I’m pretty much new to 3d printing. I’ve owned a Da Vinci previously which was not the best choice since they do everything for you and you cannot customize any of the printers settings, let alone use your choice of filament. I was limited to their filament and was not provided speed, temperature, or any of the settings. I am also on a low budget, and for Da Vinci Printers, a 600g roll of PLA would cost between $25-$30. I always thought this was pretty cheap, considering how much 600g would last me. However, I’ve heard that Da Vinci Filament is extremely expensive, which is what makes the printer suck. The printer itself is cheap but you’re forced to use their filament. I thought if their filament was considered expensive in the 3d printing world, I’d better switch to a wanhao, since I want to learn some tech stuff along the way. Im planning on purchasing a Wanhao Duplicator i3, and I haven’t had any luck finding filament online. The popular brands were about the same if not more than the cost of the Da Vinci Filaments. I’ve only heard about colorfabb and matter hackers from Joel, Angus, and Jerry from 3DPrintingNerd, Makers Muse, and Nerdgasm. These seemed expensive for me, but I heard that PLA is better for beginners. I was wondering where I can purchase some high quality inexpensive filament. Thanks guys!
cobnut
2
Hi henryqiu, unfortunately, like almost everything in life, the words “inexpensive” and “high quality” can rarely be used to describe the same product. The filament market is fiercely competitive and if there were one producer that was making filament cheaper and higher quality than any other, it’d be easy to find online.
In my experience, it’s worth paying for high quality; it’s worth thinking about the cost of all the failed prints, not only in terms of the filament itself, but also in your time, the potential to upset customers and so on. Cheap filament may be cheap to buy but it’s usually expensive to use. It’s worthwhile getting some samples (most companies will offer 10m or so at a reasonable price) and then doing some good test prints to evaluate the quality. If you find a supplier you like, use them.
Also bear in mind that how you store your filament is very important. Most filaments absorb water over time, some more quickly and some more volume, so it’s vital that you store opened filament in a dry container with some sort of drying process, even if it’s only the packets of granules. Good filament can become poor purely from bad storage so when you’re testing, make sure you’re not testing poor quality filament that’s brand new and dry against good quality filament that’s been sitting around soaking up moisture and dust for a month or the results could be misleading.
Check out Makergeeks on line.
makergeeks.com/ And check out the Maker PLA line.
Enza3D
4
HI @henryqiu!
As @cobnut mentioned, you really do get what you pay for in the filament world. I find that it’s just not worth it to fight with cheap filament that may be inconsistently sized, be “blends”, etc., and instead buy better quality and just charge slightly more for it. The more expensive filament tends to have nicer colors as well (especially ColorFabb, love them), so your end results look really nice.
I really use exclusively ColorFabb and Matterhackers Pro line for my ABS and PLA needs, but have used Hatchbox on and off. It’s a bit cheaper, but definitely does have more quality control issues than the other two brands do. Also keep in mind, the prices you see for ColorFabb and Matterhackers are generally for 1 kg of filament (almost double the amount you got from Da Vinci) so it’s in a very similar price range; normal Matterhackers filament is pretty cheap at $29/kg with free shipping in the US. At the end of the day, the choice is up to you, but you are going to be trading the time required to work with lower quality filament for a lower cost.
