3DPrinting
3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can learn about and discuss 3D printing and development of 3D printed parts and devices.
The r/functionalprint community is now located at: or [email protected]
There are CAD communities available at: [email protected] or [email protected]
Rules
-
No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
-
Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
-
No porn (NSFW prints are acceptable but must be marked NSFW)
-
No Ads / Spamming / Guerrilla Marketing
-
Do not create links to reddit
-
If you see an issue please flag it
-
No guns
-
No injury gore posts
If you need an easy way to host pictures, https://catbox.moe may be an option. Be ethical about what you post and donate if you are able or use this a lot. It is just an individual hosting content, not a company. The image embedding syntax for Lemmy is 
Moderation policy: Light, mostly invisible
view the rest of the comments
There are the usual suspects-- Prusa, Creality, Qidi, Soval etc. They all have their fansbois and detractors. Prusa is the most expensive Soval the cheapest.
Everyone complains about Prusa's price while ignoring they need to pay EU wages and taxes. Personally, I think Prusa knows they can't sell printers to cheap ass consumers. So they are slowly withdrawing from that segment and switching to entry level business printers. Still, they offer the best long term support out there. My trusty 6 year old Mk3s+ stills works as good as as new and I just downloaded new and improved firmware for it yesterday. That's support and worth a lot of money to some of us. There is a community mod I'm considering trying to convert it to run Klipper.
I find Qidi an interesting brand. Priced between Prusa and Bambu, (though cheaper than Bambu's CoreXY offerings), they often get passed over, but they offer printers with more industrial features than anyone else. All enclosed CoreXY printers with active heated chambers with high temp extruders and hardened steel nozzles, Qidi makes printing difficult engineering filaments easier than any other consumer printer available right out of the box. You can even get an idex model. The Plus4 is the newest offering and they are bring out an ams style filament box for it soon. The biggest complaint seems to be fan noise. I almost bought one, but they dropped their X-Smart3 180^3^ printer. So I ended up with the A1 mini.
Crealty is, well Crealty. The K2 is supposed to be a pretty good printer. And based on user reviews, Crealty might have finally gotten one right. But it's large and more costly than the rest of their offerings. I do not follow Crealty at all.
Soval offers a mix of budget style printers. From Mk3 knockoffs to a not quite CoreXY machine-- the gantry moves up and down and the bed is fixed. But they are budget priced. Reviews seem mixed. No multi filament printing offered or on the horizon.
Do your due diligence and pick out the one that seems to fit your needs.
Looks like the Creality K1 has lidar tech but it's super loud and the quality is pretty bad compared to the X1c.
I hope someone picks up the slack and gives us a worthy alternative.
I'm not sure the lidar tech is really that big of a game changer. Sure, the bambu printers do that layer detection, but so does the Anker. A lot of other ones can use a webcam to do print failure detection.
But if you're not running 100 printers, you can just check the camera, or poke your head in the room every once in a while to see if anything failed.
I used to run a small print farm during COVID. I learned to hate fixing my printers. I never want to worry about leveling my beds or account for print vibration or worry about bed buildup or even look at my printer outside of the standard maintenance. I just want to print. Lol.
The Anker looks interesting. I think if I was in the market for a Cartesian style printer, I would pay the 100 bucks more and pick up a Prusa MK4S instead.
I think you might be surprised by how far 3d printing has come, Really none of that is a concern anymore, even with basic printers. Heck, most printers don't even have an option for bed leveling.
Wwwwhhhhaaaaattttt?!?!?! Really? That sounds awesome.
In the past most of the cheaper printers didnt have bed levelers anyways. It's always the paper method.
I installed 9x9 BLtouch for all my printers which helped a bunch, but when you're printing 16 hours a day, the build up on the bed requires that I relevel the bed.
I really hope you're right. It was pretty hell back then.