Hi! Huge question here, mainly to people who work with FDM printers on a daily basis. What model of FDM printer would be the best for semi-professional to professional work. I need a machine for printing 1:500 scale buildings districts. What I need the most is reliability (little to no errors while printing) and speed. Since buildings will modeled in CityGML LOD2 (block model with roof shape) detail the printer doesn’t need to be extra precise but it would come as a perk.
Why not an SLA printer?
@Jeff_DeMaagd SLA materials are quite expensive and those models will basically get replaced when we get SLS machine. So we went for cheap since these will be temporary and simplified.
@yazjack what kind of budget are you looking at?
@Thomas_Sanladerer 10k$ tops, but I wouldn’t mind if it’s less. Main goal here is to find printer that has a low print fail ratio. I don’t want to waste time on failed prints. I was looking at Ultimaker since it’s high ratings in numerous rankings but I’d like to compare it with real life user experiences.
If you’re in the US or Canada, maybe the Lulzbot Taz4, or whatever is the latest version.
@Jeff_DeMaagd bummer, Europe 
I checked for any distribution network but there’s literally none.
Ultimaker 2, then. It looks like the nicest “prosumer” 3D printer I’ve seen so far. I think they’re made in Netherlands.
Yeps, we build them in the Netherlands.
But, as far as I’m concerned, every printer under 5k does require some fiddling from time to time. We’re doing our best to provide high reliability for a low cost, and we have an excellent community and support staff in case you have problems with an Ultimaker.
For architecture important things to know are that very small details with FDM don’t work very well, and that not all architecture design software exports files that are properly water-tight, which causes problems with the current software.
I cannot give you real neutral advice towards a printer, as I’m biased. Working at Ultimaker and so on. But I can give you hints for what to look out for and properly manage your expectations.
@Ian_Spring is a bit of the expert on architectural printing on an Ultimaker.
@Daid_Braam biased or not thanks for the response. As far as file preparation goes I’ll be the one preparing it so I know the drill. If necessary I’ll toss the tiny detail like chimneys away. Before I contact Ian could you elaborate on fiddling? Is it software or hardware related?
Fiddling can be both mechanical and software. Material jams, bed-leveling, slicing problems, setting tweaks, improving material-profiles. Just a few I can think off.
@Daid_Braam sounds like something that can be covered within the learning curve. What I’m afraid of is hitting some point at which the device would be rendered useless without some heavy hardware mods.
If you are just afraid of failed prints isn’t it better to buy 3 cheap reprap based printers? Material is cheap and you can start three prints to ensure that it won’t fail. After a bit of learning I use my reprap based printer nearly fail-safely (just remember, especially at the beginning, to buy good quality, dry, plastic)
@Adam_Antoni_Dobrowol I don’t think something that cheap would fly with my bosses and that kind of reasoning won’t work with them.
What would you say about 5th gen Replicator? It doesn’t have a heated bed but it most certainly is an eye candy 
Hitting more professional note, do you think that Stratasys Mojo would make any difference?
@yazjack type in “replicator 5th gen problems” into google and see the horror that it is.
@yazjack +1 to ultimaker. That’s definitely the best thing you can buy in its price range.