[Ambadassor]

That has been my experience as well. I had a bunch of printers before the X1C, from 3 different countries, and all of them needed various amounts of tweaking and hacking to reach the print quality and ease-of-use I was expecting.

Even the Prusa MK3 (upgraded to MK3S, then MK3S+...) required a Raspberry Pi to be able to print without lugging an SD card from my PC to the printer, and a USB webcam to add print monitoring.

Now when people ask for FDM printer recommendations, I tell them that this hobby has two main paths: One path regards the printer as a tool to create things for other projects; the other path has the printer as the project itself.

An analogy I use is buying a car that's working and ready to drive vs buying a car that doesn't work and repairing it. Are you looking to drive or are you looking to fix/build a car?

Bambu printers are an easy recommendation for a printer which is a tool. The new Prusa CORE One might be a good fit as well, but it's still too early to tell what its quirks are. For printers that are projects, the Ender 3 comes to mind as a very cheap base for countless tinkering and upgrades.

[throw646577]

> Now when people ask for FDM printer recommendations, I tell them that this hobby has two main paths: One path regards the printer as a tool to create things for other projects; the other path has the printer as the project itself.

This is undeniably true at the youtube content level.

But at the printer level I think consumers will crash into this far less if buying the latest. Creality’s three new Ender 3 V3 models are all low-tinkering models, even the cheapest. So are the Anycubics. Sovol’s latest machines like the SV06 Ace manage to be both fully open source and also highly tuned out of the box.

As much as I admire the build quality of (most of) the Bambu Lab machines, in real terms what they have actually achieved is making the closed source, closed build, hard to upgrade and repair, RFID-chipped-consumables printer acceptable to the market. They even almost succeeded in making printing dependent on the cloud, until their little distributed industrial accident happened.