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Get an old Prusa MKIII and stick a Revo in there, then learn everything there is to know about 3D printing without spending a fortune or getting locked in. Onc

Get an old Prusa MKIII and stick a Revo in there, then learn everything there is to know about 3D printing without spending a fortune or getting locked in. Once you have processed a couple of rolls of filament you'll be much wiser about your needs and that would be the moment to pull the trigger on a 'proper' printer. Bambu AI is a very good printer (we have 10's of them, and 10's of Prusas as well), but the Bambu eco-system is not ideal and they push really hard to get you to use their cloud connect, the printers have cameras and send footage to servers in China if you get them connected to the point that they are usable. In contrast, there are many open source solutions that will connect a Prusa to your LAN and allow various degrees of remote management (Octoprint, for instance). Prusa's are extremely hackable, I've adapted them to do all kinds of stuff they were never meant for (1x1x.25 meter for instance, or standard width and height but 65 cm tall). Bambu's are quite closed, though in theory you could hack on their slicer but it's infuriatingly bad compared to the alternatives.

mholm 6mo ago
I think I'd largely disagree with your recommendation, unless they specifically wanted to get into 3D printing (the hobby) rather than 3D Printing (the tool). I got my printer wanting to make things, and didn't enjoy the tinkering with my mk3 at all. It was a great printer for the time! But I swapped to a P2S and never looked back. I hear Prusa is competitive these days, though not perhaps in price at the low end.
- jacquesm 6mo ago
  I print a couple of tons every year and I would not be able to do that without the knowledge required to operate a farm reliably and productively. Yes, they're tools, but like all tools it helps to know what you're doing. If I hand you a machining center you won't be able to learn much without a lot of breakage and expense. If you get a lathe to learn and play with, to build up an intuition for feeds & speeds and how materials handle and chip then you will be able to use that machining center to the maximum of its abilities. Tools require knowledge. 3D printers are no different in that respect and to toss $100 on a printer just to learn is money very well spent. And those old Prusa's excel at precision work, we can do stuff on those that we can not touch with any of the others.
  - wildzzz 6mo ago
    I mean, it's kind of like comparing a tuner car with a new EV. Both will take you from A to B but one requires a lot more work to take you from A to B in a very specific manner while the other just turns on and goes. The tuner car has a tremendous amount of power and is really good at driving fast and accurately but it also requires a lot of work and custom parts to get it to perform like that. The most amount of work in maintaining the EV is that it may need new tires eventually, otherwise it just works. Most people just want something that just works out of the box using models they downloaded from the internet. It's great that you want to have a 3D printer that performs at the absolute limit of the hardware but that requires work.
    - jacquesm 6mo ago
      Gah and here I was thinking I'm on hackernews rather than 'appliances are us'. Sorry, I got the audience mixed up ;)
  - somehnguy 6mo ago
    Most people don't intend to print tons every year nor desire to manage a print farm. Most people interested in creating object rather than managing printers will have an infinitely better experience getting a Bambu that is ready to crank out amazing prints right out of the box. Other than basic troubleshooting (which they have documentation on) there isn't really a need to take a deep dive into how exactly each piece works. I say this as someone who started printing many years ago with an i3 clone and has replaced nearly every piece of multiple printers (control board, bearings, hotend, extruder, etc!) over the years for better performance. I moved away from wanting to tinker with the printers and haven't touched them since getting a P1S years ago.
    - jacquesm 6mo ago
      I believe I gave two options, one for more in-depth learning and one for appliance style use. As for the P1S: it is not nearly as well engineered as the A1s, and the firmware absolutely sucks. It also takes forever to get started on a print.
CobrastanJorji 6mo ago
Not the MK3. I love that printer to death, but asking somebody new to 3D printing to do Z leveling manually is a tall order unless they're in it for the hobby. The MK4, with its load cell, eliminates this requirement and is therefore a way better choice for someone new to 3D printing.
- jacquesm 6mo ago
  The MK3 does automatic Z leveling. The MK4 is nice but a lot more expensive even today.
  - CobrastanJorji 6mo ago
    The MK3 does have auto Z leveling, but it does it with a PINDA sensor, and you're still going to need to do a Z calibration plus maybe some fine tuning, and that's not the hardest thing in the world, but it's not the easiest. The loadcell on the MK4 completely eliminates that whole mess.
    - jacquesm 6mo ago
      I've put 10's of thousands of hours on MK3s and the PINDA works fine as long as it is mounted well (which isn't always the case) and set to the right height relative to the nozzle. The automatic calibration routine - on a well built printer, which also isn't always the case, runs exactly once after you've built the printer. Fine tuning is possible, and can be quite useful if you want to play around with the degree to which your prints stick to the bed, for instance for automatic print release tricks (and bed temp as well). The fact that you have all this control comes at a price compared to say a Bambu A1: you need to know a bit more about how a printer works. But that knowledge will come in very handy when sooner or later you want to do something that isn't in the manual. The MK4 loadcell is a solution for some problems and a the cause of some others, it is not the best implementation of a loadcell either but it is smarter than the way for instance the Creality K1 and variations are set up (they have four, underneath the bed). I would recommend against the Creality series printers by the way, they're dirt cheap and wicked fast but they break all the time and the stock extruder is complete junk. Finally, the best investment you can probably make alongside any printer is a multi-roll filament dryer with a heating element and a fan. That more than anything else will affect your print quality. We do the bulk of our work on Bambu's now, but for really high precision stuff we will use the MK3s and it's amazing what those old printers can churn out. Nozzle wear is a bit higher on the MK3s than on the Bambu's. The oldest MK3 we have has done > 100 Km of filament...

