I don't believe in two-week reviews. Creality sent me the CR-10 Smart and I lived with it for three months, with some ups and downs. Here's my honest long-term take: a beautiful, high-quality printer that rewards a bit of tinkering.
Packaging, design and the little extras
The internet is full of CR-10 Smart unboxings, so I'll keep it short. It was extremely well packed and comes with something unusual: a drawer full of tools built into the printer, which I really love. The braces at the back keep the Z axis in place, and I had no Z wobble at all. And it's beautiful. I believe the design comes from Lamborghini, and for once a great printer is also pleasant to look at, with an LED light to illuminate the print.
The extruder problem
Only time tells you what's really wrong with a printer. With mine, the issue showed up from the beginning: the plastic extruder cracked at the top. Creality sent me a new plastic one, but I didn't trust it. It wasn't pushing filament properly and I was getting under- and over-extrusion. I love vase mode with a 0.4 mm nozzle pushed to 0.8 mm extrusion width, and that needs a strong extruder. I swapped in a full metal extruder from another printer, which solved it completely. It's a fix that costs about eight or nine euros.
Is it really "smart"?
It's smart in Creality's way: you can control it from an app and send sliced files straight from your phone. But if you want to run it from a Raspberry Pi, it won't talk to the mainboard out of the box, because the Creality system bypasses it. There are guides online for a small motherboard modification. That's a bummer if you manage many printers with a Pi. On the plus side, the printer switches itself off when a print finishes, which in 2021 should be mandatory on every printer.
Print quality
Many people online had problems with the auto bed levelling, but I was one of the lucky ones: mine worked perfectly from day one. I used Creality Slicer, which is like a lighter Cura. I printed PLA, PETG and TPU, and everything printed very well, if a little slowly even at 60 mm/s. A Star Trek octopus had a great first layer. A flexible snake that had failed on my last few printers came out perfect in eSUN silk orange with zero tweaking. The glass bed holds parts firmly while hot and releases them on their own once it cools to about 20–22 °C. Vases and stacking boxes in AzureFilm silk blue, champagne and anthracite looked amazing.