Ask HN: What's a good 3D Printer for sub $1000?
No synthesized answer yet. Check the discussion below.
and
> durable, temperature/chemical resistant materials such as PC/Nylon/ABS or infused materials.
are a little cart-before-horse. This is like asking what ink-and-paper printer to buy for making complex, multi-format printed books to specific criteria, while admitting that you've not used any form of publishing software or understand any of the non-software processes involved in making a book.
The slicer is by far your most important tool for _effective_ 3D printing with a variety of materials, moreso than CAD or 3D modeling. Get a cheaper, more plug-and-play printer that doesn't meet all of your criteria, and focus on learning how to effectively use its slicer.
Print basic things, experiment, and force and make hands-on mistakes with it on relatively forgiving PLA/PETG. Do these _before_ jumping up to a pricier, fully enclosed machine _and also_ before printing harder-to-use materials, each of which will add new difficulties. You don't want your first hotend blob to happen on a decent machine that you actually like while using a material that's difficult or dangerous to deal with.
A Sovol SV06 or SV08 meets most of your criteria at about 1/3 to 1/2 of your budget; I haven't had the best experiences with their reliability but they fit many of your criteria. Used Creality Enders might be even cheaper depending on where you are, and while also fussy are hackable and repairable to the point of often being used as platforms for entirely different printers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmMW6_7lrlQ
To make a CNC machining metaphor - Slicer software is basically just your interface to the dials and knobs on the CNC settings for speeds and feeds. There's more settings, because 3d printing is more like if a CNC had a baby with a welder and an injection molding press, only it's injecting and simultaneously welding up a blob of plastic. You're balancing the toolpaths, the temps, the adhesion, and the overall speed all at the same time, all for whatever material you're using.
So it's complex, but these companies have a ton of data and experience in order to make sure their preset settings are damn good out of the box. And these days, they get it right more often than they get it wrong!
Long story short - you should probably just get a Bambu. You'll learn what you need to learn from it, while having good quality output the whole time. If you find out it's not suitable for what you're looking to do, then you can sell it used with decent resale and get the best printer for your specific application.
Your manual controls on pretty much all 3d printers suck. But that's because manual operation is considerable far down the priority list. I've never seen one that did jogging other than setting an increment and tapping a touchscreen button to make it move 1 increment.
Every CNC machine I have ever ran did way better with the jogging. Even the ones from the 70's. You set a speed with a knob and then hold down a button. It goes till you let up. Or you use a rotary wheel for fine control.
And don't even get me started on homing. The homing sequence on all the printers I have dealt with is home X and Y before homing Z. Most machinists will be aghast at this as if you are homing all 3 axis's at once you home Z first to get the tool out of the way.
EDIT: to be specific, this is for "bed-slinger" printers, but the concept is the same for fixed height tool head printers (eg where the bed is what's raised and lowered).
Is your goal to earn or learn?
How much time do you have to spend on 3d printing?
I can do what I need to do in CAD, design my own parts, etc. Other than the above, I'll use it for gifts, stuff around the home, rasPi and ESP32 electronic projects with home assistant, misc. enclosures, etc. I have a broad set of use cases but running production 24/7/365 isn't something I see myself doing unless I stumble upon a niche as I mentioned.
What kind of temperatures/pressures/chemical exposure are you expecting for your prints? You should probably start there, check for 3d printing materials that can actually handle those requirements, and then filter for printing technologies that fit the bill. I would imagine that would already break it down a lot.
Small jobs from small customers are not a high priority for job shops. Neither are cheap jobs.
Having a printer means you are able to work on projects at 2am Sunday.
Using a service would be better for a final part in a better material for the sake of longevity, not just 3d printed either, but cnc'd aluminum for example. Plastics can only go so far, but for short durations in some stressful situations, like intake manifolds, they can give you information. Having a printer in house will let me prototype to verify functionality of some engine parts, and being able to print in resistant materials will let me make final parts of less stressed parts in areas exposed to fuels, oils, etc.
I used to like the tweaking, but once I got a Bambu P1S, I've gotten spoiled just being able to hit print and let it go.
If you want a large printer that's decent for tinkering, Sovol SV08.
If you want relatively good support and to support a company that has a history of giving back, Prusa.
