Edit 2: I purchased the Bambu A1 mini. If I regret it, there will be more chances in later years. Haha. Maybe by then I can work with resin and make the really fun minis. Thank everyone who responded for your advice and help.
Edit: I am leaning against resin printing due to the lack of sufficient ventilation in my current work space and the potential for injuring my cats. I also do not plan to do exclusively miniatures; they were just the thing I was most excited for when making this post.
I looked around for a pinned thread or purchase wiki type thing, but didn't see one. I apologize if this is the wrong place.
After visiting a family member, I have decided that 3D printing has finally gotten affordable enough for me to maybe add to my list of hobbies. My primary use cases would be making miniatures (no particular scale necessary, as I just like to paint them at the moment), making parts for other hobbies (including cross stitch), and just generally making gifts and fun knick nacks. My budget is no more than $250 for the machine itself. I have not-insignificant computer experience, and some training in CAD programs.
Several seem to be on sale in the US for Father's Day (today), and I was wondering if anybody had some advice or suggestions on some specific ones.
- Creality Ender-3 V2 is what my family member has had for a while now and enjoyed, and less than $200 is very nice. It does seem to be dated at this point, and Creality support seems to be lacking.
- There's also the Neo of the above for the same price, but I am honestly having a hard time pinpointing the difference.
- Sovol SV06 seems to be a common recommendation for the price range, but I've heard similarly negative things about their support, especially on Amazon (although I no longer trust Amazon reviews very much).
- Flashforge Adventurer 5M appears to be on a significant sale on their official eBay (240 USD), but I have only really seen it recommended in almost spammy manners, which seems like either excitement for the sale or an ad campaign.
Any help you can give is greatly appreciated, even if it's just not getting into the hobby at this price point.
If you want to print miniatures that are actually miniature in scale, a resin printer is probably the way to go. That said, you need to wash prints, cure prints, properly dispose of waste materials, etc. This article talks about their differences and shows somr a/b comparisons halfway through it. You can get pretty good detail with a small nozzle on a FDM printer, but resin will still blow it away.
As for a budget printer, most are generally pretty reliable but if you want good results you're probably going to need to fiddle with them. You'll also probably need to fiddle with them to keep them running and/or optimized (for example, better fan shrounds for your hot end, etc). I didn't mind somewhat ugly prints from my i3 Plus, so I didn't need to do very much fiddling beyond some basic mods over the 5 or so years I was fairly actively using it - especially after I replaced the bed springs with silicone and printed snug fitting thumb wheels.
There's nothing wrong with an "old" printer. I bought a Monoprice branded Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus a little over 7 years ato and from a pure feature perspective it's not that different than the base Ender v3. The biggest advances are in quality of life things, like z-offset calibration and "auto leveling", but it's worth saying that most budget printers can't adjust their extruder mechanically to be in plane with the build plate like say a Voron, so they compensate by tweaking z-height as the extruder moves between high and low spots. Geared reduced extruders on direct drive setups are also preferable over driving the extruder directly from a stepper motor like my old i3 Plus or early Ender v3 models.
Printers are generally very modifiable, so if some new whiz-bang feature comes out in a few years you'll likely be e able to adopt it to your printer.
The results from resin printers look fantastic. My only work area is inside with cats, so I'm concerned about ventilation and contamination (especially since shutting them out of the room will reduce ventilation further). Also, miniatures are just one of the things I wanted to make. Planters, cross stitch hoops and tools, and those neat sectional fidget toys are all things I plan to make, and it seems resin isn't ideal for those. I don't mind sanding the result to make it smoother, and I understand the results won't be as high detail as a purchased miniature when I do make them.
I have not yet learned much about stepper motors vs other options, but otherwise it sounds like the main thing that has changed in this price range is an increased number of valid options in it.
I have done this with both, and honestly, the resin miniatures, while impressive, are a fuckload of work to remove the supports from, clean, cure, and dispose of the uncured resin and prep for the next plate. The hazard they present isn't terribly noticeable until it is. Ventilation is probably necessary for all 3D printers, but unless you have outdoor or purpose built external venting, resin will bother you eventually.
As for FDM, you can do it, but it will never reach resin detail. On a 0.2mm nozzle, for instance it would clog too much, or print too slow and something would end up interfering with the print. A 0.4mm does alright, but you'll want to do some abrasive finishing and some thicker layers of primer.
It also depends on your plastic, how much you are willing to tweak your printer, etc. unfortunately, unlike resin, once you dial in the settings you will have to monitor it as the plastic absorbs moisture, the extruder and other gears wear down ever so slightly. Ambient temperature will affect how well layers stick, and slight breezes will be noticable.