Have 3d printers changed much in the last few years?

[e100]

Or are things basically stuck where they were 5 years ago, at least in the hobby/professional crossover price bracket?
For example, is mechanical closed loop control a common feature or still a rare thing to see?
Do you still need to do endless fiddling/tuning to avoid failed prints?

[ataradov]

I'm not sure about "grown up" models, but I've got some random mini 3D printer (Entina Tina 2) on sale for $130 last year. It works flawlessly. I did not have to tune anything and I never had a failed print that was not my fault. It would be sad if basically  toy actually works better than pro stuff.

It is also pretty awesome to have a 3D printer. I did not think I would use it as much as I do.

[Berni]

Yep the good hobby 3D printer are still the same nice machines they ware 5 years ago. The difference is that you can get a decent machine for even cheaper now.

We have a Prusa mk2 going here for over 5 years, It has likely eaten trough enough as much filament as an average person weighs. Still running fine to this day. It had some upgrades (better linear rails, magnetic bed etc..) but those upgrades probably have over 5 years of time on them too. It needed minimal maintenance and if it does fail a print, it is usually because the user did something wrong.

Why do you need closed loop control on a 3D printer? If the print head hit something so hard it lost steps then something has gone seriously wrong and you should stop printing (that these days printers can detect trough lost step detection).

[e100]

Why do you need closed loop control on a 3D printer? If the print head hit something so hard it lost steps then something has gone seriously wrong and you should stop printing (that these days printers can detect trough lost step detection).

I saw this picture on Reddit that was posted today https://i.redd.it/49a3x9zamhfa1.jpg
which shows a complete inability to detect basic positional errors. I was really hoping that stuff like this would be a distant memory.

[ataradov]

I guess it might be a bigger problem for large print volumes.

I don't remember seeing any printers with servos. But apart from people that try to push the printers to their absolute extent, it does not seem to be an issue. The most of the improvement that happened in the recent years was slicing software. It is way more sophisticated and can generate G-code that is easy on the hardware. So, there seems to be no push for closed loop the hardware.

And usually the hardware is pretty flimsy on those things, so if something collides and servo motor tries to force it into position, it might cause more damage.

[SMTech]

Yep the good hobby 3D printer are still the same nice machines they ware 5 years ago. The difference is that you can get a decent machine for even cheaper now.

We have a Prusa mk2 going here for over 5 years, It has likely eaten trough enough as much filament as an average person weighs. Still running fine to this day. It had some upgrades (better linear rails, magnetic bed etc..) but those upgrades probably have over 5 years of time on them too. It needed minimal maintenance and if it does fail a print, it is usually because the user did something wrong.

Why do you need closed loop control on a 3D printer? If the print head hit something so hard it lost steps then something has gone seriously wrong and you should stop printing (that these days printers can detect trough lost step detection).

I think this about sums it up, you're still likely to tweak and fiddle with whatever you buy for some perceived improvement. Some control boards can have more sophisticated control  and acceleration than others which can let you set extra settings in the slicer. I think that helps with things like corners.

I find ours occasionally useful, but not being someone who has any interest in 3d modelling or any prior knowledge of that area limits what I might attempt and hence overall usage. I'm not sure I understand people who use them a lot, the materials & process have their limits and its slow. However random adaptors for pick and place, prototype custom enclosures and test fixtures would all take more time and money done another way, most of the time.

If I was to choose over again, I'd maybe prefer a core XY setup for a bit of extra stability as well as being a nicer form factor. Proper rails would also be nice instead of those silly wheels. Our Cr6 SE does have the auto levelling gimmick, which is a handy feature although I still went over ours and made everything as parallel and level as I could get it fairly early in its life.

I would be nice if 3d printing was just as straightforward and printing paper but it isn't. You still need to test things, fiddle some settings to get the balance of quality, density and speed that works for you. Slicers have too many options attached to too many different parts of the process that create too many way for "user error".

[tszaboo]

There was some improvement. Like bed leveling with sensors, or you don't need to do bed leveling because it has BLtouch or something similar built in. I have an Ender 3, I have spent hours improving it in tiny bits, Some of that is included in the new models. Parts are better quality when they matter. Or it comes now with a touchscreen instead of a knob and a single color LCD. Things are more user friendly, and works better out of the box. And at lower price as well. And get this: They started injection moulding more parts for the printer so they are better quality.

[amwales]

I started with an UP! mini for just over £1000 over 10 years ago, it was a remarkable machine at the time but did suffer from a number of issues and fell out of use as it became more unreliable as time elapsed. Just over a year ago I bought an Prusa 3mks around £800, it wasn't cheap but I wanted to get reliable 3d prints out, it has a much larger bed that the UP and it does that job admirably although it seems a lot slower that the UP!. A few months ago I took the plunge into resin printing as I have re-ignited an old passion for miniature painting and wanted to try out printing more artistic type models. There are lots of resins available but most are brittle and can be a little sketchy with dimensional accuracy. I paid £300 for a small Elegoo Mars 3Pro, Chinese resin printer on Amazon, I have been stunned by the quality of the prints, take a look at the example picture below, the small line inside the red circle is a support that is a thin if not thinner that the beard hair below it. There a a few other dotted around but I had removed most before thinking to take a picture. That print is thin enough that it is a little transparent. The resultion of the printer in xy is 35microns and the z that I used to print the model in the picture is 50microns. We are living in crazy times, expensive multi £1000 resin printers from the likes of Formlabs have been around for a while but I think its been the last few years that these cheaper, capable printers arrived. 

