Back in 2018 I bought an Ender 3 and over the years after a lot of tinkering and upgrading I got really sick of having to work on it, so I shelved it permanently a few years ago. I didn’t have very much I wanted to print by then anyway, and another print failure that resulted in a giant ball of plastic covering the hotend for the umpteenth time tipped me over the edge. I could only disassemble it for service so many times before I started wanting to give it the Office Space treatment.
But now I would like to start printing again, only this time I want to actually just print things and not feel like an unpaid 3D printer mechanic. I don’t need anything fancy, I’m still only going to print ~95% PLA with the occasional PETG or ASA maybe. Really all I want is the equivalent of an Ender 3 only reliable, quiet, and with auto bed levelling (also having an actually flat bed to start with would be nice). Any kind of mandatory (or pseudo-mandatory via arbitrary feature-lock) cloud connectivity is a hard no from me. I will use Octoprint to manage it.
Are there any cheap printers that fill that role these days? I’m well and truly OOTL
If don’t care about open source or that you’re locked into a vendor specific slicer. The A-series from Bambu labs is a very good turn key printer.
If you care about the specifics of open source or how your print gets sent to the printer, then I suggest looking somewhere else.
Started with ender 3 v3. Constant tinkering
Got a bambu A1 year later. Won’t go back to anything creality makes ever.
A1 just works.
Replacement parts are similar prices as generic parts for the ender.
So I don’t care if it’s all proprietary. It all works. And you don’t need to deconstruct it to get it to work.
Of course that’s a thing now. Yeah I would very much not like to be locked into a vendor ecosystem.
https://us.elegoo.com/products/centauri-carbon?variant=gid%3A%2F%2Fshopify%2FProductVariant%2F45103213314229
Probably the best bang for the buck printer out there if you don’t care about multi color, and it’s getting multi color soon
I’d also recommend the A series (I got recommended the A1 from a friend when I was starting out), and it’s been pretty great so far. As for the slicers, I know you can use OrcaSlicer with Bambu printers (as well as with a ton of others too)