this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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Jumping off of this, as someone who's been adjacent to 3D printing spaces for over a decade now, what is a good beginner 3D printer for someone who would rather spend less up front and spend more time calibrating and tinkering? Is it still the Ender 3 Pro?
The thing is unless you need the slightly bigger bed size, the A1 mininfrom Bambu is simply a better product. It's faster, easier, and often cheaper (I got mine for like 150-ish). And the full-size A1 is also bigger.
That's the thing with Bambu. What's made them such a disruptor and given them the opportunity to be shitty is that they make a really good product with excellent software at less than half the price of a comparable Prusa.
And with the new SnapMaker U1 slapping back, they dropped their prices again. The new X2D is half the cost of the last-gen X1 and has an extra nozzle.
So what would you recommend to someone who wants to get their hands a bit dirty and is reluctant to put anything on the network?
Also realistically the printer would live in my detached garage which I haven't yet bothered to setup any sort of wifi in, so a connected printer would balloon the scope of such a project and cause it to intersect with and be blocked by other queued network projects, and sometimes I just don't want to faff with networking after working how many hours faffing with networking professionally
If your don't mind assembling the printer yourself, get a Voron 2.4 kit. It's an open-source 3d printer, perfect for getting your hands dirty. Much easier to upgrade and repair than a Bambu.
Edit: I believe Voron printers are typically used over a network, but you should be able to just plug a monitor into it and do the slicing and printing on it directly. They typically have a Raspberry Pi or a Pi clone built into them for running Klipper.
In that case, for a random person I'd still recommend Bambu unless you're boycotting on ethical grounds.
Their printers run just fine without a network. Just export the g-code to a microSD card, put the card in the printer, and select the model from the card. It also allows you to use whatever slicer you want that way.
It's really only cloud printing that's locked behind Bambu Studio.