If you want something cheap with a lot of features that tend to be more high end, Elegoo Centuri Carbon.
If you just want something cheap that's arguably incredible value with an active community, Creality Ender 3 V3 KE.
Prusa is by far the most "open" probably with the SV08 second because it uses so much from the open source community (it's Voron inspired).
If you have a lot of time to spend, you could build a Voron, but I would not recommend that to anyone new to 3D printing.
i have no idea if it works with modern ones but my "old" Ender 3 plays nice with it
I did have to play around and use orcaslicer to get the printer set up using the network printing and camera feed working.
The one issue I do have is that it seems I would need to connect the printer to a internet enabled Network to get firmware updates, because the firmware version I have is ironically the one before they enabled SD card updating lol.
Back to the original question, I've had this printer for about a month and have been printing virtually non-stop with very minimal complaints. Coming from an ender 3 it is absolutely night and day in terms of ease of setup and general usage.
https://blog.bambulab.com/updates-and-third-party-integratio...
Or just stay on the previous firmware version and you never need Bambu connect.
"Standard Mode (Default): By default, LAN mode will include an authorization process that ensures robust security. This option is ideal for the majority of users who prioritize security and ease of use. Despite claims to the contrary, LAN mode through Bambu Connect will require neither internet access nor a user account. This hasn't changed and won't change." With the firmware that implemented security in, third party only speaks through Bambu Connect. Reading the page I included that information and if you go to the original security update announcement, it is clear you can only use Bambu Connect for third party access. In addition you lose the ability to control the printer.
So yes, LAN only mode (in conjunction with Developer mode) is the only mode that you can avoid using Bambu connect in.
These being:
- Eddy sensor (for faster bed meshing, eddy-ng addon for Klipper adds auto z-offset)
- Mainline Klipper/Kalico (required for eddy functionality)
- Some motherboard fan replacement mod (the default is tiny, noisy, and always-on)
Of the others listed:
- Bambu printers and the Elegoo Centauri Carbon have locked-down firmware (possibly with hidden license violations).
- I think the only Prusa machine with that build volume is the XL, which is out of the price range
- The Creality Ender 3 V3 KE is okay, but the build volume is 220x220x240mm
You can buy upgrades for your Bambu too.
While I agree, I think it's heavily underselling Bambulab printers in terms of UX and print quality, they are the absolute best in the market and by a mile.
Most serious 3D printed guns have at least a metal barrel. Often, 3D printed guns are just a lower receiver, that is the part you hold in your hand, the parts that actually fire the bullets (barrel, pin, slide, etc...) are bought off the shelf from real gun manufacturers.
This is a workaround for some laws that considers gun parts to not be a gun. For example, outside of a gun, a barrel is just a metal pipe and can be traded freely. The part that makes a gun a gun is the lower receiver, and you can 3D print that in plastic and still get good performance. In fact, Glock makes this part in plastic and these are some of the most popular and proven guns in the world.
Everybody else who needs a gun for lawful purposes (i.e. self defense) is simply going to purchase one from a reputable manufacturer.
Perhaps the grip.
I had a buddy in high school who did competitive shooting, he did the same thing by carving these parts from wood, now it can be done for a fraction if the cost. Check out Olympic shooting pictures for an idea of the parts I'm talking about.
US is a rare country that treats only serialized parts as "guns" and don't regulate actual gun parts. This allow Americans to trivially "build guns at home", but easd of actually building guns is extremely exaggerated.
Also, there's little in 3D printers that actually makes it easy to build gun parts. It's all cosmetics. Real illegal ghost guns are always made with plumbing supplies.
Next door,3d items literally being built. No fight. No fuss.
The fact that the Bambu printers use linear slides means they have a huge accuracy advantage right out the chute. And the Bambu printers have a bunch of other quality of life improvements that really add up.
While you can certainly slag Bambu for their business practices, the other 3D printer companies are absolutely lagging on the engineering front. Companies like Prusa need to step up their game.
As for phoning home, we isolated the printer on its own network and it hasn't caused us any issues. Sure, some of the monitoring features won't work, but it seems to print just fine without network access.
I have an Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro. It was like $220. I have put approximately $30 into it for the Raspberry Pi I installed Octoprint on, and even that's a stretch since I already owned the Pi. It prints just fine. Sits for months. Fires up every time. First layers perfect every time.
