It Depends - is a higher speed printer going to solve a problem you have?
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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You have 3 very different things listed there.
The K1: Creality printer with many issues. Yeah it is fast corexy, but they keep having to pull it from sale and people still have it falling apart or trying to rip the hotend out of itself. Personally, I would avoid it.
Bambu Labs: 3d printer company. They have 2 different printers to choose from. The X1 carbon being the flagship, fully enclosed corexy printer. I have one and while I like it, I don't like the reliance on cloud and how locked into Bambu labs parts you are with it. As an example, a company designed and manufactured a small batch of hotend for the X1 that would boast higher flow rate and used a more normal round ceramic heater. When they asked Bambu if they could provide information on how to pid tune the new heater, bambu said "you don't. We do that at the factory". They have even stated they won't be opening that ability up so you will almost certainly never see an aftermarket heater for the bambu printers. The other option is the P1P. It is the same basic printer as the X1, but it is not enclosed and some of the features are not present such as the lidar and chamber carbon filter. If going bambu, I would probably suggest the P1P as is it cheaper (They just reduced the price $100) and works really well.
Prusa XL: Larger format Prusa printer. It also has the option for multiple print heads so you can use different filaments on a print (I think it will allow for different nozzle sizes too) without needing them to be the same temp, and without the need for purging, saving time and materials. Unless you need the additional material support, I personally consider other options. The Prusa MK4 makes more sense for most people and even then, with Prusa having higher pricing for their printers, you might find something for roughly the same price that is larger and has more serviceable parts (with the MK4 you are pretty much locked into Prusa for replacement parts, and not real upgrades or after market exist). The downside to similarly priced alternatives being much assembly is required and you may not feel comfortable doing that.
In the end you have to consider what you are looking for, and compare the features of the available options. Of the things you listed I would feel perfectly happy with either the Bambu options, or the Prusa options, but for the home user I think the Bambu options work out better. For me, I went Voron 2.4. I bought my Bambu x1 carbon so i could print ABS parts more easily. Once the 2.4 is built I suspect the Bambu will spend most of its time in the closet until I find a multi color print I want to do.
With that said, waiting doesn't make sense. Most of what you are looking at are recently released and not really do for a revision. You also have to consider things in the 3d printing world happen all the time. There isn't a cycle of new stuff like with computer hardware. If you are in the market for something new, look at what is available and see if anything fits your needs. As long as you are making a decision based on what is the latest at the time of purchase, you are probably not going to miss anything.
I hadn’t really considered building out a Voron but looking into it, it seems like converting the so go into a voron is probably the way to go. Thanks so much for the info!
Why not rebuild your sk go as a Voron?
Wow I had somehow never thought of this. This seems like it’s probably the best and best value option.
To save you some research, the Voron Trident is the least hassle for the biggest bang. I had been eyeing the SK Go for years and now I'm eyeing the Voron. Some day...
Yeah, I would say most people looking to build a voron should go trident. The v0 is tiny and brings about some finnickyness as a result, and the v2.4 has all sorts of belts and is generally more complicated.
I built an LDO Voron v2.4 kit and it's amazing. It Prints multiple times faster than any other Printer I own at noticably better quality. It wasn't cheap, and took a while to finish. But it was worth it.
I might be just sorta a dummy in this regard, but if you're getting prints you're happy with, why upgrade?
Most people probably don't spent all day every day printing anyway, and even if you triple the speed of a print you are still talking about a very long time to do a substantial print, so it isn't like you're going to get more out of the printer because you can print faster because the printer isn't the bottleneck
I’m not really unhappy with my SK-GO it’s a very good machine especially for the price I got it at but I’ve had some reliability issues and it has some imo fundamental design problems (many of which have been fixed with the newer versions of the go) and it feels like if I’m going to spend the money to fix the things I’m sick of dealing with I.E. warped bed, weak/flexy x axis, bad carriage design, not built with enclosures in mind. I might as well save up some extra cash and either rebuild the machine into another design like a rat rod or Voron, or just buy a new printer many of which people seem to be raving about and don’t have the problems my GO has. Also I put roughly 10-20 hours on my machine per week so even just a 10% time savings would add up to saving me a lot of time/money over the life time of the machine.
That all makes sense.
I've got a heavily modified tevo tornado, and I think the big thing I'd replace it for would be a heated enclosure so I could print ABS and the like without warping to oblivion. I might still get a second Z screw and motor, given that I seem to have some problems with taller prints.
The tornado was my first printer back when it first came out in 2017! The second z screw made a HUGE difference on my machine, same with adding braces to the z and switching to kilpper so I could run input shaping (no matter what though I was always limited by the heavy glass bed). I ended up buying the SK-GO because I tightened the bed leveling knob too much and shattered the bed lol.
There's a lot of info on moving to a duet3d board, I did that, and I found a tiny direct drive extruder. Printing the braces was the very first thing I did, since my joke is the first thing you 3d print is more parts for your 3d printer. :P
I assume you mean Rat Rig :) Their printers do look good on paper, especially from a value-for-money perspective, but I've heard so much negative stuff about that company that I'd be very wary of doing business with them. Usually the complaints fall into one of the categories; no quality control, no support, delays, and/or poorly printed parts (i.e. the parts of the Rat Rig printer that are 3d printed). IIRC the worst design flaws of the VCore 3 have been addressed in 3.1 by incorporating fixes by the community, but allegedly the company still denies that those problems existed in the first place. You can ofc. be lucky and have no issues at all with Rat Rig, but I would recommend asking around among people who have bought printers from them to see what their experience has been like. This is just things I've heard, so don't take my word for it :)
Also if you do go for Rat Rig, you probably want to avoid the larger models they offer. The coreXY design doesn't scale indefinitely, and when the belts get too long you might run into print quality issues, and be forced to print slower. The largest Voron Design offers is 350x350, probably for a good reason.
