I want to buy a 3D printer for about 200-250€ but I’m unsure which one to get. There are printers that a lot of people recommend but others say they’re a piece of garbage.

The ones I found so far are these:

  • Creality Ender 3 V3 SE - 182,94€
  • Anycubic Kobra 2 Neo - 199,00€
  • Sovol SV06 - 239,00€

There’s also the open source firmware Klipper, which a lot people recommend but from what I understand, you need a Raspberry Pi for that. I do have a Pi 4 that I was planning to sell that I could use for that instead.

Would be great if some of you who know more than me could help me decide what to get.

  • tyler@programming.dev
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    8 months ago

    If I had to recommend anything it would be to not get an ender. Aside from literally not changing a single thing about them for the past decade, they’re so cheap you’re going to struggle to accomplish anything with them. Spend a little more money and worry less. Look for printers on sale.

    • paf@jlai.lu
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      8 months ago

      How did you manage to get an ender 3 10 years ago while they were launch around 2018 😂. Wild guess is that you didn’t mount it with care, which often end up with countless issues and blaming printer part is easy. If it was such a bad printer, you would not encounter printers farm using it.

      It was definitely not a plug and play printer (they were not any at that time), but you could/can achieve same quality print as a thousand €/$ printer, the worst thing on it was his plastic extruder (10€ and 10 minutes to replace it), and the best thing on it is that you can customise it to your wish unlike any other printer and this was due to the vast amount of people who loved it. I still have an old 3 pro and it is rock solid, I sometimes don’t use it for a whole year but each time I plug it back, i only clean and level the bed and it is good to go. (as I have a cr6-se which is also awesome by the way)

      That being said, I can’t tell how the most recent ender 3 versions does as I have only tried ender 3, 3 pro and 3V2.

      • tyler@programming.dev
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        8 months ago

        I’ve never owned an ender 3, so you claiming “you didn’t mount it with care” is pretty obvious owner blaming. I spent inordinate amounts of time on forums helping people with their shitty Enders and yes, they are shitty. When it takes the same amount of money in parts to fix the machine, then it’s a bad machine. Maker’s muse has a fantastic video on a lot of the problems with Enders that literally haven’t ever been fixed in all the years of production. https://youtu.be/k4Cc_3G4mpc

        You can easily see that Enders aren’t good just by looking at posts of successful good builds. Take note of how many of them are modified and how many are stock. There’s vanishingly few stock Enders that are able to print decently out of the box.

        A s maker’s muse said “it’s not a good 3d printer, and it’s certainly not a fast 3d printer”.

        • paf@jlai.lu
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          8 months ago

          My bad, misread as I understood that you spend last decade fixing each part. As I said ender 3 from something around 2018-2019 were very great for the price but maybe quality has decreased since. Might be better choice today