The Ender 3 V3 SE prints beautifully, up to 260 degrees

It really is very good for the money

I want to be fair to this machine before I complain about it. The Ender 3 V3 SE auto levels, it has a direct drive extruder, it prints fast enough that the number stopped being interesting, and it costs less than a pair of decent winter tyres. For a first printer it is close to the obvious answer, and the reviews saying so are not wrong.

But almost every review is a review of printing PLA, because almost everyone prints PLA. The interesting question is what happens the day you want to print something that has to live outdoors, or in a car, or hold a load. And that is where the specification stops being generous.

The numbers that decide what fits

From Creality's own specification for the V3 SE.

260 is a ceiling, not a target

PLA prints somewhere around 200 to 220. PETG wants 230 to 250. Both are comfortably inside 260, and between them they cover most of what anyone actually makes. So far so fine.

ABS wants 240 to 260, which looks like it fits and mostly does not, because you want headroom above the material's range rather than to be sitting on the ceiling of the machine. Polycarbonate wants 270 to 310 and is simply out. Nylon is out. The carbon filled versions of anything usually want more heat than the unfilled version, so they drift out too.

None of this is Creality being cheap. It is a property of how the hotend is built. A hotend with a PTFE tube running down into the hot zone is limited by that tube, which starts to break down somewhere above 240 and does so invisibly, giving you worse prints and fumes rather than an error message. The 260 figure is the honest edge of that design.

The small town tax

Here is the part that does not show up in reviews written by people who live near a shop. Everything I buy for this printer is ordered and then waited for, usually two to three weeks. So the cost of buying the wrong nozzle is not the forty kronor. It is that the project I was going to do that weekend now happens next month, if I remember.

Which is the whole reason I ended up caring about compatibility as a thing worth checking properly rather than guessing at. When the feedback loop on a mistake is three weeks long, guessing gets expensive in a way that has nothing to do with money.