If you're into DIY, Annex Engineering printers are pretty cool. Slightly more expensive than Vorons since they have 2 stepper motors per axis, but I think with the benefit that their designs scale all the way up to 500x500 build volume. Annex also focus their designs 100% on speed and quality, while Voron has stated that they are willing to sacrifice some for aesthetics, so it depends on what you value.
Watching this thread; this might be slightly off topic, but I’m interested in finding a good “starter printer” for someone with limited working knowledge, but something with a pretty good size print bed and higher print quality. Maybe one of the three OP mentioned is it?
If I were starting printing today, I'd probably get an Ender 3 S1. You also can't go wrong with Prusa printers, but you'll pay a bit (a lot) more for them.
Really anything from those "best beginner printer" lists will work, as long as it has ABL (auto bed leveling).
Regardless of what anyone else says, you'll want ABL at some point, so just get it right off the bat. Because adding an ABL sensor afterwards can sometimes be super annoying.
But I wouldn't recommend anything from Bambulabs. Lots of gear on those printers is proprietary, and you will need to buy parts at some point.
With other printers you can get cheap parts everywhere. With Bambulabs printers though, enjoy waiting months for a $180 part that's $20 on every other printer.
The dual extruder and auto bed leveling are really appealing, but this seems to limit choices a lot. My budget would probably be $500 give or take $200, does that change your recommendation at all?
does that change your recommendation at all?
Not Really.
I'd get maybe $300 worth of printer, and then save the other couple hundred bucks for filaments and modifications that you'll want after spending a while with the machine. That's where the Ender 3 S1 fits right in.
I don't really recommend spending more as a beginner, because you wont know what you actually need until you start printing stuff.
Though, if you don't like to fiddle with stuff at all, the Bambulabs P1P ($599) is a thing that makes good parts. I still don't recommend it, especially for a beginner. But for someone who just wants stuff to work in an Apple sort of way, (expensive, locked down, a bit contrived, but mostly seamless) that might be the best choice.
Yea I mean, I think I have a pretty low appetite for modding and tinkering. I would describe my ideal 3D printer as like, “what if Apple made a 3D printer”. I’d want to load filament and have it “just work” as much as possible.
So in that case, Bambulabs P1P is probably the printer you want, despite it's proprietary nature.
I probably should have asked what you were looking for in a printer before starting to recommend stuff, but at least we figured it out in the end.
Awesome, cheers! I'll check it out! Thanks man.
These new generation printers seem to be a lot more user friendly. My starter (and current) printer is the Sidewinder X2 which I got for the larger build volume, 32bit board, TMC2209 stepper drivers, direct drive extruder, etc. It's been pretty good but I've also replaced/upgraded a ton of stuff including swapping out the stock glass bed for an aluminum bed due to major warping.
If I was to buy a new printer today I'd 100% go with a CoreXY machine to eliminate the bed swinging back and forth and causing so many issues. Other neat features would be multi color/filament extruders but that's also something I could live without.
You can either go cheap up front and upgrade parts/tinker later or spend a lot up front and have a more user friendly experience. Most printers are capable of the same quality so you're really just paying for reliability and features.
I'm also trying to fix my perpetually-broken X2, fun times.
The dual extruder and auto bed leveling are really appealing, but this seems to limit choices a lot. My budget would probably be $500 give or take $200, does that change your recommendation at all?
I don't have any specific recommendations buy your budget is enough to buy something midrange and have money leftover for filament and any mods you'd like to do. I'd suggest starting your search by figuring out what print volume you'd like to filter down your options and then further filtering by features like auto bed leveling, direct drive extruders, and 32-bit mainboards. Whittle the list down to a handful of options in your price range. Once you have a short list, you can check reviews on each model and pull the trigger on something. The Ender models are pretty popular and have huge community support. I have the Sidewinder X2 like I mentioned and it has been good to learn with, but I haven't kept up on all the new printer releases to suggest anything better.
I second every bit of this. My first printer was a sidewinder I upgraded like crazy and converter to klipper. Ended up just wishing I started with a corexy. Mine had a bit of a bend in the x gantry that took me forever to figure out and was not possible to compensate for. Went to a 300mm voron 2.4 afterward and have been super happy
If you have the cash bamboos are 100% worth the upgrade. I've printed more on my carbon in 6 months then I have on my other machines in 3 years.
The speed is amazing but the reliability is what really makes it shine. Being able to press to on a 24 hour print and knowing that it'll come out flawless has been such a time changer.
So true! I’ve not printed yet a single benchie or any other calibration test on it, while on my previous printer (Artillery X2) I wasted a lot of time and filament trying to fix layers banding and flow rates and even choosing the right slicer. I was also always concerned to start a new big print not knowing if it would succeed or fail. Those times are gone now
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