Comment on Looking to get my first 3d printer, any suggestions?
squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You first have to determine what you want.
- Do you primarily want to print or do you want to tinker? An Ender 3 is not an out-of-the-box printer, especially not an used one where you have no idea what the last owner did to it. So if you want to tinker, that’s ok.
- Do you want great quality or a great price? An Ender 3 is quite outdated and compared to newer devices the quality isn’t great. If you are ok with that, it might be ok for you.
- Do you want a fast printer? An Ender 3 is slow by modern standards. It prints around 60mm/s stock and you might be able to get it to 100mm/s, maybe 120, but quality will suffer hard. Most modern printers do around 300mm/s stock and can be pushed to 600-700mm/s. This can reduce print times from 5h to maybe half an hour.
- Just to double check: are you ok with buying a potentially abused device with worn-down components that might cause hard to debug and costly to fix problems as your first printer?
If all that fits for you, then the Ender 3 will be good for you.
If it doesn’t, spend €200 and get a Bambulab A1 Mini.