Hi all am looking to purchase a 3D printer, have found a reprap Prusa i3 kit at a reasonable price, have read up on these and it seems good, was just wondering people’s opinions? It’s in my price range, print quality matters to me but I understand this may not be perfect.
The Prusa i3 design is a fully GPL open source design, so there are many many different manufacturers making their own versions of it. The latest kit version sold by Josef Prusa, the original designer, is a very nice machine that will give you good prints and will be reliable for you. Kits or assembled printers from other manufacturers will vary in quality of components, and even version of the i3, sometimes pretty substantially.
If you don’t got with the Josef Prusa version, you want to generally avoid kits with acrylic frames at the very least as plain acrylic doesn’t make a very good structural material long term.
Do you have a link to it? Usually the $200 ones on eBay are not that great and lead to some headaches but some people have luck with them.
If print quality matters then you might be able to go with a cheap kit but upgrade to good VXB linear bearings. Those will make all the difference.
Marty Rice’s kit is a good one. It’s a Wilson II reprap design based on the Prusa i3
Thanks for advice have asked the seller a couple of questions there is one good comment and another that says quality is not great so that was the reason I seemed some advice really, I will look at the Joseph Prusa design too
Craig Sumner
My advice: Buy new & original Prusa i3 MK2 model, support the author and get the full support. It’s much better than previous i3. Skip cheap Chinese clones as their quality is very unsure. (I am printing on MK2 just now and have tested their documentation & quick support several times as I had also i3 Plus kit for tests and upgraded from it to MK2.) → http://www.prusa3d.com
HobbyKing’s M150 is yet another clone of the Wanhoa i3 with a few improvements. They are reliable workhorses with a large community of support. Slightly more expensive than the eBay one, but still very cheap.
http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/_90849__Malyan_M150_i3_3D_Printer_UK_Plug_UK_Warehouse.html
@Craig_Sumner And you can also find my preview of MK2 feat. Josef Prusa here on http://youtu.be/pCHKpsawbbI 
I’m a very happy user of a cel robox. If you want to to print instead of tinker.
FWIW, save yourself some time and spend a little extra coin and get the kit from Prusa. Otherwise you’ll likely end up spending the money over time as you modify to address the lower-end kits’ quality issues (like swapping out the hotend).
tl:dr;
buy it for parts, don’t buy it for a cheap working 3D printer
I’ve had a ‘from kit’ prusa clone (I say clone as some ‘interesting design decisions’ had been taken from the core prusa designs that made for some really big head scratching). The quality of the vitamins was fairly terrible, the hotend was shockingly terrible and after eventually getting it all together it never really printed anything satisfactorily. It’s since evolved into a 3D CNC Router and is having a much better time.
So I bought a TinyBoy clone from HobbyKing (Mini Fabrikator 1.5) and it’s been perfect. Tiny print bed, but cannot fault it otherwise.
So I’ve since looked at kits like this ebay one, not because that’s the printer that I want, but actually its a cheap and easy way to buy the parts, some of them might be crap (there’s a LOT of terrible reviews about the panels being bent or cracked, the rods or long bolts being bent or the wrong length etc) but the arduino, motor sheilds, steppers, hotend, heated bed, power supply etc, they are fairly difficult to break, and they are where the main cost is.
Lots of food for thought 
then, thanks all for comments and recommendations, lots to look at.
I have always had it in my head that I would get or make a rep rap, I want to learn by doing not just by something that is hidden in a box that works, I had it in my head that if I purchased a kit it would evolve over time perhaps with me even printing parts and making a larger printer from parts contained in my first purchased kit, a lot of what ‘B once’ said made sense too me, but a lot of what the rest of you said also makes sense, i was so close to taking the plunge😁