It seems like they’re all really expensive, with most halfway decent ones being over $1000. It also seems like they’re really finicky and hard to get working consistently.
Are there any 3d printers that are actually a refined product, something you can just get and start using? I don’t want to spend most of my time fiddling with the settings and having to buy a ton of upgrades in the hopes of getting it to be a functional machine that can actually be used to print out parts.
If there are any out there that are basically self-maintaining or highly automated in terms of configuring themselves correctly, is it only the really expensive ones, or are there more affordable sort of “get and forget” printers that you can just set up and start using?
Whatever you get, look for auto-leveling in the features. Fuck manual leveling.
If you want cheap you gotta deal with jank.
That might as well be Creality’s motto but hey mine works
I have a Prusa MK3S+. I bought mine as a kit, though they did sell (mostly) assembled units as well.
After 2 moves of just shoving it in couch cushions and waiting over a year between prints the only thing I did to get it up and running was blow the dust off the hotplate. I probably coulda done more, but I didn’t have to and it banged out a perfect print first time. Most of the fiddling I’ve done with it is in the slicer.
It’s a lot of money, but it has “just worked” every time I’ve used it.
FDM or Resin? I got a Ender 3 S1 Pro for my fdm printing and I have to fuss with it way less than other printers I’ve owned. Comes with all the upgrades you could want except maybe an enclosure (and the creality tent does it pretty good for cheap).
Still need to level your bed, but assembly is pretty foolproof and you don’t need to fuss with much else.
There are ones that come with hard enclosures and even have beds that level themselves, but those features are very spendy.
Edit: any printer you get, you’ll still need to learn to slice files in Cura or whatever, figure out when you need supports and what good settings are. But also, the new Cura has pretty good default settings for that printer.
Ender 3 S1 has been pretty great for me. I mainly do functional prints and it can do some pretty fine detail. I learned a lot by doing and tweeking settings as I went along. Not even the high dollar consumer grade ones will be “self maintaining” or just be able to load a file and print perfectly without knowing what settings to tweak to get which results. Getting a $500+ printer has some features that will make certain things easier, but you’re probably not going to care about those features unless you’re doing production work.