The "printer being the hobby" is only true if you let it. Even cheap no name open source printers are really good these days, and in the high end there are plenty that are competitive with Bambu on print quality, out of the box experience, and features, often exceeding them.
I dunno, I guess I just don't think having to let a printer talk to some fucking cloud service in China so I can start an STL print from my phone is all that important of a feature.
Many people started with something like an Ender V3, then moved to Bambu... and that is absolutely life-altering in terms of 3D printing expectaitons. But a similar difference is present moving to a modern Ender, Elegoo, or Prusa. Just their marketing is far from as solid as Bambu.
Not that Bambu printers are bad; in fact I still like their AMS solution the best of any I've seen or tested.
It’s going to be hard to justify supporting open source hardware at these prices.
It's almost impossible to justify buying their printers today. The issues and concerns about Bambulab seem to be primarily driven by disappointment with how a new company that didn't open source their hardware was able to absolutely steamroll the entire market, rather than actual real issues you as a user will have.
The only way to beat Bambu Lab is to be better than them at the 3D printer game, but most companies can't do that, so people have become resentful while grasping for straws to find things to criticize. Snapmaker got the message and decided to come out with the Snapmaker U1, the rest can wallow in their "open source" superiority complex to silence critics.
My prusa has be far more reliable so far. admittedly it’s newer than the a1 so it’s too early to be super conclusive on that, but so far it’s been quite a bit better
Of course, it’s quite a bit more money too
After that experience I got a Prusa, I'm only an occasional printer but I've put maybe 5 rolls of material through it over the course of a couple years and haven't had any stop+fix issues.
Bambu were the first that gave me the feeling 3D FDM printing has become more appliance-like, less 'spend endless hours maintaining the machine'. Sure, the Bambu also needs maintenance. But it is not the main procedure with the machine.
My experience was the same. I can just run the thing without having to tweak, tune, calibrate it. It takes care of that itself. I also don't let it talk to my wifi though. I just use the microSD card.
But my purchase was a while ago. While it is possible the industry has caught up, the reputation Bambu built still leads the pack.
GUI and UX are not the same. Prusa has pretty good print quality too but not as good a GUI as the Bambu.
UX would include the ability to easily tear down a hot end, replace a nozzle, tighten any belts, and anything else that would affect your ability to print high quality prints.
For prusa, since that's the printer I have experience with the most. Replacing the nozzle and clearing filament jams are pretty easy. But tearing down the hot end to remove debris wrapped around the extruder gear was not.
But then for most stuff I use a .6mm high flow nozzle.
Prusa is widely known to launch their next-generation tool changer at Formnext in Nov, which is going to be a concept where you have a rack of nozzle+heatpipe+filament tube tools that the print head grabs and heats up inductively. And Bambu is more or less working on something similar they will probably launch some time next year.
This is totally changing the "nozzle swap" equation. It means purge-free and much faster multi-material printing without outright duplicating print heads like the XL does, and the ability to park and mix nozzle sizes as well.
It'll be cool to see which company pulls it off better. As someone who was never convinced by either Bambu's shoddy and wasteful AMS or Prusa's ridiculously humongous MMU+Buffer approach, this is the leap I've been waiting for for an upgrade.
Edit: Amazing move to downvote a comment that simply and neutrally adds new information to the thread.
Bambu Vortek seems to just be swapping nozzles so, while that should cut down on waste, it's going to be much slower (XL is already much faster than AMS based printers but comes at a substantial price increase).
INDX tool changes are expected to be around 8-12 seconds. Vortek would be probably be around 30+ seconds.
If Bambu are only swapping nozzles it also means they still need something AMS-like to swap the filament path, which somehow feels a bit clunky. I think having seperate filament paths is overall a cleaner and simpler design.
Someone's made an animation of how they think it'll look like: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YNSlx0GJ5Ig
With my Bambu for 18 months, problem just doesn't exist. I have spare parts because previous experience said I'd need it. But not yet.
The most egregious operational issue is the occasional hairball, even then, the printer often catches the issue and pauses the print to let me check on it - automatic hairball detection.