mholm 6mo ago

I think I'd largely disagree with your recommendation, unless they specifically wanted to get into 3D printing (the hobby) rather than 3D Printing (the tool). I got my printer wanting to make things, and didn't enjoy the tinkering with my mk3 at all. It was a great printer for the time! But I swapped to a P2S and never looked back. I hear Prusa is competitive these days, though not perhaps in price at the low end.

jacquesm 6mo ago
I print a couple of tons every year and I would not be able to do that without the knowledge required to operate a farm reliably and productively. Yes, they're tools, but like all tools it helps to know what you're doing. If I hand you a machining center you won't be able to learn much without a lot of breakage and expense. If you get a lathe to learn and play with, to build up an intuition for feeds & speeds and how materials handle and chip then you will be able to use that machining center to the maximum of its abilities. Tools require knowledge. 3D printers are no different in that respect and to toss $100 on a printer just to learn is money very well spent. And those old Prusa's excel at precision work, we can do stuff on those that we can not touch with any of the others.
- wildzzz 6mo ago
  I mean, it's kind of like comparing a tuner car with a new EV. Both will take you from A to B but one requires a lot more work to take you from A to B in a very specific manner while the other just turns on and goes. The tuner car has a tremendous amount of power and is really good at driving fast and accurately but it also requires a lot of work and custom parts to get it to perform like that. The most amount of work in maintaining the EV is that it may need new tires eventually, otherwise it just works. Most people just want something that just works out of the box using models they downloaded from the internet. It's great that you want to have a 3D printer that performs at the absolute limit of the hardware but that requires work.
  - jacquesm 6mo ago
    Gah and here I was thinking I'm on hackernews rather than 'appliances are us'. Sorry, I got the audience mixed up ;)
- somehnguy 6mo ago
  Most people don't intend to print tons every year nor desire to manage a print farm. Most people interested in creating object rather than managing printers will have an infinitely better experience getting a Bambu that is ready to crank out amazing prints right out of the box. Other than basic troubleshooting (which they have documentation on) there isn't really a need to take a deep dive into how exactly each piece works. I say this as someone who started printing many years ago with an i3 clone and has replaced nearly every piece of multiple printers (control board, bearings, hotend, extruder, etc!) over the years for better performance. I moved away from wanting to tinker with the printers and haven't touched them since getting a P1S years ago.
  - jacquesm 6mo ago
    I believe I gave two options, one for more in-depth learning and one for appliance style use. As for the P1S: it is not nearly as well engineered as the A1s, and the firmware absolutely sucks. It also takes forever to get started on a print.

CobrastanJorji 6mo ago

Not the MK3. I love that printer to death, but asking somebody new to 3D printing to do Z leveling manually is a tall order unless they're in it for the hobby. The MK4, with its load cell, eliminates this requirement and is therefore a way better choice for someone new to 3D printing.

jacquesm 6mo ago
The MK3 does automatic Z leveling. The MK4 is nice but a lot more expensive even today.
- CobrastanJorji 6mo ago
  The MK3 does have auto Z leveling, but it does it with a PINDA sensor, and you're still going to need to do a Z calibration plus maybe some fine tuning, and that's not the hardest thing in the world, but it's not the easiest. The loadcell on the MK4 completely eliminates that whole mess.
  - jacquesm 6mo ago
    I've put 10's of thousands of hours on MK3s and the PINDA works fine as long as it is mounted well (which isn't always the case) and set to the right height relative to the nozzle. The automatic calibration routine - on a well built printer, which also isn't always the case, runs exactly once after you've built the printer. Fine tuning is possible, and can be quite useful if you want to play around with the degree to which your prints stick to the bed, for instance for automatic print release tricks (and bed temp as well). The fact that you have all this control comes at a price compared to say a Bambu A1: you need to know a bit more about how a printer works. But that knowledge will come in very handy when sooner or later you want to do something that isn't in the manual. The MK4 loadcell is a solution for some problems and a the cause of some others, it is not the best implementation of a loadcell either but it is smarter than the way for instance the Creality K1 and variations are set up (they have four, underneath the bed). I would recommend against the Creality series printers by the way, they're dirt cheap and wicked fast but they break all the time and the stock extruder is complete junk. Finally, the best investment you can probably make alongside any printer is a multi-roll filament dryer with a heating element and a fan. That more than anything else will affect your print quality. We do the bulk of our work on Bambu's now, but for really high precision stuff we will use the MK3s and it's amazing what those old printers can churn out. Nozzle wear is a bit higher on the MK3s than on the Bambu's. The oldest MK3 we have has done > 100 Km of filament...