3DPrinting

That's what I started on (well, a knock off clone) and I still say it's a great printer if you want to learn 3D printing.

Now, if you want to actually print right after buying, no no no. Not a good fit.

It's basically a set of parts that can be cheaply replaced, but measured properly (mostly) and lets you avoid putting together a BOM. Plus, there are tons of them out there, so lots of community support and many cheap, occasionally working, 3rd party upgrades.

I feel like it taught me the mindset of FDM troubleshooting and how the parts/variables interacted with each other. It was $150 a few years ago, so it's great for screwing up and figuring out what you want in your first real printer. It also has a lot of potential and folks that have modded them to actually run well, so it helped me figure out where I fell on the "It just works" to "Let's test these 200 different hotend fan duct designs" spectrum and which features were most important to me.

Since lemmy is bugged and won't let me reply to @DrNeurohax@kbin.social's comment, here's what I tried to write:

Buying a simple printer with lots of modding options can indeed be a good way learning, but there are a few reasons why I don't recommend Creality: They appear to have done some serious cost cutting after their initial success where they established themselves as the makers of the best printers for beginners. Primarily this is noticeable on their (lack of) quality control, and there's a too big risk that you get a unit with manufacturing or assembly flaws. An experienced user might be able to quickly diagnose and fix these errors most of the time, but it's very difficult for a first timer, who is more likely to assume they're doing something wrong and keep bashing their head against the wall.

The second issue is just lack of value for money. Creality can put their prices higher and people will still buy Enders because of their reputation and marketing. The Ender 3 v2 barely had any meaningful improvements over the first Ender, and was definitely not worth an extra $100. I used to say that Creality has fallen way behind the competition (i.e. compared to other cheap Chinese printers) but IMO their Sprite extruder is decent, and they also put dual Z on the Ender 3 S1. I would even go so far as to say the E3S1 is a good albeit overpriced printer, assuming you get lucky with quality control. And if you can get an Ender 3 Pro for $99 when Microcenter runs that campaign that's a very good price for a bare-bones printer.

The important thing to keep in mind is to never have any brand loyalty when it comes to cheap Chinese printers. Most companies have made a few ok, or even good, printers but also sell several bad models.

And to clarify, I didn't meant DIY would be an alternative to Creality for a first printer, rather that there are other cheap Chinese printers that offer better value for money and slightly lower risk of getting a flawed from factory printer, for example one could get an Anycubic Kobra Go instead of an Ender 3 v2. Currently Sovol SV06 looks like the over all best choice for budget printer, but that can change at any time. A few years ago Artillery Genius was considered a relatively good starter printer, but then they replaced it with Genius Pro which is more expensive and in some ways arguably a downgrade from the previous model.