3D Printer for less than $400
Does the market need a cheaper printer, or a better one?<p>I've used 6 types of 3D printers. (Extrusion type, ABS or PLA) 3 from the 'consumer' grade and 3 from the 'pro' grade. Each of the consumer grade printers was an exercise in frustration.<p>All the printers had ugly, clunky software, but the pro printers would almost always make the thing I wanted.<p>The consumer printers I've tried take 3 or 4 failures to get 'set up' then a few more tries to find the bugs most of the way through a build, and eventually you might get one nice print. (After 4-6 hours)<p>The difficulty of getting a good print scales dramatically with the initial footprint, and not as much with height.<p>I have no intention of actually buying a printer until I've seen one <i>work</i> that I can afford. I can't manage the cost of most pro machines, but I can't accept the headache of 'consumer' printers today.<p>I'm glad 3D printing is taking off, but I think we've reached an inflection point where we need to go from <i>possible</i> to <i>easy</i>.