[Tim Henrion Henrion]

Starting out in 3D printing, I made a “conservative” choice and bought what was supposedly one of the “top of the line” printers from a well-known printer vendor: the Creality CR-10 Smart Pro. I figured with this printer, I’d be “good to go” for some time. I was wrong. It was borderline “junk” that I had to gut and rebuild with many 3rd-party components. I probably spent as much money rebuilding the printer as I paid for it initially.

If you’re just getting into 3D printing, be prepared for a lot of learning, frustration, and gray hair. Be forewarned that most 3D printers ARE NOT “it just works” kinds of devices. Using them requires experimentation, tweaking, and much time spent/wasted doing so.

To anyone getting into 3D printing now: Save your money and get what I bought for my 2nd 3D printer: a Bambu Labs X1C. It’s one of the few “it just works” printers on the consumer market. I also HIGHLY recommend getting it with the AMS filament management system, as you’ll likely want to switch between different filament types as you get up to speed.

Beware of cheap printers, as they’re likely to be built with cheap commodity parts that you’ll end up replacing/upgrading anyway. The X1C works out of the box, does a lot of tweaking automatically that you must manually do with other printers, and will save you a lot of gray hair.

If, for whatever reason, you don’t want to purchase a Bambu X1C… at the very least, buy a printer that runs Klipper open source firmware out of the box. Klipper is much more capable and customizable than vendor-customized versions of previous generation firmware (like Marlin) and is constantly updated with bug fixes, new features, and add-ons.