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Comment by johnny_canuck | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how much better the printers are these days as I'd love to get another one.

I had a Wanhao Duplicator i3 in 2015 and found it required a lot of tinkering and calibration every time I wanted to use it. I ended up selling it as it was so time consuming to get everything correctly set up that it just killed any interest I had in it.

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Nowadays spending 500-1000 USD on a machine gets you something that can print almost anything (within size limitations) out of the box with no calibration. The BambuLab printers are nothing short of extraordinary for quite reasonable prices (the A1 mini is only like 300 bucks, but it's small). And their software stack is good enough that 3D printing is roughly as easy as 2D printing (with the same caveats that occasionally your machine will jam and you'll want to chuck it out a window).

I had a Makerbot 2X in 2014 and it required constant janitoring every time I wanted to print.

I built a Prusa MK4 this spring; it calibrated itself and printed a great looking piece right from the get-go. The difference is night and day.

Check out Bambu Lab printers if you want something more modern. They have several models available for less than $1000 and give good results with little messing around.

I say this as someone who doesn’t want 3d-printing as a hobby. It’s just a tool I want to occasionally use in order to get something else done and the less time I have to spend tramming and calibrating, the better.

I bought the cheapest printer available, the Kobra Go I believe, and with very little tweaking I had it running well enough that I don’t care to tweak more. I owned a delta printer ten years ago which I spent $1200 plus another $600 in custom parts and it ran about the same as my current one (though it was bigger) and my current one cost $150 plus shipping. I don’t suggest the cheapest one if you have the money but I only use mine once a month or less so it was the perfect price vs. functionality. I did build the old one from a kit and modified nearly every mechanism though, so I’m relatively confident with these machines. I do suggest the more expensive, better quality printers if you don’t want to tweak stuff much.

I had an old Ender 3 kit that was nothing but a hassle from 3-4 years ago. My partner bought a BambuLab A1 & it was insane to see how it "just worked" out of the box. Highly recommend

Check to see if there is a community maker-space in your area - including libraries & universities. One of the benefits of using those machines are that they are well-maintained and frequently used & tuned. Also, you can meet other 3D printing experts who can help you with any project - its a good vibe, and a great way to get back into making without a large investment...

I got an Ender 3 v3 CoreXY about a month ago. I just about pulled it out of the box and started hitting print. It's almost that easy. It's been printing almost continuously for about a month with very few problems.

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