Hello there,
after a few years of being out of the hobby I am starting to get interested again after seeing that a lot of budget printers now are having all the features that my old one were missing. Direct extruder, auto bed leveling, dual z axis, stuff like that. So which one of the budget printers around 300€ would you guys suggest one should get to get started again? Elegoo Neptune 4? Creality Ender 3 V3? Anycubic Kobra 2? Sovol S06? There are so many good looking options that I am interested in your experiences and opinions. Thanks!
For your price, Ender 3 I guess but IMO, you should save up for a Prusa because you’ll eventually spend more upgrading the Ender anyways (that was my experience anyways, got a CR10s and spent twice as much upgrading it, but ended up getting an MK3S+ in the long run anyways).
I’ve always wondered where this comes from, the thought that a person would spend a huge amount to upgrade an Ender? I spent maybe $100 upgrading mine until I screwed up and fried my motherboard, but even adding the extra $60 for a decent upgrade I’ve still spent less than the original cost of the printer, and way WAY less than the cost of a Prusa. At this point the main upgrades include a direct drive and dual-Z to handle some NinjaFlex. I’ve always considered ABL a waste of money, and every other upgrade was just things I printed myself. You certainly can’t beat the reliability, I mean my printer has been sitting idle for nearly a year and I just fired it up a couple weeks ago to print some new items – no leveling or anything else, I just loaded up a spool of PLA and off it went. So what exactly are people spending these exorbitant amounts of money on for upgrades?
Partly, time is money but partly IDK, I’ve spent at least $200 upgrading mine with scaffold reinforcements, BL touch, a better hot end, and a few other QOL things and I’ve spent more on the CR10 than I did on the MK3S+ but it still doesn’t work as well as the Prusa. Granted, the print volume is bigger but I hardly ever print anything big enough to take advantage of it.
Agreed that time is money, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time on mine. I think the worst time-sink was after converting to direct drive and basically having to start from scratch on all my slicer settings, and then working out cable management to reclaim my Z height. At one point I was playing with faster speeds (thus the dual-Z upgrade) but eventually I want to switch to a 0.2mm nozzle and try to dial in miniatures (HO scale trains). I would be better off switching to a resin printer for that but I don’t have an option for good ventilation so that’s not really a consideration right now.