3DPrinting

The most important question you must answer is if you want to make/print things, or if you want to add 3D printer building & coding as a hobby.

If your intent is the latter, then the other comments have you covered. If the former is your goal, break out your wallet and order an assembled Prusa Mk4 ($1100 plus shipping, customs). Put it in a convenient location with moderate ventilation and good thermal stability and print everything in either PLA+ or PETg. I’ve been through two “cheap” printers and know more about tweaks, firmware, and upgrades than I ever wanted to. I’m tired of having printer maintenance as a hobby and, personally, have a Prusa on preorder.

Alternates for plug-and-play: I have a friend with a Qidi Tech printer from 3 years ago and he does nothing but print Etsy stuff. No tweaking and he loves it. Also, people who have the Bambu P1P and X1 seem to love them. In fact they love them so much they can’t shut up about them. Probably both are good choices for Just Printing and they’re in the $700 range. In all cases you'll still have to learn the intricacies of slicing and, for custom parts, modeling, but at least you won't be fighting with your printer.

The Ender 3 S1 Pro is pretty popular at my store right now, I've put together a few of them and as long as you check to make sure the gantry is level with the frame and that all the wheels are tightened correctly, it prints pretty solid. If you can get a really good deal on a Ender 3 Pro or Ender 3 V2 though, they're still not bad either and there are tons of guides on how to mod and upgrade the machines. And if you have a Pi or SBC lying around, definitely give Klipper a shot once you're used to the machine a bit, I put it on all my machines when possible now.

I would recommend the sovol sv06, it's a great beginner printer at its price! Either that, or a Neptune 3 Pro

I would probably avoid creality's Ender 3 series, nowadays it's overpriced compared to other, better printers on the market. Unless you can find them for around $100~ as the other person mentioned, I probably wouldn't buy one

SV07 is still new, it's both an upgrade and a downgrade to the SV06. I would suggest that if you want klipper, an sv06 and an orange pi (or thin client) with kiauh may be the better option.

Haven't heard much about the Neptune 4 besides it being a Neptune 3 pro with klipper and a big cooling fan

Tronxys Corexy machines are usually regarded as tinkerers machines. They are alright out of the box, but you can do many upgrades to make them so much better

I recommend the $99 Ender 3 that Microcenter (and other retailers) have frequently.

An Ender 3 or similar clone would be a great start. There is a reason they get recommended so much. They are fantastic to learn on, have tons of community support, and can be incrementally upgraded to be a very excellent all arounder. Really, as enticing as others can be, go with the ender or one of its clones. I got a voxellab s3 and I love it but it's got some pain that I wish weren't there.

Starting out, can't go wrong with an ender 3 V2 (or s1). We have 3 of them running at work and they are reliable, easy to work on, and produce solid parts. Extra parts are easy to get and are plenty cheap. There's a huge community around them. Overall, excellent starting printer. You'll definitely want to toss an autoleveling kit on there. The only real downsides are it doesn't print higher end materials well (honestly through, PLA is fine for most use cases), and it's super slow. Dear god it takes forever to print.

If you want to spend a bit more, the p1p is a no fuss printer from Bambu Labs. We also have 3 of their top tier model at work and can't say enough good things about them.

I don't recommend upgrading printers. It can get expensive fast and the tuning becomes endless. The p1p is such a good value that buying a printer with the intent to mod it is hard to justify. Just spend a bit more to get a better, more reliable printer up front.

I think any of the Ender 3 variations would be a good choice. Lots of parts availability and a big online community to help you should you need it.

Get something cheap which does what you want it to do. Then go expensive.

For me, I got a Monoprice Select Mini as my first printer. It was good enough, but I soon learned I needed something bigger. Then I got a Flash Forge adventure.

That ended up breaking because of over use, so I got a Ender for the reparability. I would've just kept the Ender but I was able to start selling my designs, so I got a Prusa Mini and soon a MK 4 for their reliability.

You won't know what you'll need until you use it. Getting something cheap makes this more accessible.

I went with BambuLabs and couldn’t be happier. As a total noob with a healthy budget for a new hobby I wanted something that I could use more often than I had to tinker with it, and it fit the bill nicely. (Don’t get me wrong, plenty of tinkering has still been required lol)

Ender3 is fine, but I probably ended up spending more on upgrades than I did on the printer (incl. a new motherboard when the microSD slot stopped reading, a new hot end, dual z axis upgrade and a few others). I'd save yourself the time and headaches that a lower end printer can bring a go for something a little better.

As for SLA, I quite like it. I work with water washable resins, and as long as you wear gloves and contain the washing waste, it's great. Yes it's more hassle than FDM, but the detail is unparalleled. Just be careful, resin is very brittle and it's easy to break prints.

I was given an Ender 3v2 (it was on my wishlist) as my first 3D printer and I have learned so much modding it, upgrading it, extending its capabilities. If you want that kind of experience, the Ender 3 series is great. And yes, I'm making/prototyping real parts with it.

But if that's not the approach you want to take, yeah, spend some additional moneys, buy something that's already where I've got with my 3V2.

A lot of people are saying Enders, but I would avoid them at this time, their quality has dropped a lot and you can get better printers for around the same price (most notably from sovol)

Avoid tronxy, they are big, cheap and so basic you will end up spending more to upgrade them than you would have by spending the money to build a Voron.

Personally, if you are attracted to the DIY/tinkering aspect of 3D printing, start off with building a voron. It’s open source, fast as hell and prints great.

If you just want to print the occasional thing and want to tweak/upgrade occasionally, buy a sovol, prints great, won’t need a lot of maintenance and has some room for upgrades.

If you want incredible prints with no fuss, get a prusa or a bambu. You’ll get great prints like a voron will give you, but you will pretty much print out of the box with little tweaking besides occasional calibration .

Also, don’t be surprised when you look behind you and found out you have 7 printers shoved In your office. A meth addiction may be cheaper than this hobby ;)

I second a BambuLab. I have the X1 Carbon and after 4 years on my ender 3 I have hundreds more successful prints on the X1 with almost no headaches. The mult color is great, even if you have to deal with the ethical dilemma of the waste filament. Really is a set and forget printer.

I got a Voxelab Aquila X2 for <200. With a few upgrades it works like a champ for prototyping. For more high quality parts I'd go with something else but I mainly print functional stuff and projects and its more than enough

I started with a delta kossel printer, don't make the same mistake I did. It's a really cool printer, but to start it's super complicated and the stars need to align for it to do great prints.

My next printer was a Tevo Tornado, which is similar to an Ender3 or a CR-10. I'd recommend any one of them. The nice thing is that you can use ender3 parts on all of them for the most part, so you can get spare parts cheap.

Really, I think the biggest thing is go with an XYZ printer to start, not a delta or even a coreXY. The XYZ is caveman dumb, and that's what you'll want starting out imo.