For FDM type of printers I would say the Ultimaker 2+ (extended). The upgraded material feeder made the whole machine very reliable. I’m printing almost daily (mostly prototypes) with it since 4 months now and it never clogged, skipped layers or whatever and hits 95% succesfull prints I guess. The remaining 5% would also be good if I made the right settings in Cura, so it was not machine failure. It handles a lot of filaments (I did some succesfull experiments with flexible materials and Colorfabb XT, HT, NGEN) but I mostly print PLA. Bed levelling is easy and the whole machine has a nice build quality and reliable sense to it. Print quality and precision is very very good, if you want to print slowly that is.
There are printers for sale with better specs at a better price, but from what I have seen they do not have the same print quality as the Ultimaker. The fact that Ultimaker has it’s own software package (cura) which is optimized for it, makes the whole experience a lot smoother and without hassles I guess.
You can also consider the BCN3D Sigma, while it’s promising on paper I have not yet seen it make prints of equal precision as the UM2+. Also it’s a lot more noisy
Take a good look at the Tiertime UPBox. I run one and it has been a breeze to operate, produces good prints and has a fairly large build volume. If some curious person hadn’t opened the lid, let the heat out and warped the part, my first print would have been sold to a customer - not bad for a Friday evening “impulse” purchase…
I would recommend the Zortrax M200. Look at the stats in 3D Hubs and see the great number of reviews that has been posted. This is an no non sense machine that performs right out of the box. Perfect for prototypes. The filaments are not that expensive for the quality you get and makes up for the failed prints you would spend your cheap filament on with other printers.
