Can anyone help @Olof_Johansson out with suggestions, please?
Thanks in advance!
Originally shared by Olof Johansson
I have a completely unmotivated and irrational desire to acquire a 3D printer. Where do I even start researching?
Last maker fare was full of them but its hard to tell the good ones from the bad ones, not to say what makes it good or bad.
I’ve got pretty basic needs, mostly to tinker with. Not enough spare time to spend many hours building one or messing around tuning settings to make the random grass weeder filament work well and all that kind of stuff.
There are no consumer 3D printers that “just work”. They will all require poking and prodding and calibration and recalibration and troubleshooting. They will all cause moments of severe frustration and unexpected hours of maintenance work when you thought you’d had it all working perfectly.
Now… When you get past the initial learning curve of the software and the machine and start getting good prints it’ll be great, and it’ll work for a week or two or three or even more… But then for no readily discernible reason it’ll stop working, and you’re back into the poking, prodding, troubleshooting mode. That’s simply the nature of the beast at the moment.
But if you’re not prepared to do all of that, then 3D printers may not be at the level of refinement you want from your technology and you may not want to jump in right now.
There are a bunch of resources on G+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/117814474100552114108 and https://plus.google.com/u/0/102677633012207071976/posts for instance.
My advice is: find something that lots of other people are using, because they can be fussy and you don’t want to be an alpha tester for a complicated problem.
My further advice is that umotivated desires to have 3d printers usually end in frustration. They take money, time, skill, and learning to get running, and if all you’re going to do is print a couple of TARDIS models and then let it get dusty you’re probably going to kick yourself for having spent the time and money getting it running. If you have specific plans for projects that need 3d printing, it’s likely a reasonable project for you to start. If not, it’s probably going to end up being a waste of your time.
Honestly, there are printers that typically “just work”, and the Ultimaker falls within that category. As long as you’re not doing something stupid like jacking up the temps to 300C, Curas defaults are pretty damn sane, and as long as you stay within the parameters of the machine it should print fine. A lot of people here are just bitter because of their experiences with machines that are really only 1/2 baked.
Too add to the consensus. Were I to buy an off the shelf printer. I’d buy an Ultimaker 2. If I had to describe Ultimaker in car terms, I’d say they were the equivalent of audi: reliable, well engineered, aesthetically pleasing, mature design and reassuringly expensive.
Comparing differences between the “up” 3d printer and the “prusa”, I can’t find any differences in print quality. Except the price difference I could not tell you wich to choose. But ofcourse the prusa is way cheaper.
The up is plug and play, where the prusa has to be build and calibrated before printing.
I’ve owned two printers so far. The first I got for the price, the Up Mini. It was terrible. I’m sure someone more experienced could do more with it, but it’s not the entry level “just works” unit they advertise it to be. I have a Makerbot Replicator 2 now, and it really does just work. I haven’t had any major issues with it, and it’s easy to do basic maintenance on.
