As someone who has been involved with printers 100% over the last 3 years I agree with this article for the most part. Everyone has a new crowdsourced "better

As someone who has been involved with printers 100% over the last 3 years I agree with this article for the most part. Everyone has a new crowdsourced "better than everything" printer pretty much every couple days. It is way past the point of confusion from the consumer's standpoint. Eventually some of these brands will wash out or merge but for now we are left with quite the range of products...most of which are virtually identical except for frame design. I don't recommend anyone who is serious about building your own printer to spend less than $1500 on parts when self sourcing. You "can" make a printer for $600 that is fairly solid but it typically is a tradeoff on time invested in tuning. Makerbot is never advised. Nothing about them is good enough. There are several better printers out there...but you are never going to get good results with anything that is less than $500. I feel sorry for anyone who has backed any of these sub $500 printer campaigns...I fell it will be detrimental to the community by creating unhappy consumers. They are promising assembled printers nowadays for less than I spend on hotend, motors and electronics...let alone frame and assembly. I am a printer vendor and have been for the last 3 1/2 years...I have worked on many opensource projects related to the reprap community. I have done my best to help people tune their printers in IRC regardless of where they sourced them...any printer can be made to print...making one print good takes time. How much time is based on how good the printer is assembled mechanically, electrically as well as tuned in the software side (firmware and slicer). I often tell people "These things are like table saws...not toasters...just because you have a table saw does not mean you can use it well right away"