What's the most key point when you decide to get a 3d printer
As the title said, what's the key point when you want to get your first 3d printer? Speed or others?
As the title said, what's the key point when you want to get your first 3d printer? Speed or others?
12 Comments
My most important key point is availability of spare parts and especially whether they are freely availble or the manufacturers own brand or a particular unique part. For example. If I want a new nozzle I want to be free to buy whichever nozzle I choose from whatever vendor I want.
Second has to do with who the manufacturer is. I hate subscription software, but I have chosen to pay Blender each year. Same thing with my 3D printers. I like what Joseph Prusa has done for the community and therefore I "happily" paid a bit extra for my MK3 printers.
If I had to buy a non-prusa, I would NOT buy a chinese clone. On principle.
I very much agree with you that accessories for any product can be easily bought to make it easier for us to adjust the machine, but one thing we need to understand is that the speed and print quality of a machine should not be constantly modified and optimized to reach the ideal after use, because it often has problems, large or small, so prusa's website has so many complete features, why do not we choose a professional and perfect machine?
So, first you might want to decide what is more important: Details or durability . In general you would choose a resin printer over a filament printer (FDM) if details are the most important thing (for example, you want to print figures and paint them).
Having said that, FDM printers tend to be more useful in general and less of a PITA to feed and care for - filament is much easier to have around and deal with than resin - and resin requires cleanup, curing, better ventilation, solvents, etc - so it's operating costs are higher. You can make mechanical parts with an FDM printer more easily than with a resin printer as resin prints tend to distort the side pointed at the build plate - something you have to account for. You CAN also get some pretty detailed prints out of the FDM printer, but it will likely take a lot longer and require more post-processing if you want to paint it.
My recommendation would be to start with an inexpensive Ender 3 or something like that (unless you have the means to buy something better) learn about printing (slicing, modeling, keying, settings, filaments, etc) using inexpensive filament and then decide if you want to take it further. I've seen good used Ender 3's for $120 with some upgrades and accessories.
If you want a truly plug-and-play solution, the Prusa MK3's are awesome printers (I have two) but they aren't cheap - even if you opt to assemble them yourself. The new kid on the block is the Bambu Labs X1-C - and it's a stunningly capable machine for about the same price as an assembled Prusa MK3 - but it also does so much automatically that it kind of removes you from the process so might not be the best machine to learn with. I also have an X1C and it's blown me away with it's speed and accuracy.
Resin printers have a strong professional and very complex operation, such industrialization will produce toxic gases, harmful, I do not consider, FDM relative will be much more convenient, but I do not want to buy a cheap machine to print ordinary things, now is not the previous era of revision, we have more options.
i have been 3d printing models off and on for the last 5 years. Started with the simple versions of creality. In the end I came to the conclusion that a "cheap" printer from creality delivers almost exactly the same result as an expensive printer. I had comparisons of really expensive printers with the same printing model, made by other people. You just have to understand how it works and there are weak points and all the rest is a matter of experience. It is best to look for a printer where the filament feed is installed directly on the extruder... without this feed hose. In my experience, you don't need all that nonsense around like an extra chassis to get very good prints. Unless you print at the North Pole. Good filament is key and experimenting a bit. Expensive printers can possibly multiply a few calibration steps.. but if you start and don't print in bulk, then you don't need it... speed is relative... 3d printing takes time. my opinion.
As far as I know the quality of this cheap machine is not consistent and for a perfect quality finished product you have to give up the speed, if it is 40mm/s-50mm/s he can give you a good quality but this consumes a lot of time and power, if you adjust the speed to 70mm/s or even higher you will not only lose time and print quality, it will not even deliver the complete thing to you.
just try it out and collect your own experiences. I can only tell you from my experience that these high speeds do not reliably bring quality to more expensive prints.
if you adjust the speed to 70mm/s or even higher you will not only lose time and print quality, it will not even deliver the complete thing to you
Not completely accurate. There are a lot more variables than speed when it comes to printing setup: filament type, filament brand/chemistry (not all PLA's are created equal), nozzle size, nozzle style, nozzle temperature, bed temperature, bed type, firmware that the printer runs, slicing parameters, etc, etc. Quite often it all boils down to experimenting to get the results you want/need. The more expensive 3D printers (including the industrial-quality printers) tend to be a little more "plug and play" but the default parameters can usually be improved upon.
If I am going to purchase my first printer, I think printing quality and printing speed are the most important things. But I find that many printers lose the quality if they go with high speed. So I am going to find a machine which can do high printing speed and high speed at the same time.
Is there a higher speed brand in the current market of the machine? Ignore the price for now.
I recently received my Bambu Labs X1-C printer - and it's an amazing machine. It is incredibly fast with outstanding quality right out of the box. This doesn't save you from having to know how to set up your prints, but I've been blown away at how fast and beautiful the prints are - all of my other printers seem glacially slow in comparison. I've only had it for about a month, so I can't speak to longevity - but I haven't heard anything about reliability problems from long-time users.
With higher speed you also need to consider the speed the filament is fed with. And that leads to how efficient the nozzle is - often regulated by heating it a bit more.
I have made hundreds of prints, and have resigned to the fact that speed is for testing and quality is not produced by higher speed.