My First 3D Printer HELP

[FraseFilms_CA]

I am currently trying to decide which 3D printer to buy and am trying to decide between the Monoprice select mini and and the M3D Micro 3D Printer. Selling points for me are.

-Maximum Print Size

-Best Print Quality

-Print Speed

-Reliability

-Ease of use

-Range of usable filaments

I am open to suggestions about other 3D printers but do not want to pay more than 225$

Also if anyone has a 3D printer that they are willing to sell just comment down bellow and i will get in contact with you.

Thanks in advance

[bkjones]

This is just my opinion but I think you are shooting a little low on price. I understand a budget but at the price you are looking to spend, there isn’t anything that will meet your expectations. Printers in this price range will not match any of the selling points you are looking for. Print size will be small, quality will be marginal at best, speed will definitely be slow, range of filaments will be non-existent, and ease of use and reliability will be low as well. To give an analogy it’s like saying you want to buy a brand new car that’s made well and is safe and reliable for $12,000 US. That car just doesn’t exist. Increase your budget by $125 and there are some printers that start to make sense. Double your budget and there are quite a few printers to choose from. There is no reason to have to spend $2000 on a 3D printer any more if you don’t want to but IMHO $350-$500 is the lowest price of entry for a printer that is worth the trouble of owning. Best of luck to you.

[EvilsWay]

I disagree with the point your making on price. The printers in the $225-$500 are largely the same kits rebranded, or closed source designs that require their own branded filament, which poses its own headaches and horrible price points. The prints below were printed on my ANET A2, cheap printers are fine, yes, a bit slower, but acceptable. The prints below were all printed at 50mm/s theyre consistent, completely seamless, and dimensionally accurate to a point where any size discrepancy could easily be blamed the calipers factory +/- 0.05 accuracy rating… Printers in this guys range are fine, they just require a little love, and patience…

[EvilsWay]

I have owned the mono price mini. It has its pros and cons. Its cheap-ish, and its totally built which was important to me for my first printer. To this day, I have had trouble finding something in its price range that produced prints as consistently. My problem with it was this, its tiny… you wont notice right away, but as soon as you have to start splitting objects into multiple parts or scaling them down, you will notice, and you will wish you went bigger. The other issue I had was that its not open source, as soon as something breaks, your generally S.O.L. You can source parts, but not as easily as you would for a bigger format, open source printer. If you want cheap and easy I suggest you look at ANET’s A2 printer. Its easy to built (like really, it was my second printer, and the first I had assembled myself). Its not plug and play like the monoprice, but its in the same price range, and well worth the experience of building it. Which brings me to another point… things will break, and if you assembled it yourself, you will know how to fix it… not true with the pre assembled monoprice which will be an experience all its own. The monoprice also has trouble reaching even the bare minimum temps for ABS also, so you’re very limited to filament types as the power supply wont give it enough juice to heat past 65 reliably (or at all in my experience). If you can stretch your budget another 25 bucks, this printer is a work horse. You will need to make some minor modification IN THE FUTURE if you want to print at ABS temps safely (I learned the hard way…) you need to buy a mosfet (8 bucks) and a new power supply (18 bucks) and you have a printer twice the size of the monoprice, and way more capable. Hope this helped! Have fun…

ps if you need to stay in monoprice price range, I think the monoprice mini is the best printer in that size/price range

[bkjones]

Everyone has their own opinions and standards to which they wish to judge by and my opinions are just that, mine. I have no experience with closed source printers and would never have anything to do with one, so I can’t comment on those but let’s be honest with each other almost every FDM 3D printer out there is basically based on one of three designs. Prusa i3 type, Delta type or Makerbot type. With a few exceptions and minor differences every FDM printer out there will fall under one of these. The only major difference will be in quality of components. The Anet A2 is of course a Prusa i3 type and that design is capable of some good prints. With a small amount of tweaking and upgrades the Prusa i3 types can be excellent printers and are a great value for the money. I would recommend a Prusa i3 type kit over a Maker Select Mini all day long except for the fact that some people do not want to nor have the skill to build a kit. For those people a good, reliable $225 printer does not exist. Again, just my opinion. YMMV.

[EvilsWay]

That’s a great point, your first post was just very doom and gloom about them… In the end, if he ends up buying a printer at all, at least he is getting into the hobby. The question isn’t whether or not a $600 printer is better than $200 printer, simply, which he should be looking at given his price range. Your OP would have scared me away from the hobby altogether given that I personally, would not have even considered going any higher in price than about $250 for my first (or second, or third) printers. I now have a fairly reliable etsy shop selling my own designs, and am (of course) looking for bigger, faster, better… but as a first printer, most any Prusa I3 clone on the market under $600 about the same (stay away from the Ebay plywood ones though) if his price range is fixed where he has it listed… the A2 I put in my op is an amazingly capable printer. Hindsight being 20/20… I should have gotten the TEVO tarantula, same price, bigger community on thingiverse.

[bkjones]

I apologize if my post came across that way. My intention is not to scare anyone off but to try and help so that an informed decision can be made. There are many people out there that have bought cheap printers and/or kits and are not happy with them. So not only do they end up with a bad experience with 3D printing but their wallets are lighter as well. There are so many abandoned printers and kits out there that could have been avoided by spending a few dollars more. If you’re not building a kit or a least consider yourself a tinkerer, 3D printing has a higher price of admission for a ready to go printer. That’s all I’m trying to say.