[Berni]

Yeah 3D printing will never be as easy as printing on paper.

All of the 3D printer technologies have there limitations in what they can do, So it matters a lot what shape you are trying to print.

It takes a bit of experience to get to know what the kind of printer you got can and can't do and how to 3D model things in a way that is easy to print them.

3D printers can be thought of as a cheaper and easier to use alternative to a CNC machine. They can make 3D objects, yet don't require the knowledge, planing and setup work that a CNC machine needs to make a part. If you just need some weird shaped mounting bracket you will get one out of a 3D printer faster and with less work. Sure the parts are crap in terms of quality and strength compared to something machined out of aluminium, but a lot of times they are plenty good enough for the job and cost cents worth of material on a machine costing a few 100s of dollars. Did you screw up a measurement on your model? No problem throw it away and print a new corrected one while you go get lunch, cheep and very little effort.

I saw this picture on Reddit that was posted today https://i.redd.it/49a3x9zamhfa1.jpg
which shows a complete inability to detect basic positional errors. I was really hoping that stuff like this would be a distant memory.

Prusas need to have new enough electronics with Trinamic drivers to detect lost steps, and the detection has to be enabled in settings. Either way lost steps are a sign that something else is wrong. Be it something with the printer (mechanical issues, wrong stepper power settings) or the printer was asked something it can't do, leaving a plastic blob or similar somewhere that solidified and gets caught.
We needed very little tweaking with a Prusa and failed prints are rather rare.

[e100]

I paid £300 for a small Elegoo Mars 3Pro, Chinese resin printer on Amazon, I have been stunned by the quality of the prints

From a mechanical point of view it looks simpler, and therefore potentially cheaper to manufacture.

Are the liquid resins regarded as hazardous and therefore difficult to ship? Is disposal a problem, or do you just leave it under a UV light to cure then bin it?
 

[wraper]

Yes they did. Bambu lab X1 series came out recently, which made anything else in $1-1.2k and even significantly higher price range look obsolete. It even measures mechanical resonance and compensates for it. So can print extremely fast in very good quality. Also it has an image spaghetti detection, micro lidar and other stuff. Can print in up to 16 materials if additional automated feeding system is purchased. Also they released stripped down P1P with fancy features removed.
As of resin printers, they got faster, more endurable due to monochrome LCD and DLP and much cheaper.

[Berni]

I paid £300 for a small Elegoo Mars 3Pro, Chinese resin printer on Amazon, I have been stunned by the quality of the prints

From a mechanical point of view it looks simpler, and therefore potentially cheaper to manufacture.

Are the liquid resins regarded as hazardous and therefore difficult to ship? Is disposal a problem, or do you just leave it under a UV light to cure then bin it?

We have a Photon S as a UV resin printer, but it doesn't see that much use.

Resin doesn't seam hard to get, but it is quite a bit more expensive the filament. The stuff is not that terribly poisonous, but can potentially cause allergic reactions on skin for some people.  The worst part of it is how smelly and messy the stuff is. It can be smelled into the next room and it has a very oily and sticky consistency to it, so once it escapes the containment it spreads to everything trough touch. This means you need a strictly guarded area for handling it, especially since anything you print comes out of the printer covered in resin and needs to be pried off the build platform. It gets easier once you get a tub filled with 1 liter of isopropyl, but still. Also the resin shouldn't be left in the printer for long periods, so you have to keep pouring things around and cleaning stuff. Everything smells of alcohol at that point..etc. To sum it up, it is a messy printer to operate. They are also not immune to print failures. They still need supported overhangs or parts might break off and ruin the whole print.

The detail these printers can do is amazing tho. You can print some ridiculously tiny features in the prints, including thin rods or walls that other printers couldn't even dream of. Layer lines so fine you can't even see them without magnification.

However the mess is only actually worth it if you really do need the fine details. If you don't need it then FDM is way more convenient to use.

[wraper]

Also resin printers are not well suited for functional parts. Normal resins are not that expensive in comparison. However it becomes expensive with special resins which are not brittle, and still you will get something not quite  like normal plastics printed by FDM 3D printers. However they are great when you need to make something wide or many small pieces at once. Unlike on FDM printers for print time it only matters how many layers need to be printed as the whole layer is exposed at once.

[e100]

Yes they did. Bambu lab X1 series came out recently, which made anything else in $1-1.2k and even significantly higher price range look obsolete.

I hope it lives up to the performance expectations and spare parts are readily available.
At the moment all the reviews seem to be from people who have been given free pre-release machines thus they say nice things so that they get more free stuff from other manufacturers.

