a special spool holder to use Hatchbox filaments. But this year Hatchbox updated their spool design and the center hole is now 2.2 inches. No more center hub hole problems.
For the most part, the spool is what you would normally expect: it’s made of a black, hard plastic with a diameter of 7.88 inches, a width of 2.69 inches, and a weight of 1kg (.45kg for White HIPS filament). But it’s the details that make Hatchbox spools so great to use.
Hatchbox Spool Details
Hatchbox spools have added design features that increase their ease of use. The big center holes make it easy to hold while changing spools. And Hatchbox spools have two small holes every 90º so that you can secure the filament no matter how far around the spool has rotated when you are finish printing. These small details add up.
The Hatchbox 3D filament spool is wound very well, with minimal tightness, even close to the center of the spool. The low amount of tightness throughout the entire spool allows for an even flow of filament through the extruder. Every Hatchbox spool is wound very well, and there are rarely any tangles.
The last thing worth mentioning about Hatchbox spools is that they are well labeled. Labeling is not necessarily the most important thing to look for when evaluating a spool. However, a lack of labeling can cause minor annoyances if the spool is difficult to distinguish from other similar-looking spools that you might have in a storage container.
With Hatchbox spools, you will not have this problem. The side of the spool is clearly labeled with a barcode, brand name, plastic type, color, recommended print temperature, filament diameter, tolerance, and weight. It also has a “Made in China” label on the side in case you were wondering where the filament came from.
But best of all, Hatchbox spools are one of the only filament brands that include this basic information in several languages on the label: English, Dutch, German, and Chinese.
QUICK TIP – EMPTY SPOOL WEIGHT:
Check out our complete Empty Spool Weight Database.
The weight of an empty Hatchbox spool is 225g, although it sometimes varies between 210 – 240g.
If you set up a scale under your spool of filament, then you can use the empty spool weight to estimate how much filament you have left while you are printing. This can also help you gauge how much filament is left on the spool for other projects.
Who Owns Hatchbox?
Hatchbox is a California based brand owned by Megalowmart Holdings LLC, a company that specializes in 3D printers and 3D printer filaments. The man behind the enterprise is George Li, a member of Megalowmart Holdings LLC and President of GLD Technologies Corp. since 2010.
Besides Megalowmart, Hatchbox works with several other partners: Fire Sale Merchant, The Smoke Mart, Low Baller. These other brands sell other types of products, such as lighters, water pipes, and grinders.
Quick Facts About Hatchbox Filament
- Business Type: Fullfillment by Amazon
- Location: 2665 Pomona Blvd, Pomona, CA 91768
- Founding Date: 2013
- Source: China
- Shipping: Amazon
- Return Policy: None
- Deals and Perks: Free shipping on orders over $35, except for Black PLA
- Customer Service: Excellent customer service on its Facebook page, poor customer service on Amazon page, email, and over the phone.
- Website: www.hatchbox3d.com
- Press/Media: Extensive media coverage, mostly positive
Where Does Hatchbox Filament Come From? Where Can I Buy It?
The filament sold through the Hatchbox brand is imported from China, repackaged with the Hatchbox brand in California, and distributed through Amazon’s “Fulfilment by Amazon” program. Because Hatchbox uses Amazon, the delivery times are excellent. Hatchbox has also recently launched its own website: www.hatchbox3d.com.
We will see if Hatchbox can maintain the same level of excellence in shipping with the new Hatchbox website that it has been able to offer until now by using Amazon. Additionally, there will hopefully be new deals and perks for customers who buy filament through the website.
Right now, Hatchbox offers free shipping on orders over $35 through Amazon. This is a fairly common offer, so it would be nice if there were more unique deals on the website.
Hatchbox Filament: The Take-Away
All in all, Hatchbox 3D filament is the best 3D filament available for it’s price range. Don’t let the low price fool you. This filament is as good as many filaments that cost twice as much. Also, the range of materials in the Hatchbox lineup will satisfy most customers.
All of the filament materials are of high quality and print with superb accuracy, smoothness of flow, and no clogging, warping, or stringing. The Hatchbox color options are vast and each one prints exactly the color you would expect. The red is very red, the blue is very blue, and white is pure white, not off-white. The black PLA filament is also a deep black, and for its price, it’s probably the best black filament available.
If Hatchbox is known for anything, it’s known for never clogging your printer. The brand offers some of the most consistent tolerances available. All of its filaments are consistent in shape and diameter, with low ovality and no bulges. This cannot be said for many other high volume filament producers on the market today. Hatchbox packaging and spool design are also on point.
With the launch of the Hatchbox website, new deals will hopefully become available for customers who want to try these already affordable products. However for now, you can get free shipping on many orders of Hatchbox filaments from Amazon.
Go to Amazon now to purchase your own spool of Hatchbox filament to see what all the hype is about. We promise that you won’t be disappointed.
And if you still have doubts, just check out the HUNDREDS of positive reviews on Amazon.com.
I use Hatchbox PLA and like it very much.
The only issue i have with hatchbox ABS is the reels are not recyclable.