Hello! I have been on the fence about getting a printer for years. Now my wife is getting interested too, and I feel that now it’s the time.
What are the recommendations nowadays? I am trying to steer clear of Bambi Labs due to their controversies (I’m also a supporter of open source software).
I’ve seen a few mentions of Prusa in this community. Would that be a good start? I don’t want to get in at an extremely basic level and then need to upgrade in half a year.
That’s correct. Creality jumped in the game after and took advantage of a lot of the work prusa and the open source community did to make printers much more affordable with the ender series. That drew a lot more people into the community like myself, but nowadays I’d say steer clear of them for a number of reasons.
Bonus history, Naomi Wu is/was a huge maker from China who was able to push development on the cr-30 print mill. The print mill is almost literally just a small tread mill with the gantry on an angle that “shines” in batch printing and theoretically infinitely long parts. From my experience though its even finickier than an old ender and poses some additional design considerations. I think it’s super cool conceptually though and very satisfying to get successful parts off of, but could really only recommend to enthusiasts with lots of time and disposable income.