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.
@nieceandtows
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.
@nieceandtows
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.
@ikidd @nieceandtows
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.