Anyone have any good / bad experiences to share?
Looking to get one just to mess about with at home / for work / kids. Not looking to spend a fortune, £600 prob my limit but diving in there’s literally thousands about and don’t want to make a wrong choice really.
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It is very much depending on what you are looking for…
Quite below your budget, but I’m very happy with my Creality Ender 3.
But in that case the printer is also bit of a project.
Having said that, if I had that amount of budget and I prob would go for a Prusa i3 MK3S
Any thoughts on the resin gear too? Higher detail from reading but again I’m in the deep end here 
I second that!
Great and cheap printer.
And you get a VERY big community with LOTS of YouTube tutorials and tips and tricks.
But it is very time consuming.
The first week I only printed parts to improve the printer itself. 
But it helps you to get familiar with it.
I would also look for a printer that can be used with https://octoprint.org/.
Its a really great project to improve printers by adding a web interface.
But I have no experience with other printers.
Maybe there are good alternatives in your price range that better fit your needs.
I have read up about the creality and some of its flaws (like the motor shim). I’m probably leaning to towards something more ‘plug and play’ so to speak as time is not something I get loads of 
So yeah, something with a self levelling bed would be a start.
Going to have to do a lot more reading me thinks.
What’s the actual print quality like on the creality?
Quite an old printer now from what I can see in the ever evolving market.
I started out with a Flashforge Finder, which is an education-focused model that’s often used in schools. However, I recently upgraded to a Creality CR6-SE.
I don’t think I’d recommend the CR6 for a beginner experience. The community is very supportive (many came from Ender 3s), but there’s a lot of tweaking. As @christoph_wempe noted, you start by printing out the parts you need to improve it.
The Finder is more limited, but probably easier to get running off the bat. Also, it has built-in WiFi (but doesn’t work with OctoPrint). However, it has a ridiculous built-in filament compartment that ONLY fits Flashforge’s proprietary spools. So, one of the first things you have to do is rig up your own spool holder. There are lots to be found on Thingiverse, so that’s not a huge issue.
The main reasons I upgraded from the Finder to the CR6 are to gain a heated bed and the CR6’s auto bed-levelling.
I’m sometimes tempted when Amazon has a deal on a resin printer, but the whole process is just a huge hassle. So while I love the idea of it and the detail you can get from resin, I’m not going down that route.
I was looking at these - the ELEGOOs for instance.
Oh really… haven’t read enough yet
I use SLA printers (Form2/Form3 - bit more than just home printers), and there’s a fair bit off faff:
- Printing
- Cleaning - IPA wash tank at a minimum, or you can go manual but that’s extra faff. Smelly - not really something I’d have in a normal room in the house.
- Curing - heated UV curer required
- The resin tanks have a limited life, and are not cheap.
- The resin also has a limited life, and isn’t cheap.
- Printers are quite sensitive to ambient temperature, so probably won’t work out in a garage or shed (unless you can heat said garage or shed).
But you can get great prints (25 micron layer thicknesses), and the choice of resin materials is amazing.
I’m very interested in a printer for home, so I’m following this thread with interest. But I won’t be getting an SLA one!
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Need sleep 
Sat up doing a lot of reading, especially on the ender, which I think is a good starting point considering it’s £120 direct (£165 on Amazon.co.uk)
It’s cheap enough that I don’t even need to worry if it’s too much faff, jeez I do more than that down the pub on a Friday night
Now I see it’s faults / upgrades etc.
What (if any) would you recommending purchasing outright with the printer? Obviously a lot can be printed but there’s also a lot of other bits like btouch, glass plate etc
Just bought myself a second printer, Anet A8plus (300x300mm heated bed with glas-plate).
As all Anet printers, needed some tweaks, but I love playing around with those stuff.
You can get it really cheap at amazon…
The first is a cocheer Anet A8 with 220x270mm heated bed.
Both printers have been tuned
A8:
Enclosure for Raspberry, relais board, mainboatd and two mosfets for hotend end bed), Pi-Cam, printed drag-chains for better cabling, And some more printed addons.
Bought a better bed holder and glasbed.
A8 Plus;
Enclosure like above, Pi-Cam, drag-chain bought at amazon, Igus bearings and some printed addons.
Quality:
Still fine tuning the A8+ but coming close to a quality I accept.
Printing on glasbed gives a nice surface for my wall mounted tablet frames and the lage heatbeds allow printing in one peace.
Comparison:
A8 is louder than A8+
A8+ can print faster cause of better bearings
A8+ heats up faster as it is 24V instead of 12V
You will find a lot of negative feedback on Anet 3d printers, but if you like to play with those things, add tweaks and do fine tuning, you can get a reasonable quality at a good price…
I think this is probably the case for most. All of them have their flaws.
For Beginners (like me) I find this YouTube-Channel very useful:
There are many short videos for specific improvements about the printer itself (mostly Ender 3) and Slicer (like Cura) in general.
I have a Creality CR-6 SE that I got off Kickstarter. It is now available at $429 MSRP. I have had a pretty good experience so far. I hated leveling the bed on the CR-10 that I had gone in on with my coworkers, so the BLTouch leveling free system on the CR-6 has been great. I only print PLA, but it does a great job on that.
I tried PETG a couple times which didn’t work very well. I thought maybe I was printing at too low a temp for the PETG, so I tried to print at 230 but the printer kept shutting off due to detecting thermal runaway.
This is a single extruder printer, but you should be able to print with multiple filaments using the change filament command. Unfortunately, it ignores that command altogether. The release notes for the last firmware update indicated it was fixing that, but the command still does not work for me.
Others had trouble with the power switch, but I have not run into that, and Creality claims to have fixed that problem.
I have a Kickstarter version with the faulty power switch, so I disabled it and just use a TP-Link Kasa to toggle it.
I’m using the community firmware for the CR-6 SE and it’s really good. A new version was just released and there are a lot of advantages over the stock firmware. You might want to try it.
I recently bought an anycubic mega pro. After a few days of printing the I needed to level the bed. but with a steel linear I could see that the bed is not plain and it doesn’t get leveled. after many emails with support they sent me replacement. at today I received 3 glasbeds and a complete headbet. I regretted that I had not did a research before. now I will look into a prusa mini or the mk3s. You get what you pay for. but if it works it makes fun and if you could use octoprint even more.
Took the plunge and ordered an ender 3 this morning. Now starting to read on other bits to change out, added a glass bed to the order too. £131 total, can’t go wrong there given the positive feedback on here 
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