Hey, I’m a complete newbie when it comes to 3D printing. I have a chance to pick up this printer second hand, and I was wondering what the community thinks of the product. Would this printer be decent for a beginner? Thanks!
Hey, I’m a complete newbie when it comes to 3D printing. I have a chance to pick up this printer second hand, and I was wondering what the community thinks of the product. Would this printer be decent for a beginner? Thanks!
If you want to tinker with the printer a lot, sure. If you want something that reliably Just Works, you’ll probably need to increase your budget. I’ve heard consistent stories from friends that their various Ender 3’s required lots of tinkering or upgrades to make them happy (one who found it so frustrating he gave up twice before finally getting it working ok, and this was with help from our “expert” friend who had lots of experience with Ender 3’s). And consistent stories from friends that their Prusa MK3’s Just Work and they don’t understand what the Ender 3 friends are talking about for how to solve various problems, because they just didn’t happen.
My personal suspicion (owning neither) is that the QA on the Enders is probably not great, so some of them work pretty well and others are miserable. Any given user has no way to tell whether they are doing something wrong, or just got a machine with really poor tolerances. Ender 3’s are really common on support forums like this one, but I’m not sure how much comes from the low price leading to high sales volumes vs. users on average having more trouble getting jankier machines working well. But Ender clearly has many fans so…?
According to a post on the 3dprinting subreddit that was recommending different budget options, they were not recommending the Ender 3 anymore because QA would have in fact went down like you said. (Their name is made, they can cut cost to increase profits now…)
They were only recommending it if you went for the Ender 3 S1 since it had more features than the base Ender 3 / Pro / V2.
I have an older Ender 3 Pro that I modded quite a bit over the years and would also agree this is more a machine if you want to tinker with it. One important thing to note is that almost no upgrades will result in higher print quality when compared to a well tuned base Ender 3. The mods simply made it a bit more reliable IMO or reduce how often I need to calibration it.
I also agree that if you don’t want to tinker with it, get something else. It will be more expensive upfront but if you take a cheaper printer that you mod over time, the cost will end up being similar. But it’s a decision hard to make if you are not sure you will like the hobby, and an Ender 3 or other similar budget printer can still be OK without modding if you don’t mind the limitations.
And if I were to buy a new printer today, I’d definitely go for something better with more features built in that I wouldn’t have to mod to achieve the same functionality.
I think the community is a bit notorious for over modding the ender 3 beyond what was strictly necessary. I’ve seen a ton of unnecessary mods over the years and more than a few issues from poorly executed mods. Now that said, I have a sample size of one for personal experience. There are a couple weak points in the design, but they are easily correctable when they do fail. Even most of the good mods are more of a nice to have than required. Of those many are parts you can print with the stock ender, which is decent practice.