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Ask HN: What's a good 3D Printer for sub $1000?

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Re: Ask HN: What's a good 3D Printer for sub $1000?

#131

Post by antirez »

bb88 wrote: post #128
chakintosh wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't care about business practices and general privacy concerns, Bambu. While I agree, I think it's heavily underselling Bambulab printers in terms of UX and print quality, they are the absolute best in the market and by a mile.

> UX and print quality GUI and UX are not the same. Prusa has pretty good print quality too but not as good a GUI as the Bambu. UX would include the ability to easily tear down a hot end, replace a nozzle, tighten any belts, and anything else that would affect your ability to print high quality prints. For prusa, since that's the printer I have experience with the most. Replacing the nozzle and clearing filament jams…

What bambulab printers that have the "A1" series nozzle, replacing one is a matter of 3 seconds, just by naked hands. 10x times faster than in the Prusa world (Nextruder included). Being this the single most important thing a printer need from the POV of servicing, this is a huge difference.

Re: Ask HN: What's a good 3D Printer for sub $1000?

#132

Post by malfist »

antirez wrote: post #131
bb88 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UX and print quality GUI and UX are not the same. Prusa has pretty good print quality too but not as good a GUI as the Bambu. UX would include the ability to easily tear down a hot end, replace a nozzle, tighten any belts, and anything else that would affect your ability to print high quality prints. For prusa, since that's the printer I have experience with the most. Replacing the nozzle and clearing filament jams…

What bambulab printers that have the "A1" series nozzle, replacing one is a matter of 3 seconds, just by naked hands. 10x times faster than in the Prusa world (Nextruder included). Being this the single most important thing a printer need from the POV of servicing, this is a huge difference.

How often are you changing nozzles? I can't think I've ever done it except for swapping out the manufacturer supplied brass with a hardened steel after or arrives

Re: Ask HN: What's a good 3D Printer for sub $1000?

#133

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

skhameneh wrote: post #8

If you don't care about business practices and general privacy concerns, Bambu. If you want a large printer that's decent for tinkering, Sovol SV08. If you want relatively good support and to support a company that has a history of giving back, Prusa. If you want something cheap with a lot of features that tend to be more high end, Elegoo Centuri Carbon. If you just want something cheap that's arguably incredible val…

I wouldn't recommend a Creality to someone new to 3D printing. They can be a pain to work with. They're CHEAP, and there's plenty of aftermarket support, but that ends up turning the printer into a product for someone who sees the printer itself being a hobby, rather than the printer being merely an appliance that produces things.

Buying a Creality printer is like buying a hobby-grade RC car (ie, Traxxas, Team Associated, etc.). Decent out of the box, but you're likely going to be reaching for buying upgraded parts and it eventually becomes a Ship of Theseus.

I have an Ender 3 Pro, my list of upgrades:

- Replace the crappy flexible mat with PEI-coated flexsteel

- Filament runout detector

- Motherboard replacement (made flashing custom firmware 100x easier, and uses quieter stepper motor drivers)

- Automatic bed leveler

- Dual-gear extruder

- Customized firmware that changes the 3x3 bed leveling matrix to 7x7

- OctoPi

A decent printer will have half of these features already built in.

Re: Ask HN: What's a good 3D Printer for sub $1000?

#134

Post by randomNumber7 »

chakintosh wrote: post #76
skhameneh wrote: post #8

If you don't care about business practices and general privacy concerns, Bambu. If you want a large printer that's decent for tinkering, Sovol SV08. If you want relatively good support and to support a company that has a history of giving back, Prusa. If you want something cheap with a lot of features that tend to be more high end, Elegoo Centuri Carbon. If you just want something cheap that's arguably incredible val…

> If you don't care about business practices and general privacy concerns, Bambu. While I agree, I think it's heavily underselling Bambulab printers in terms of UX and print quality, they are the absolute best in the market and by a mile.

I looked at a bambu printer a friend owns and it is pretty high quality engineering.

It stands on soft rubber feet so the whole machine has a low natural frequency (similar to the drum of a washing machine). This has the advantage that the high frequency movements of the motors/axes never resonate with the casing.

In the beginning it does a lot of tests and seems to also shake the machine to analyse the frequency behaviour.

Re: Ask HN: What's a good 3D Printer for sub $1000?

#136

Post by bsder »

Symbiote wrote: post #111
baq wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. Bambu is the difference between 'my hobby is 3d printers' vs 'my hobby is 3d printing'. The damn thing sits in the garage idle for months and then it just prints a whole spool of stuff perfectly without even a drop of oil (which it asked for in between plates, I'll grant it that).

A Prusa is equally reliable.

Sadly, Prusa is not equally reliable.

The fact that the Bambu printers use linear slides means they have a huge accuracy advantage right out the chute. And the Bambu printers have a bunch of other quality of life improvements that really add up.

While you can certainly slag Bambu for their business practices, the other 3D printer companies are absolutely lagging on the engineering front. Companies like Prusa need to step up their game.

As for phoning home, we isolated the printer on its own network and it hasn't caused us any issues. Sure, some of the monitoring features won't work, but it seems to print just fine without network access.

Re: Ask HN: What's a good 3D Printer for sub $1000?

#137

Post by blacksmith_tb »

nerdtalker wrote: post #135

Elegoo Centauri Carbon. I am blown away at the quality which rivals or exceeds my X1C and it's like $300. It was on sale $49 off earlier this week which was insane. Subsidized by CCP but keep it offline and you're good to go.

Yeah, I have friend who recently got one and is loving it. Does seem close to the X1C (which has been really solid for me, but is hardly cheap).

Re: Ask HN: What's a good 3D Printer for sub $1000?

#140

Post by wpm »

Symbiote wrote: post #111
baq wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. Bambu is the difference between 'my hobby is 3d printers' vs 'my hobby is 3d printing'. The damn thing sits in the garage idle for months and then it just prints a whole spool of stuff perfectly without even a drop of oil (which it asked for in between plates, I'll grant it that).

A Prusa is equally reliable.

Bambu's marketing (handing them out like candy to every YouTuber) has propagated a lie that there's "Easy and locked down Bambu" and "Yucky hard to use custom printers".

I have an Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro. It was like $220. I have put approximately $30 into it for the Raspberry Pi I installed Octoprint on, and even that's a stretch since I already owned the Pi. It prints just fine. Sits for months. Fires up every time. First layers perfect every time.

The "printer being the hobby" is only true if you let it. Even cheap no name open source printers are really good these days, and in the high end there are plenty that are competitive with Bambu on print quality, out of the box experience, and features, often exceeding them.

I dunno, I guess I just don't think having to let a printer talk to some fucking cloud service in China so I can start an STL print from my phone is all that important of a feature.

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