I see a Creality Ender 3 V3 (not SE or KE) for $130 refurbished, and also a Creality CR-10 SE for $103 refurbished on ebay. Are either or these a good choice to get into the hobby, or am I making a mistake? Should I rather buy a Bambu? My budget is around $100-$200 max. Please advise.
A creality anything shouldn’t be your first printer. I own two creality printers.
I’ve always heard “if you want to print thinks, buy Bambu. If you want to fix your printer, but an ender 3”
It depends on the type of person you are. Those machines you reference are in a class of machine where you are likely to have to put a lot of work into them to get them running reliably and probably more money than if you just bought a better printer from the get go. They are machines to recommend people who want the 3D Printer to be their hobby rather than designing and printing stuff.
If that doesn’t sound like you, just buy a used Bambu or Prusa even if you need to delay the purchase to save up longer.
Thanks for the advice. I do know that I am sort of the kind who picks the flavor of the month to get obsessed over, then throw it away for the next shiny thing, so I am a bit of both of your usecases.
I got an Ender 3 V3 KE. I am long past obsessing with 3D printing but it bleeds into my other hobbies or fixing things around the house.
“I need a plastic thing that is this-this-and-this dimensions…” I model it in FreeCAD, do a few test prints, adjust my design and re-print until satisfied.
A 3D printer became a tool that I use a couple of times per month.
You can get a new Sovol SV06 for less than $200. That worked very well out of the box compared to my older Ender 3. Prusaslicer also has a good profile for it. I don’t care for Cura slicer as much. Enders are of an older generation of printers that I will personally avoid just because of the legacy of having to tinker with them just to get them to work. The opposite end is the Bambu where “it just works” except it doesn’t always and it’s not as easy to fix and it doesn’t play well with third parties. Sovol is a good starter printer that I’d had even better bed adhesion with over Prusa MK4Ss at work.
Thanks for the advice. I’ll look into that one.
If its your first printer I would not go for a second-hand one. There are so many ways you can subtly mess up a printer and if you don’t know your way around printers yet, then it’s quite hard to fix all that.
Considering you can get a Bambulab A1 mini which does everything out of the box and works better out of the box than an Ender 3 after months of upgrades.
I have to agree. My ender 3 has been through hell over the past 5 years, but since I am familiar with it, I can usually dial it in.
If I was just starting out I would be overwhelmed with trying to understand it AND troubleshooting.
If you have an electromechanical background, such as bench repair and/or having repaired lots of truly broken printers, then it is less of a risk imo. I know that refurbish items are usually okay, but there are bad items that make it out of any shop.
The Ender 3 is like an old Jeep Willy’s. Teaches you a ton about how it operated but it does so poorly.
I went from a highly modded Ender 3 to a stock K1. The difference in consistent quality and speed is staggering.
OP, save up your money for an enclosed printer. It makes such a big difference it’s well worth it.
The max is pretty, but the SE is more in my price range.
My use is for making little plastic bits cheaply, and I’m not concerned about time. If my kid wants to upgrade to something better, I will probably “buy” it off him.
I never got the Ender 3 to be consistent. If anything it wasted time, filament, and money because it might finish a print and it might not. Great teaching tool. Awful printer these days.
I found it to just be slow. My only complaint was some weird layer squish, but that was very wrong esteps.
Thanks for the advice. I hadn’t considered that refurbished printers are technically used ones with inspection. Is it that important to avoid used printers for a first printer? I had no idea.
“refurbished” is a word that might not mean anything either.
When buying your first printer you should first choose what you want: Do you want to print or do you want to tinker?
If you want to print, get a printer like the Bambulab a1 mini. If you want to tinker, an Ender 3 is ok.
If you want to really tinker a lot, get an used one.
But I really wouldn’t recommend getting an used printer for your first one since you don’t know how they have been treated and messed up.
Thank you that’s very useful
I picked up a used ender 3 V3 se off of marketplace for $60 and had to repair it. Since then it’s been printing 10x better than my anycubic kobra neo. I think it comes down to slicer profiles in orca slicer. The ender 3 was a wildly popular printer compared to the kobra. Cheap printers cut corners but can still print good. If you’re not mechanically inclined then don’t get a cheap printer.
My ender 3 stock wasn’t my first printe and isn’t my only printer, but some days it’s my best printer.
It’s almost impossible to begin on a second-hand machine. It Will be a looong learning curve and you won’t obtain anything satysfying.
Best printer under 200, the A1 mini : https://eu.store.bambulab.com/fr/products/a1-mini
This is the only fiable plug and play printer for this price.
If you wan’t the whole 3dprinting learning program, you’d better find an Ender 3 v1 😉. Totally manual but very easy to tinker, a lot of tuto, big community to help.
How much would the size difference make me regret not getting a bigger one, and how soon would I reach that point?
I don’t think the smaller size is that big of a deal. I got a friend into 3d printing a year or two ago and he started with the A1 mini and still has it. Most of the stuff beginners print isn’t that big anyway. If you go with the A1 mini and find that you love it, you may want to upgrade to a bigger size in the future. If you go with something like an Ender 3, you may just give up on 3d printing all together. Bambu printers are just so user friendly.
I’m currently printing some accessories for my xreal glasses at my library on a MakerBot replicator mini, and just found out a1 mini is actually bigger than that one, so I don’t think the size is a big deal for me right now.
What do you want to print ?
I’ve been printing some accessories for my xreal glasses at my local library and some trinkets for my kid, but to be quite honest I don’t have any specific things I need to print. I’m looking at functional prints to get an idea of what things I can print lol.
Depends on what you are doing. I’ve been 3D printing since 2017. I’ve had maybe 2 prints over that time that wouldn’t fit on the A1 Mini. Both of which were useless throwaway toys that I could have easily done without.
The thing with FDM is that print time and filament usage scales cubically with size. Double the size, 8x the print time and filament usage.
The sweet spot are parts that are a few cm into each direction. Below that the printer often doesn’t have enough detail, above that it takes forever to print.
Quickly. 180 is pretty small. I’d get a 250 at the least. Ender isn’t bad, whatever people seem to want to say here, if you get it with the autobedleveling kit. The Bambu is proprietary and wants to lock you into their cloud BS.
Creality also want to lock you into the cloud. The soft is open source, but you won’t really work on the soft…
I have an Ender 3 v1 and a Creality Hi.
Since the Hi is on the market, the e3v3 won’t be maintained (Just have a look at the prices).If you wan’t something bigger than a A1 mini, can you add 50€ for an A1 or a Creality Hi ? You’ll have both very good printers.
I’ve had an Ender 3 v1 and v2, and enjoyed them. They were perfectly fine for what I did, but I spent a good percentage of time with them printing parts to make them better. Recently bought a Hi with the CFS, and have had almost no problems. The only problems I’ve had would be non-existent if I’d clean the bed more often. I personally think the Hi would be a good starter printer.
I went from the Ender 3 v3, to the Anycubic Kobra 3, and the difference is so wide, or makes it hard to recommend the Ender. With the Ender I could do small simple models, but anything with multiple parts were hard to dial in tolerances. The anycubic allows me to do multiple days of printing and be assured all the parts will come together. I now also get error handling so a tangle or running out of filament won’t ruin the job. It even resumes after power loss. I know it’s not in your budget, but the difference is very noticeable.
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