Want To Buy A 3d Printer - Which Should I Buy?
If you have one please tell me about it - how long have you had it, how much do you use it? Is it great or awful?
Forum Discussion
you are a bit off topic but....
Printers are all the same, basically they feed a plastic filament trough an hot end and draw with the melted plastic, so you need to check for the following parameters.
Most important is size of print bed. An excellent printer but too small is not very helpful.
Then you have to check for material you want to print with.
Standard material is PLA, but you will find ABS (require a heated print platform) , soft filament (tricky to feed), soluble filament (very usefull but need a dual head printer).
Avoid printers that come with proprietary parts like cartridge for filament or nozzle, or special software, it is always a trouble and means more expenses.
Generic printers usually can be usually fixed/upgraded with generic parts for cheap. You would also find a lot of parts that can be 3dprinted. Generic printers are also more forgiving about accepting various filament.
Avoid kits if you never get such equipement assembled, All printers require some manual work (putting kapton tape on the heated printbed, making sure belts are correctly tensioned, cleaning nozzle, making small adjustment) and almost all require assembling a few parts out of the box and fine tuning.
Personally a got the wanhao 4x dual head. the print bed is large, that printer came almost ready and is simple to use.
http://wanhaousa.com/products/duplicator-4x
It was cheap (800$). I print mostly ABS, a few parts with flexible filament.
most printers are x/y/z tables (different types, sometimes table is fixed, sometime head is fixed) , but if you print very high parts you can choose a delta-type.
The probleme with delta type is the head must be very light, so it makes very difficult to have dual head on this type of printer.
If you need to make complex parts, you will certainly need support. Support must be removed when print is finished, and sometime it is next to impossible to do a clean job.
Soluble filament are very good, because you can use it as support. at the end of the print you just need to wash the model with hot water.
but use of soluble filament for support require dual head printer.