What's the most key point when you decide to get a 3d printer
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@stephenleeeyan do I want a printer to play with or do I want a printer to print with.
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@deckingman said in What's the most key point when you decide to get a 3d printer:
@stephenleeeyan Build quality.
Yes, quality is important. How about the speed and price?
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@Amayaatp-0 said in What's the most key point when you decide to get a 3d printer:
@stephenleeeyan dimensions, maximum temperature, type of extrusion (direct or the other xd), and most important the price
Easy to use is the most important thing i think, and the quality and speed.
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@breed said in What's the most key point when you decide to get a 3d printer:
@stephenleeeyan do I want a printer to play with or do I want a printer to print with.
Both, I want to play with it, and also want to print something that I can use.
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@mrehorstdmd said in What's the most key point when you decide to get a 3d printer:
@stephenleeeyan In FDM printing, you're always trading print quality for print speed. If you want to use your printer to mass produce some parts, then worry about speed. If you're printing for a hobby, doing a lot of one-off prints, what difference does it make if you have to wait two hours or four for the print to finish? It's not as if you have to watch the machine running the whole time. Start up the print and go do something else. I frequently start prints just before I crash for the night. When I wake up the print is done.
That, of course, requires a reliable printer that you can trust not only to finish the print but also to not burn your house down. A lot of cheap printers aren't reliable. What good does it do to print at 300 mm/sec if the prints fail 3 out of 4 times, or you have to watch the machine and tweak it while it's printing?
If you're shopping for a printer and they claim that it prints at 200 mm/sec, but they don't have detailed photos of prints made at that speed and at lower speeds, chalk it up to marketing BS. It's relatively easy to make a mechanism move very fast, but much harder to get the extruder to behave the way you want when it's printing fast. It takes a lot of testing and tuning to squeeze the maximum quality out of a fast print, and that quality will generally not match the quality of the same print run at a lower speed.
If the part you're printing is small, and you try to print at 300 mm/sec., the extruder will keep laying hot plastic on top of hot plastic and pretty soon you'll end up with a blob of plastic instead of the print you thought you were trying to produce. You need a lot of print cooling power to make small prints at high speed, just like you need a lot of heater power in the extruder. If you don't have the cooling power you can print in very thin layers so that the extruder is squirting out less plastic on each layer, so it cools quicker. But then you have to print more layers so in the end your print was running at 300 mm/sec, but finished as if it were running at 50 mm/sec. You'll have a nice looking Z axis in the print, but you also have all the artifacts that are characteristic of 300 mm/sec motion.
Thank you so much for this detailed reply. I find many machines tell that they can go with 150mm/s, but actually they can only go with 80mm/s. How to choose it?
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@stephenleeeyan said in What's the most key point when you decide to get a 3d printer:
@deckingman said in What's the most key point when you decide to get a 3d printer:
@stephenleeeyan Build quality.
Yes, quality is important. How about the speed and price?
They are all related. You won't be able to print at higher speed unless the build quality allows it. A poor quality printer is likely to have a frame that flexes which will be worse at higher speeds. It's also likely to have inferior guides which might stick, bind, or otherwise have too much friction. It's likely to have low quality or low spec motors that might be incapable of producing the torque necessary to accelerate the mass at the required rate. Low quality belts might stretch which will be worse at higher accelerations. The list goes on. So ultimately, that's why it all comes down to build quality and good quality parts cost more than low quality parts.
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@stephenleeeyan The speed that is acceptable depends on your temperament and the reason you are printing. If you're mass producing parts, you probably want high speed. If you're not, you probably don't need high speed.
A lot of 3D printing noobs have the patience of a 5 year old, and can't wait for the machine to finish the current print so they can start the next one. If you're like that maybe you want to find a fast machine.
I think that for most people, the urge to print one thing after another, as fast as they can, wears off a week or two after getting their first printer and gaining some experience with it. I'd say that if you can get a quality print at 80 mm/sec, you're doing pretty well, but then, I don't mind waiting for a quality print.
@Amayaatp I wouldn't print anything at 300 mm/sec, but a lot of people are speed obsessed and will try to print everything at 300 mm/sec. There's a bunch of people who compete with each other for bragging rights about how fast they can print a tugboat. Search for "speedboat 3D printing".
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In the category of 'what's a feature you'd never go without'
In my humble opinion the absolute tweakiest part of the printing process is getting the distance from nozzle to bed correct print after print. I'd never again get a 3d printer without a Z probe.
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@markz If you're building a machine yourself, it isn't that hard or expensive to build it so that you get consistent results without a Z probe. It requires a level of build quality that you won't find in a hobbyist grade kit, so if you're buying a hobbyist grade machine or kit, definitely get the Z probe.
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@mrehorstdmd said in What's the most key point when you decide to get a 3d printer:
................ it isn't that hard or expensive to build it so that you get consistent results without a Z probe....................
Amen to that!. Although arguably using the nozzle itself as the Z end stop sensor is a little more challenging...........but infinitely rewarding and as near 100% reliable as is possible.
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For my first printer, I went for low price. For my second and following printers, I went for reliability. (I use printers for work. I have other things to do than babysit a printer. I appreciate a fast printer, but if I really need more output, I buy more printers and/or plan better.)
