Best affordable 3D printers (and now there are quite a few options)

Having struggled/getting amazed by a 3D printer we bought for our lab (price ~1000 eur) during the last semester, my strong advice to anyone is to buy something with a good community behind.

Sure on paper some of these can be cheaper and have better specs, but unless you know a lot about 3D printing (and after 2 intensive months with some prints per day I felt I was just scratching the surface) you will not be able to get these great results you get in the pictures or even the ones you imagine you will get.

It's extremely time/energy consuming to get the slicer (the slicer is the software that actually transforms a 3D model in 3D printing instructions for a specific printer) right both for the printer and for the filament used and there are just too many variables involved.

After all this time, it seemed quite obvious for me that buying something like the Prusa i3 (or something with a good community behind) would be a much better choice. You greatly minimize these issues with the slicer since there is a big community behind you testing the right settings for that printer/filament combination and it saves you a lot of time and mental energy.

P.S. Perhaps you get that from my text, but just to make it clear: many vendors have a pretty bad support and they only publish mediocre support for slicing software.

So it seems that for the price of a smartphone, you can now buy a 3D printer. I like the times that we live in.