I am very interested in 3D printing and I want to get into it. What would be a good printer for a beginner that is also of reasonable quality.
I don’t want to make anything huge but I don’t want to limit myself to any size that’s unreasonably small.
Edit: Wow, you guys were all so helpful. While I haven’t made my decision I have a lot more to go off of, I’m gonna do a bit more research into it based on what you have all said.
It’s a bit dated, but I had an excellent beginner 3D printing experience on my Flashforge Creator Pro. The OG.
It’s a bit slow, but very consistent out of the box. It was also pre-built, which was nice.
It was heaps easier to get going compared to my Anet A8. But I learned a lot on the A8 by putting it together.
I started with a Flashforge Dreamer - which is relatively close to the Creator Pro. Bed leveling was annoying from the beginning - though after adding some locking nuts at least stayed leveled for a while.
With PLA I was getting good prints without much effort - though quicky ran into limitations with flashprint, build volume size, other materials. I did some PETG printing, which was a pain - extruder slipping on the material, so compensating with overextrusion which somewhat worked, but gave nad tolerances.
It is now my experimentation printer -rebuilt with microswiss hotend and extruder and flashed with marlin.
That was probably one of those most succinct cons list about the Creator Pro / Dreamer I’ve heard. My experience mirrors yours.
What was your second printer?
Prusa mk3s+ with mmu2s and a mini.
Mini pretty much immediately upgraded with the Bondtech IFS extruder - great extruder, but won’t buy Bondtech kits again as their documentation is horrible. Mainly had the mini for flex and abrasive initially, as I didn’t want to mess with nozzle changes on the less accessible mk3s, and didn’t want to mess with flexible with the MMU. Upgraded it earlier this year to Revo hotend - had a bit trouble due to another delay with their hardened nozzles, but figured out you can get Revo nozzles from China with pretty much the same tolerances for 5 EUR each, so was just running through them until I finally got my obxidian nozzles.
Mk3s ran stock with MMU for a while, printed the TZB extruder in PC-CF earlier this year, switched to TZB-firmware, and also moved it to Revo - didn’t have much issues with MMU before that, but things are very noticeably faster now, plus even very flexible flex just works.
Not sure if I’ll upgrade it to the MK4 - the load cell setup is intriguing, but I don’t want to give up the Revo setup, so I’ll probably wait and see if mods will come up allowing me to use both.
