I have found a creality ender 3 pro on facebook marketplace for $75, would this be a good 3d printer at a good price for my first time?
I probably wouldn’t be printing too often, but I have a number of ideas for things that I’d like to try making.
I have found a creality ender 3 pro on facebook marketplace for $75, would this be a good 3d printer at a good price for my first time?
I probably wouldn’t be printing too often, but I have a number of ideas for things that I’d like to try making.
I have a very high budget, but I’d like to stay under $300, I already use Linux, I’m used to spending weeks tinkering with things.
If you can stretch that a tiny bit perhaps the Anycubic Kobra S1 is an idea (I think I saw that machine for 369€). Apparently not much for tinkering, but a cheap “just works” device with probably the cheapest upgrade path for multi-colour printing. Its enclosure also enables you to immediately try out more demanding materials like ASA (for UV resistance), ABS or Nylon. And of course PHA, the only truly compostable material (not yet too common, but f.e. Colorfabb sells those).
I see a lot of people recommending Creality. Be aware that Creality is about to go public. There already are signs of enshittification since they announced that plan (incl. a website for 3D models filled with stolen work and AI trash), so I’d avoid them as much as Bambu.
For filament I’ve had some really bad experiences with cheap stuff as well (tangles, air bubbles, dirt etc.), so I’ll add some recommendations too. Mind that this is just my personal experience.
tl;dr
Cheap printer: Anycubic
High quality printer: Prusa
To avoid!: Bambu, Creality
Cheap filament: TINMORRY, eSUN
High quality filament: extrudr, Prusament, Colorfabb
Recycling filament: Recyclingfabrik (EU), Prusament
To avoid (filament): DasFilament, GEEETech
Can a Bambu printer not be hacked to get full functionality yet?
The older ones can get mostly hacked (not sure about their newest devices), but given Bambu’s increasing reliance on closed source code, custom parts that are not easily replacable and their financial need to lock people into their ecosystem (they’re backed by Venture Capital) it will be a constant fight. And you never know if they’ll lock down something with the next patch. Not to mention that, by using their services, you’re forcing others into soft-dependencies as well (e.g. their model website “MakerWorld” requires everyone who wants to download more than 5 individual parts to register = more data and ads for Bambu).
There’s no reason to buy into something like that.
Thingiverse is just a way to steal IP by Ultimaker. No one buys those shitty printers any more. You have to register with Prusa’s site as well. All 3D printing that is practical is backed by VC. These cheap hobby printers went nowhere until Bambu started up.
I think a bunch of garage hobbyists need to wake up and realize the tech will not advance on the free model. See CNC technology.
My guy, first off: the current most powerful printer is the T250, which is 100% open-source. Secondly: Neither Printables (Prusa) nor Thingiverse (Ultimaker) needs a registration for people to download stuff. Not defending Thingiverse or Ultimaker, they definitely also did shit. But that doesn’t mean you have to step right into it (unless you’re into such things). Prusa also made some weird choices (by far not as much as others though). Thirdly: even modern printers with fancy new tech like toolhead switching can and are being build with Klipper as their control software (Snapmaker U1), and Sovol based their company around offering easy-to-use printers with off-the-shelf parts closely based on Voron designs. And I probably don’t need to explain how Prusa operates. None of them are perfect kof course, but there’s zero need for the kind of enshittification Bambu and Creality now stand for.
You have to be trolling. There’s nothing special about Bambu printers, except perhaps their (by now) awful failure rate and printer recalls. Although it might indeed be special to build printers where the hotend successfully melts itself, the newest problems with the A1 (not the first time Bambu printers are suffering from thermal runaway due to bad thermistors, literally the most dangerous failure there is). The one thing they do like a pro is marketing and capturing marketshare by selling underpriced hardware with increasingly closed software through influencer campaigns.
To call everything that already existed when Bambu was created “cheap hobby printers” is just absurd.
Rofl, so Prusa printers aren’t practical. Noted.
I started with anet a8, For the price pretty much everything is diy or propietary I would say the ender 3 pro for 75 would be good as that leaves you with 225 left for spare parts or upgrades. But if you want it to work out of the box search for used prusa’s.