I don't like the Bambu company and I wouldn't buy one now thanks to their lock in practices. My Bambu won't get the "fuck you" firmware update.
But as to their hardware reliability for "just printing stuff" - it's pretty awesome. If other companies have caught up to this, then the 3D printing world is in a much better place.
It stands on soft rubber feet so the whole machine has a low natural frequency (similar to the drum of a washing machine). This has the advantage that the high frequency movements of the motors/axes never resonate with the casing.
In the beginning it does a lot of tests and seems to also shake the machine to analyse the frequency behaviour.
Your ears can immediately note that it is a nice feature for sure.
Prusa drives the slicer development ecosystem (Bambu Studio is a fork), so new production-ready advances typically come from them first, which is lovely to support.
The Bambu products are fine. They print well. But the "it's on another level" stuff is mostly paid influencer narratives (a rampant thing in 3D printer YouTube, etc.) that don't really hold up to any professional scrutiny.
With advent of EasyPrint etc. arguably Prusa may have also one-upped them on ease of use? Though this isn't first-hand knowledge as I haven't tried it personally.
The out of the box experience between a Bambu printer and a modern Prusa is not noticably different. You'll be onto your first print in 10 minutes with either.
Prusa's product history simply goes back longer to when 3D printers were more hobbyist kit. But they've grown up just the same.
It's a bit like saying a 2025 Lexus is superior to a 2025 Maybach because Mercedes' first car in 1886 was a rickety afair.
I'd love for Prusa to do an updated Mini. I'd have a hard time justifying the price point on the original today, given the competition, but it's genuinely a great bit of kit.
Mind you, I used to promote Prusa the same way I do for bambulabs now for almost a decade. But once again, Prusa did too little too late. Their Core One response was not quite enough.
I just don't have enough waking hours to tinker with everything hobbyists around expect me to tinker.
Only if you compare Prusa printing at 50 mm/s with Bambu at 500 mm/s.
>and better overhang performance
What? No. Proof: https://youtu.be/HcSOz-Lsxgg?feature=shared&t=293
>Prusa drives the slicer development ecosystem (Bambu Studio is a fork)
Prusa slicer is also a fork ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So this video's claim, if I got it right while skimming in a subway, is that when Prusa redesigned the part cooling fan shroud to improve overhang performance they also went ahead and improved the slicer, and the benchmark results that have them generally win overhang comparisons around that time may be attributed more to the software fix than the new HW parts.
That's very interesting information, thanks for sharing.
It's also exactly the kind of thing where a Bambu fan would normally go "oh, so they just made the better integrated product that works better in the end without the customer having to care why".
But I totally agree they should document this transparently since Prusa Slicer can also be used with off-brand printers to good success.
> Prusa slicer is also a fork ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sure, which it very prominently displays on the splash screeen to this day instead of hiding it, giving credit where credit is due.
The difference is that it was forked off from Slic3r much longer ago, Slic3r isn't really actively developed anymore, and Prusa has largely rewritten it since.
So it's a false equivalence. This sort of disingenuous comment is the reason a lot of people don't like the Bambu user/influencer brigrading.
I went onto Reddit to get their recommendations. To someone completely new who hasn't followed any real developments occurring in the industry, it was confusing but it seemed like the Sovol SV06 was a good "starting point".
Well I didn't realize how far behind the industry still was. I thought surely at this point all printers much just be load file -> load filament -> click print. Just like regular printers no?
Nope, doing dumb things like using some third party slicer tool, transferring a file to a microsd card manually and then babying the printer for its super slow error prone prints feels like its still a toy not a professional device.
Imagine having to do that level of nonsense for your laser printer? Yeah maybe back in the days of "Office Space" but not today!
I was in a time crunch so out of desperation I took a gamble and dropped a wad of cash on a Bambu X1C. It is what I consider a professional product for normies in my eyes. Most everything else are just toys.
I was ready to say Bambu, Bambu and nothing but Bambu but then I read the user's last few sentences. Seems like he is not really looking for a end to end professional product and so hes got infinite options but for anyone else, its gotta be Bambu!
potential print size is basically the same print quality is the same as far as i can tell..
i use the elegoo more often.
