3D Printer for less than $400
Does the market need a cheaper printer, or a better one?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.All the printers had ugly, clunky software, but the pro printers would almost always make the thing I wanted.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)The difficulty of getting a good print scales dramatically with the initial footprint, and not as much with height.I have no intention of actually buying a printer until I've seen one work 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.I'm glad 3D printing is taking off, but I think we've reached an inflection point where we need to go from possible to easy.