Hello, I am looking to buy my first filament 3D printer. Any printer or printer brand you recommend and why? What 3D modeling software is usually used to design? Any tips are welcome! (my budget would be 200-300€) I would like to eventually get into resin printing as well.
If your budget allows snag yourself a Prusa. They’re very well made, and Jeff Prusa more or less invented the modern 3D Printer. Creality makes fine printers, but you’ll spend more time maintaining it than actually printing. I have an Ender 3 V2 and wish I had saved up to get a better printer. I don’t have any personal experience with other brands.
You’ll need to use a CAD program to make models. TinkerCAD is a great free option. You’ll also need to “slice” that model up for printing using a slicer. I personally use PrusaSlicer, but there are others as well.
If you’re asking these kinds of questions that tells me you’re brand new to all of this. I recommend checking out Thomas Salanderer, CNC Kitchen, and Teaching Tech on YouTube. They’re all great at explaining the minutiae of this hobby.
Edit: Do yourself a huge favour and get a model with a self-levelling bed, or at the very least a bed-level probe.
It’s a bit of hyperbole to say you’ll spend more time maintaining a Creality printer than using it (Ender3 S1 Pro here), though I agree with the sentiment that you should think twice about them unless you enjoy the tinkering and learning aspect of the hobby.
If you want high quality (and fast) prints right out of the box, the tradeoff is you will need to spend more than Creality money.
I would also second PrusaSlicer. I saw significant improvements in print quality and speed using mostly their default Ender3 settings versus what I was able to cobble together in Cura.
My Ender 3 V2 needs a complete frame check between each print. It’s the only way Ive managed to get consistent prints. At least the design is Open Source!
S1 Pro here as well, and for 3 or 4 months my hobby was 3D printer troubleshooting before I could transition it into actual 3D printing 😅 Everyone’s experience is different, which is exactly the problem with Creality - you’ll probably get a decent printer but it’s still a dice roll every time until they (hopefully) start investing in consistent quality control.
If I was starting today my budget option would be a Sovol SV06. Prusa definitely has the edge on reliable (albeit somewhat pricey) bedslingers, but my initial aversion to Bambu’s closed-ish ecosystem is quickly eroding at the prospect of owning a fast coreXY that just works and handles ASA/ABS straight out of the box.
With your budget, the typical “entry point” into the hobby would most likely be any machine from the Chinese brands like Anycubic, Creality, Sovol etc. Those machines work OK, but it’s very likely that you’ll find some quirks that annoy you which leads to tinkering and printing (or buying) replacement parts and upgrades. But it also helps to further understand how the printer works, which can help down the line.
“Tinker-free” printers that just work and will do so for many 100 hours (like the printers by Prusa) are more expensive upfront but don’t require constant “babysitting”.
Regarding software, there’s a plethora of programs that can be used. To name a few, we have the open source group (OpenSCAD, FreeCAD), the ‘free’ group (Fusion 360, SolidEdge), the web-based group (TinkerCAD, OnShape) and many more. Try them out and pick whichever suit you.
I went with a Prusa Mini and I can recommend the brand albeit at a higher price point.
From what I’ve heard from others the main pitfall for someone staring out is not getting an auto-bed levelling sensor.
For slicing Prusa slicer is fantastic and you can get profiles for many printers.
For print monitoring OctoPrint and OctoApp are my go to.
Thanks for the response! Could you tell me more about what print monitoring is?
We’ll, I suppose control and monitoring.
It’s a little server with a web ui (I run one on a raspberrypi) that you can load you gcode files and start prints from your pc or phone.
Then you can keep an eye on the progress of your print with percent completion, time elaspsed/remaining, a gcode viewer and live camera feed.
My current print:
Sovol SV06 on sale for $219 seems to currently be the best cheap printer. It has all the features that Creality’s best designed printer (Ender 3 S1) has and it’s still $100 cheaper. In addition the SV06 has an all-metal hotend which allows you to print higher temp filaments, like PETG etc, but if you’re only going to print PLA that’s not necessary.
Don’t trust anyone who recommends a brand when it comes to cheap Chinese printers :) Most of the companies have made both some OK models and some straight garbage models.
I recently bought one of these, and agree. Have I modded some things to reduce fan noise? Did I have to manually tram the X axis because the printer isn’t built precisely enough for the built in method to work? Yes, but those are easy things to do and only really have to do them once, and it prints amazingly well and problem free considering the price.
Yea, manually adjusting the x axis and lubricating the bearings are mentioned as negatives for this printer in the buying guide that I linked, but those are very easily fixable “flaws” compared to other similarly priced printers.
I might’ve gone overboard with a few parts but I’ve spent €300 on upgrading my E3v2 to get it to a point where I’m happy with its performance
I’ll stick to the software side of things as I haven’t been in the market for an FDM printer in a couple years.
Software wise Blender is absolutely amazing, especially being free. I’d recommend it for any modeling that isn’t a mechanical design.
Fusion 360 is also amazing, but mostly for practical physical designs. Get the hobbyist license and it’s free. You’ll thank yourself later for diving into Fusion 360 earlier rather than later.
You can use TinkerCad for simple little designs if you’d like but it’s really limited.
Can you differentiate between practical physical designs vs non-mechanical designs? Is it just whether or not there are moving parts?
Basically is it art or is it a functional item/replacement parts.
Moving parts can be pretty easy to make depending on movement in either program.
