Hi guys,
Ive been on the 3D printer purchase fence for what seems like years, but figure Im about ready to take the plunge.
Despite a lot of time Googling for an answer, whilst I am a lot more informed, Im not sure Im any closer to an answer and am hoping you guys can point me in the right direction.
Im inclined to believe I should buy a resin printer. Primerily because of speed and print quality. If I go down the resin route, Id probably look at one of the Creality units, or a Elgoo Saturn 2 (maybe a Mars 3). In the FDM range, not sure, something better than entry level, but probably not Prusa MK3S; Creality?
I will never print any models to paint or any of that kinda stuff. Much more likely to print electronics enclosures, brackets, and engineering kinda stuff.
So the question… Is one type much more suited to my kind of work, or doesnt it really matter?
Id love some thought and words of wisdom on the subject please.
Tim has a fantastic guide on just this you definitely wanna take a look at:
In my experience, FDM wins for convenience when printing enclosures for things, resin printers emit toxic fumes, the resin is a skin irritant, and they can over-cure and become brittle if left in the sun. They can’t be beaten on surface finish though, and you can do cool stuff like print threads directly in your model rather than use heat-set inserts.
You can get FDM prints to look quite nice with some tuning, and simple shapes like boxes are really easy to get looking nice. Here are some good examples I’ve achieved with the right bits:
In the end, it’s up to you, but Creality machines are good picks regardless as their community of users is massive (you’ll find content and guides for your machine). They aren’t going to be as turnkey as something like an Ultimaker, but both are priced accordingly, and I still used my Ender 3 V2 after I had built a multi-thousand-dollar machine. The most important spec for a printer is reliability - you can have the nicest prints in the world but if it only works 10% of the time it’s very frustrating. A BLTouch and spring-steel PEI beds are great upgrades that take the machine most of the way to something nicer like a Prusa.
Let me know if you have any more questions, I’ve been doing this as a hobby for a while so I’ve probably run into them before
