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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?

#151

Post by sho_hn »

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.

Prusa generally has better print quality in terms of accuracy and better overhang performance.

Prusa drives the slicer development ecosystem (Bambu Studio is a fork), so new production-ready advances typically come from them first, which is lovely to support.

The Bambu products are fine. They print well. But the "it's on another level" stuff is mostly paid influencer narratives (a rampant thing in 3D printer YouTube, etc.) that don't really hold up to any professional scrutiny.

With advent of EasyPrint etc. arguably Prusa may have also one-upped them on ease of use? Though this isn't first-hand knowledge as I haven't tried it personally.

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

#152

Post by sho_hn »

bb88 wrote: post #148
malfist wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not changing out nozzles daily, but I do sometimes make small parts that need the .2mm nozzle. Not for gaming or miniatures, but typically mechanical interfaces where the .2mm nozzle gives a better result. But then for most stuff I use a .6mm high flow nozzle.

It's worth noting though that this part of the game is about to change majorly for both brands.

Prusa is widely known to launch their next-generation tool changer at Formnext in Nov, which is going to be a concept where you have a rack of nozzle+heatpipe+filament tube tools that the print head grabs and heats up inductively. And Bambu is more or less working on something similar they will probably launch some time next year.

This is totally changing the "nozzle swap" equation. It means purge-free and much faster multi-material printing without outright duplicating print heads like the XL does, and the ability to park and mix nozzle sizes as well.

It'll be cool to see which company pulls it off better. As someone who was never convinced by either Bambu's shoddy and wasteful AMS or Prusa's ridiculously humongous MMU+Buffer approach, this is the leap I've been waiting for for an upgrade.

Edit: Amazing move to downvote a comment that simply and neutrally adds new information to the thread.

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

#153

Post by dingnuts »

bsder wrote: post #136
Symbiote wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

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

#154

Post by bluGill »

brudgers wrote: post #99
bluGill wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many parts are we talking? I sounds to me like you are the perfect candidate for send-cut-send or one of the many many other services that take your CAD and build parts. You get to choose from materials your printer couldn't do (not matter what you have something cannot be done)

When you have a printer, cycle times can be much shorter…and a few fast cycles with a job shop will pay for a printer. Small jobs from small customers are not a high priority for job shops. Neither are cheap jobs. Having a printer means you are able to work on projects at 2am Sunday.

those are the tradeoffs. It sounds to me like 3d priting isn't even a good fit for what the guy wants to do.

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

#155

Post by tibbon »

I got a Bambu P1S two years ago for Christmas as a gift. It's been fantastic. 98% of my prints have been successful.

They aren't the free open source dream machine, but it also works quite well and needs little messing with.

I've played with 3d printers back to the RepRap and Makerbots - but those always required so much work to get a successful print.

I haven't seen something clearly better in the price range.

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

#157

Post by lstodd »

mbreese wrote: post #146
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Associ…

I agree. I have a Creality Ender 3 V2. I wanted something cheap that I wasn’t going to worry about if it became a paperweight (due to lack of use). As I worked more with it, I upgraded it a ton, putting about as much money into it as it cost (which wasn’t much). In the end, it’s a decent printer for what I want to do with it. I added: * Bed leveler * Flexible build surface * direct drive extruder * second z axis scre…

well this.

when I started tinkering there were none of those kits, and the Ender I have now has pretty much nothing in common with the Ender I bought back then except some parts of the frame and the drives. and still the whole journey cost was about the same as just buying Prusa and then learning nothing.

this is a bit philosophical, but when you do want to shape material, be it wood or plastic, you have to not only understand how it's done, but to feel it. or you will repeatedly end up with crap and then endlessly wonder what went wrong

this cannot be bought, it's experience. for 3d-printing the fastest way is to get something like Ender and then build your own perfect printer out of it over several years.

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

#158

Post by zrobotics »

wpm wrote: post #140
Symbiote wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. F…

Yeah, I did the printer as a hobby thing when I built my first reprap. It was fun, and I learned a ton, but the state of the art in 2014 just wasn't there for low-end machines to be reliable. I replaced it with a prusa in 2019,and I have had zero issues at all with it. The only print failures I've had were either due to part design or bad filament (pla stored in a humid garage). I've been super impressed with the quality of the machine, and have printed some fairly challenging parts. Plus, the whole machine is open and hackable. I didn't really even consider other printers, since I wanted to support prusa and what they have done for the community. Although I have used a friend's ender 3, and I was pretty impressed with the quality for the price.

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

#159

Post by dceddia »

Symbiote wrote: post #120
dceddia wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the idea of building a printer, but I know that my attention span is limited on these sorts of things. As in, I’ll be reliably obsessed until it’s done and tuned, and then I’ll forget everything until the next time I want to use it. So my big question, for someone who’s owned one a while: is the printer ever “done”? Is there a point after which it “just works”? Or is it always going to be more like “it’s great…

I assembled a Prusa Mk3 a few years ago, and other than swapping a nozzle that wore out (they don't last forever) it's still working fine. I grease it about twice a year, and clean any gunk from the nozzle (takes a few seconds) every so often. I wash the print bed thoroughly about 3 or 4 times a year. I'm interested in 3D printing, but not interested in fiddling with the printer itself. So, I have fiddled to print so…

Yep this matches my experience pretty well! It’s been a good printer and I haven’t had to do much, and I avoid fiddling and mostly use it as a tool. I’m always eyeing the newer faster printers but I don’t love the cloudiness of Bambu and Prusa’s new stuff seems nice but not quite worth the leap yet. Voron has interested me for a while though.

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

#160

Post by _carbyau_ »

baq wrote: post #94
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.

+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).

> Bambu is the difference between 'my hobby is 3d printers' vs 'my hobby is 3d printing'.

My experience was the same. I can just run the thing without having to tweak, tune, calibrate it. It takes care of that itself. I also don't let it talk to my wifi though. I just use the microSD card.

But my purchase was a while ago. While it is possible the industry has caught up, the reputation Bambu built still leads the pack.

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