Buying a Creality printer is like buying a hobby-grade RC car (ie, Traxxas, Team Associated, etc.). Decent out of the box, but you're likely going to be reaching for buying upgraded parts and it eventually becomes a Ship of Theseus.
I have an Ender 3 Pro, my list of upgrades:
- Replace the crappy flexible mat with PEI-coated flexsteel
- Filament runout detector
- Motherboard replacement (made flashing custom firmware 100x easier, and uses quieter stepper motor drivers)
- Automatic bed leveler
- Dual-gear extruder
- Customized firmware that changes the 3x3 bed leveling matrix to 7x7
- OctoPi
A decent printer will have half of these features already built in.
I added:
* Bed leveler
* Flexible build surface
* direct drive extruder
* second z axis screw drive
* octopi
Everything except for the octopi was a Creality kit. So it’s not like they don’t know their market is looking to tinker and do upgrades themselves.
If you want to make things because the end product is the goal, get something fancier. If you want to know how and why it works, spending a bit more time on the journey part (which might be frustrating), the Creality might be a good fit. It’s not going to have the same user-experience as a Bamboo or Prusa, but for me, that’s okay.
when I started tinkering there were none of those kits, and the Ender I have now has pretty much nothing in common with the Ender I bought back then except some parts of the frame and the drives. and still the whole journey cost was about the same as just buying Prusa and then learning nothing.
this is a bit philosophical, but when you do want to shape material, be it wood or plastic, you have to not only understand how it's done, but to feel it. or you will repeatedly end up with crap and then endlessly wonder what went wrong
this cannot be bought, it's experience. for 3d-printing the fastest way is to get something like Ender and then build your own perfect printer out of it over several years.
I wanted a Prusa but didn't want to drop the money on it when I first got started, so I thought I'd just add a bed leveler to get less tweaking and more reliable prints, and it went downhill from there.
I ended up getting a Bambu P1S, and gave the Ender 3 Pro to my kids school. In a twist of fate, I basically had to undo all the upgrades I did (I was able to keep the new mobo and Sprite extruder though) because the school IT couldn't allow OctoPi on the network and they needed something they could just drop an SD card in.
The Bambu P1S has been a real workhorse. In the first couple months I printed more stuff than I had with the Ender 3 Pro in 5 years. And the multi-filament AMS has been a lot of fun for making multi-color prints. I'm kind of glad I learned everything I did with my Ender, but now I want to focus on creating models and printing.
Prusa apparently makes great printers, I like their ideals and almost got one, but in the end I decided to go with the Bambu because of the AMS and a Father's Day sale and have been extremely happy.
What are the actual concerns here? What has Bambu done that other 3D printer companies haven't?
I disagree about Sovol the company though. I have a Sovol SV07 in the garage gathering dust. Its printer head got all clogged up and when I complained to them, they just sent me a random part with no information on what to do with it. I guess I could get into the tinkering mode, but who has the time?
I'd just love to have a sub-$1000 printer which prints whenever I have something to print (which is not too often, I concede), and does a fantastic job of it.
Someone in a HN thread a couple of weeks ago said when you turn one of these on the companies CEO's face is used as the boot screen...
[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/snapmaker/snapmaker-u1-...
Bambulabs is out.
Excellent print quality out of the box Automatic bed leveling and calibration Very user-friendly with great software Compact size, perfect for beginners
Creality K1 Max (~$599)
300x300x300mm build volume Fast printing speeds (up to 600mm/s) Auto-leveling and enclosed design Good balance of features and price
Prusa MINI+ (~$429 kit, $529 assembled)
Exceptional reliability and support Magnetic flexible bed Excellent community and documentation Great for learning and consistent results
I really wouldn't bother buying anything else as a beginner. Pick between these two.
It's a weird thing in 3D printing right now that if you don't have the open source stuff as a requirement you get better print quality and reliability for half the price with Bambu Lab.
Anyway, I have a Bambu, and it is a nice printer, but it wants to phone home and it is difficult to use when you put it behind a firewall.
Depending on volume, your total cost would likely be lower. I know you mentioned privacy concerns so this may not be an option. But it significantly simplifies your work, letting you focus on the parts themselves.
At those prices just the prototype alone will cost as much as an X1C. It's expensive enough that you'd rather print the prototype using an at home printer using random filament you have lying around and only print the end result once you're done prototyping.