If it actually works as advertised then yes, it's going to shake up the market.
The other manufacturers have seen this coming since at least June 2022 but have remained silent.

[wraper]

That Kickstarter was more like a promotion for an item already in production, not to get the funding. So plenty of people already received theirs a few months ago and are quite happy.

[wraper]

The other manufacturers have seen this coming since at least June 2022 but have remained silent.

It will take a lot of time to put into production something comparable. As it seems, they decided to mass produce it in large numbers from the start, otherwise there is no way to not lose money on it at such price point.

[Rat_Patrol]

I run mainly Prusa printers, along with a home-brew high temp unit I'm currently building up. I have an MK3s, Mini, and then a large format resin printer I use regularly. I also have a 5 head XL on pre-order (since announcement day). I make a lot of jigs, manufacturing helpers, custom adapters/feeders, etc. Stuff like that, plus whatever else I may need (mounting brackets for various everything is common). I use ESD PLA for stuff that micros touch.

The MK3s is getting a bit long in the tooth for the UI, but it works, doesn't glitch, and just makes prints w/o complaint or problems or tinkering. The Mini works just fine as well, I keep a .4mm nozzle on it for more detailed prints (.6 on the MK3s). I upgraded both with the Super PINDA sensor, and use the Satin bed sheets.

The satin bed sheets are a game changer.
The slicer upgrades and improvements are game changers.
The Super PINDA helps a ton when changing bed temps from different filaments all the time (more constant first layer offset).

I can't wait to get my XL.

The Bambu looks interesting, but all the hardware is proprietary and the company is a startup. Also, to get full utilization from the machine, you need to use their slicer (and IIRC was cloud?), but basic prints can be done from any slicer apparently, so you have to hope they make a good slicer and keep it up to date. I'm not sold on them yet, we shall see. If that company goes under, or they simply decide to stop parts production, your machine will lose all support.

[thm_w]

I saw this picture on Reddit that was posted today https://i.redd.it/49a3x9zamhfa1.jpg
which shows a complete inability to detect basic positional errors. I was really hoping that stuff like this would be a distant memory.

Prusas need to have new enough electronics with Trinamic drivers to detect lost steps, and the detection has to be enabled in settings. Either way lost steps are a sign that something else is wrong. Be it something with the printer (mechanical issues, wrong stepper power settings) or the printer was asked something it can't do, leaving a plastic blob or similar somewhere that solidified and gets caught.
We needed very little tweaking with a Prusa and failed prints are rather rare.

Yeah, as someone who has multiple printers, one with DIY closed loop, you don't need it. If the printer is setup correctly you won't have issues with shifts.

https://www.trinamic.com/technology/motor-control-technology/stallguard-and-coolstep/

[hli]

Yeah 3D printing will never be as easy as printing on paper.

When I compare 3D printing today with the 2D (on paper) printing of, let's say, 30 years ago, I would say it will be. Paper printing was awful back then. Mostly on the software side, but even on the hardware side of things it was sometimes more magic than reliable tooling. (I remember a customer once explained to me that their main issue was when they wanted to print like 2000 packing list on Monday morning, going through all orders which arrived over then weekend, their main issue was that their big printer quite often pulled in multiple sheets at once. IIRC they worked on that for over a year, and finally resorted to buy a completely different printing solution. They never found out what the real issue was.)
So lets give it some time - sooner or later there will be a company who figures out how to do this correctly to go into the real consumer market. Prusa did this to an extend with their reliability of the MK3, and Bamboo also does some real progress on that with all their sensor stuff. The combination of both might be what we need.
This leaves us with the issue that 3D printing in itself is complex (as in coming up with a good model), but then coming up with valuable stuff to print on paper is also not easy, right?

[wraper]

The Bambu looks interesting, but all the hardware is proprietary and the company is a startup. Also, to get full utilization from the machine, you need to use their slicer (and IIRC was cloud?), but basic prints can be done from any slicer apparently, so you have to hope they make a good slicer and keep it up to date. I'm not sold on them yet, we shall see. If that company goes under, or they simply decide to stop parts production, your machine will lose all support.

You can use cloud but it's a bonus, not necessity. If you are concerned about spare parts, you can buy some extra right away, they are quite cheap. For example P1P complete screen unit costs only $25, and $150 for X1. Hot end with nozzle $10-15 depending on type, complete hot end assembly with heater, sensor and fan $30-35. Extruder unit $35-45 https://us.store.bambulab.com/collections/extruders-and-parts Compare that with Prusa XL you pre-ordered, a single additional extruder/tool head costs $200 less than a whole P1P and half of X1. As I've seen from some discussions, many people cancelled their Prusa pre-orders and got Bambu instead. It is a startup in a sense they are a new company but not is a sense what startups usually are. It's founded/run by serious ex DJI guys and the thing was already in mass production before it appeared on Kickstarter. If the company goes under, IMHO there will be plenty of 3rd party major consumable parts considering how many of these were already sold.
EDIT: BTW they open sourced BambuStudio and there is a fork already which works with other 3D printers too.