[phantasmish]

I waited what I thought (and what was suggested by enthusiasts to be) long enough for the tech to be mature and approachable, and finally bought a highly-recommended beginner printer about three years ago.

I’ll never touch the tech again. The chemicals seem sketchy as hell (I don’t really want any hobbies that make me feel like I need a dedicated area of my house that I only enter while wearing significant PPE, and with gloves that never leave that dirty-zone) and after probably ten joyless hands-on hours burned over a couple weekends, I never got the fucking thing to print a single one of its test designs.

Seems like yet another fiddly hobby for its own sake (that might eventually yield some not-remotely-worth-the-cost fruits) rather than a useful tool. I don’t need what it offers that bad, the amount of money and time I’m going to put toward it in the rest of my life is zero. It’s probably a fine activity if the act of fiddling with 3D printers is the main draw for a person. Otherwise, no.

[Aurornis]

It sounds like you used a resin printer.

I would never recommend a resin printer to someone new to 3D printing. They’ve come a long way and are reasonably reliable now, but it’s not a good place to start.

[DannyBee]

I was never a fan of 3d printers, but now own 2 fdm printers that I'm quite happy with. One is an industrial nylon printer, one a prosumer printer (h2c) for everything else (the nylon printer is much faster than the h2c, printing cf nylon at 30 mm^3 easy. It is also accurate enough at that speed that there are no obviously visible layer lines).

I've probably owned 6 or 7 over the past 10 years, mainly to check out new technology and such.

I also own a very nice wood cnc and a very nice metal cnc, and use both a lot. Since they are 6 figure machines, they get modified instead of replaced ;).

So I have never been afraid to spend money to try things. I also have no issue modifying things (I have rebuilt entire cnc cabinets and mechanicals from scratch, rewritten the plc programs, etc). I donate the things I'm done with to friends or schools.

I say all this because I have also tried 4 resin printers over the past 10 years, and cathartically thrown every single one in a dumpster to avoid anyone else experiencing them.

While they have come a long way, selling any of them as a beginner level printer for someone new to 3d printing should be a crime. I can't think of a faster way to turn someone off from 3d printing. If you are doing product development or dentistry they can make sense. If you want "click button, wait, receive printed model" like most beginners, they make no sense because of the workflow.

Ironically, the one parson I know happy with their resin printer uses it exclusively to print Warhammer 40k minis (he uses one of my old fdm printers for other stuff).

[pyottdes]

It really depends on what your end goal & use case is. Resin printers are pretty phenomenal for any kind of product development and are very much a useful tool in the industrial design space. That said, casual hobbyists should almost always start with an FDM (filament) printer as a first printer. Sorry to hear you had such a bad experience :/

https://youtube.com/@pyottdesign

[jacquesm]

Both have their uses.

[terribleperson]

My Prusa Mk3s (kit built) from 2019 has been no-fiddle for all seven years of its life.

[jacquesm]

Those things are indestructible. The oldest I have has done well over 100 km of filament.

[ToucanLoucan]

Without details on what you were using, I can't be certain, but this absolutely is not my experience.

I got started in 2017 with an Ender 3, and extremely cheap printer with a basic set of features. I improved it by adding a bed leveling sensor and flashing new firmware, along with adding a tool steel nozzle and heater, and a 3d printed housing replacement for it's screen which included a place to mount a raspberry pi, running octoprint, to manage it remotely, and a webcam on a stick mounted to the Z rail. It worked pretty good, and building it was fun.

However in the intervening years, I also bought a Creality CR-6 Max, a much larger printer with a built-in bed leveler. It too got a pi and a webcam, but nothing beyond that, and it too worked well. However both those printers required constant maintenance, troubleshooting and overall fiddling. It remained my niche hobby.

I've since upgraded to a Bambu Lab H2D at great expense ($3,200 retail, utterly dwarfing the sub-$500 printers of before) and honestly, it's like a different tech all together. I don't even NEED a computer, really, unless I want to use one: I can find stuff on my phone, download it, and send it to the printer over their cloud service. And no troubleshooting really to speak of, I think I've had like 3 prints that did some weird shit and required a figure or two, but absolutely no comparison to the other machines. And in fact it's so bulletproof that my wife, who is utterly uninterested and frankly a bit hostile to tech, now uses it more than I do. She says it's a slightly trickier version of a Cricut, which is just WILD to me coming from my experiences with the Ender and Creality before it.

All of these are of course FDM printers. I have also played with a Photon Mono X I got from a friend who didn't want to use it with their birds in their home, and that one while requiring more fiddling and more chemicals, is also virtually bulletproof with regard to print quality, and you get better finishes with some tradeoffs (vulnerability to sunlight, figuring out curing vs. over-curing, what have you) which sounds a bit more like what you were dealing with. I could absolutely see that souring your opinion if you started there, that's not a beginner machine IMHO.