Also there are no multijet fusion print shops "in town". That's an incredibly niche type of business you would expect in larger cities and therefore they would be priced accordingly.
Try JawsTec for MFJ. Haven’t seen cheaper prices. Granted, I work in small scales, where the fine resolution is needed and it’s a low material volume.
So you might as well buy that and have a lower-spec iteration, because you're going to run into all sorts of design problems before you get to finer constraints.
I've printed small stuff just to get the fitting right, before I finished the part with fillets, etc.
Also there is lots of small fun stuff, small fixes you'd never do with a 3d printer if you had to order prints online.
Example, I designed a printed a M8 nut cap with room for the 3mm sharp rod sticking out. I could probably have gotten a metal file to mill down the sharp edge, but it was hard to get at, and this gave a nice finish.
Sure it costs more, but if you will only do it once that is still cheap. And some of the things they can do for you are not safe to do at home.
It was about a month later the problems started. Plastic extruder broke like they all do, and the extruder gear was done.
A bed leveling probe is a game changer. A PEI bed plate is great. Those tubing couplers are super fragile. Klipper is nice.
Now it just works and I expect it to for a long time.
The trouble is that people don't want to spend the time and effort to get there. Me? I like that any replacement part is going to be 20 bucks or less. Everything wears eventually.
They do have a bunch of cloud service BS and phoning home that runs afoul of the HN spirit, but there's a LAN mode that allows you to send prints from LAN without opening up to the wider internet. If that's still too restrictive, you can always do direct SD card transfers via sneakernet.
Software might be too closed for you, IDK if there are jailbreaks. Repairability is possible but fiddly – akin to current gen car engines, rather than 70s types. They're very popular printers, I've only needed to open the head once, and there were plenty of YT teardown videos to help.
The Bambu slicer is good. They've got niceties for basic operations like snapping to bed or scaling up/down by a few percent. I believe it's based on cura slicer, which is also excellent.
P1S is at the midpoint of your budget. Their next model up is $1200, depending on your flexibility. Might have some value if you're doing more obscure materials. Didn't realize how cheap the enclosed ones had gotten. I've got half a mind to upgrade myself now....
I agree that the Bambu printers are as good as it gets for plug-and-play printing, but I wouldn't trust the tiny carbon filter for toxic fumes in an indoor environment.
The better VOC filters use a larger amount of activated carbon and they recirculate a high volume of chamber air inside the chamber.
Activated carbon also needs to be replaced over time as it loses capacity to adsorb more VOCs.
This is not the way to go with toxic fumes or how to get good ABS printing performance.
I'm not saying the gaps are intentional or in the right place here, but that there could be an ok design with gaps. If you are exhausting through a filter you have to pull in air from somewhere.
Even the Core One just barely misses.
Prusa XL hits your target but is twice your budget.
Also honestly build volume can be a little overrated unless you're printing helmets. You can make things in smaller parts. More build volume brings with it more print issues you have to deal with. But also yeah look at a Voron maybe or the SV08.
If you're new to printing, start smaller anyway. If you've done machining you know there's a materials learning curve and the same thing applies here to the nth degree. Print material, volume, orientation, density, first-layer adhesion, temperature, etc all are things you will have to account for and will affect your print quality/strength. You want to learn about these things in smaller prints that waste less time and material rather than more/larger.
E.g., get the MK4S Kit.
Regarding slicer software, Ultimaker Cura is great for beginners, Orca Slicer has a slightly steeper learning curve but they both have their pros and cons such as different support generation algorithms, having an alternative when something doesn't seem to print right with one.
Can work offline, but you'll probably need to block it at the firewall level if you care enough about privacy.
[0]Unless that's what your looking for.
Prusa Core One would be a bit more complete OOTB. It is 220mm in the smallest axis (Y) though. Slicer and firmware are open source, but the hardware is not (unlike previous Prusa printers).
Bambu gives you the same capability for much less, but the firmware is not open source (third party open source firmware does exist). I believe the stock firmware also has to "phone home" at least once before it can be used offline.
Even cheaper are less-well known Chinese companies, like Qidi. Firmware is usually a proprietary fork of Klipper or other open source projects; some people have had success flashing the mainline version.
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