Bambu x1 carbon
I’d upgrade to the H2D over the X1C if you can swing it; it has some pretty significant upgrades and being able to print two materials without wasting a ton of time and filament is great.
1 Like
As with anything, it depends on what you wanna do with it. For near top end consumer printers ($500 - $1000) I would either go with Prusa core one, bambu labs carbon series, or maybe a qidi 4. There are good things and bad things about any printer including these ones. Prusa is one of the only printers on the market that is not made in China, has really good 24hr support and a handful of other things that are good, but the technology is probably a year or two behind some other Chinese brands (still really capable). Bambu labs has really good machines, but many people are worried about them locking down some of their services behind a paywall eventually. You can find many youtube videos that go in depth on both of these brands and the specific machines they have, as well as other brands. You need to do your own research though before you pull the trigger on one. You can absolutely buy a really good 3d printer for less than $500. It really just depends on what you want / need / prioritize.
With any 3d printer there is not one that prints everything perfect all the time (bambu is probably closest to this experience). You will need to be okay with fiddling a little bit between different types of plastics and printer settings that work well for you. You will have lots of really good out-of-the-box printer settings that should get you really close if not perfect result in prints most of the time.
Also along with the 3d printer itself, if you plan on designing some of your own prints, you should have a computer that you can download and run CAD software on. I recommend fusion 360’s free version, but there are many good ones.
Anyway, youtube is your friend for this stuff. There are so many resources on youtube for 3d printing and designing.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Just wanted to chime in on another free 3D CAD software that can be a good fit it you don’t have good hardware to run CAD on. I use Onshape which has a free version and there is nothing to install on your computer because it is cloud based and all the horsepower to run it is handled on their servers. You just need to create an account and it runs on your browser. The only performance issue I’ve ever seen is if you have sketchy bandwidth. I’ve even run it on a Chromebook just to see if it would work and no problem. The free version isn’t crippled but, all of your creations are available to other Onshape users so not a good idea if you want to print and sell your creations. That would violate the free non-commercial license anyway.
Good call. We use Onshape for all our engineering.
Would you be interested in sharing your files in stl format?
My son makes Cosplay Fantasy guns. He is currently making me a tray to fit under the powder emptying tube on my FA Intellidropper 2.0. On one end its rectangular transitioned to a funnel to empty the unsued powder back into the jug.
4 Likes