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Comment by latenightcoding | Hacker News Reader

Prusa printers were great many years ago. in 2023 I'd recommend buying any cheap Chinese brand. I bought an i3 MK3S+ and it almost made me lose my love for 3d printing, the machine is clearly stuck in the past, you don't even have remote printing out of the box, you face as many issues as you would with a cheap 3d printer, but you have to pay over $1k USD and wait months to get one.

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Is this satire? I have a Prusa mini, and for a 3D printer it’s as close to “it just works” as you can get. My friend got an Ender3 and has spent countless hours modding it, replacing parts etc and he still can’t print PETG reliably while I print in any of the “normal” materials without worry at all. The stories I hear about cheap Chinese printers are like my friend with his Ender, just dialed up to 11.

I agree with this. Unless you love tinkering and modding, and don't mind spending more in the long run, a Prusa is pretty much the gold standard for reliability/consistency. I bought cheap, with the understanding that I'd be spending the money over time and maybe have a better machine in the end, but it hasn't really worked out that way. The cheap printers get costly pretty quickly. I've learned a lot, but it's all been by necessity while troubleshooting various issues that I wouldn't have had with a better printer. If you want to print, get a good printer. If you want to tinker with stepper motors firmware, extruders, hot ends, bed leveling sensors, etc, then something cheap might be a better intro. Going cheap got me started, but it was a much steeper learning curve, included a lot of frustration along the way, and was ultimately more costly.

That’s the opposite of my experience with i3/Mini compared to the Enders of the world. Cheap printers => eternal fix/mod hell, Prusa => still “just works.”

If you don’t care to become a part-time 3D printer tech, and value your time more than a few hundred dollars vs. dozens of hours spent trying to get it right, buy Prusa and get printing.

I have an Ender 3 that just worked. I one-clicked it on Amazon, it arrived later that day, I unboxed it, put it together, then started a 16 hour PETG print that was ready the next morning. That printer has since printed something almost every day for the past year without issue.

I have another Ender 3 that I upgraded. It has a Bigtreetech SKR Mini with a full color touch screen, a bed leveling sensor, and a Micro Swiss direct drive extruder. It just works as well, and probably doesn't benefit a ton from the fancy extruder or touch screen since I tend to use a web UI.

I also have a Prusa MK3S+. It performs equally well to the Enders.

For what I paid for the Prusa, I could have a 5+ Enders with upgraded 32bit controllers running Klipper. Or a lot of rolls of filament.

Come to think of it, I haven't even used the Prusa in over a month because one of its steppers or that stepper motor driver is failing, skipping steps or just going rogue. I haven't bothered looking into it yet because the Enders are easily keeping up with whatever I need printed.

I honestly think that when you buy a Prusa, you're buying the brand, and supporting a company who's founder helped shaped the industry we all benefit from. At least that's what I tell myself to justify the huge (by comparison) price difference.

Isn't Prusa one of the few open-source companies/printers? I thought they were expensive because they used high-quality parts.

super weird since it just worked for me, unlike creatility stuff

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