The Best 3D Printer

Daftar Isi

A 3D printer unlocks a world of creation, giving anyone with a few hundred bucks the power to manufacture custom components with sub-millimeter precision. And you don’t have to be an engineer to get started.

We recommend the Bambu Lab A1 Mini because it’s easy to set up and makes high-quality prints without needing any manual calibration. Plus, this model fits more easily on a desk than previous picks.

Whether you’re a tinkerer interested in prototyping or a tabletop-gaming enthusiast seeking to expand your arsenal of tiles and terrain, a 3D printer might be just the manufacturing tool you need.

The Best 3D Printer

Bambu Lab A1 Mini

The Bambu Lab A1 Mini stood out from the other 3D printers we tested as the easiest model to use, while maintaining competitive print quality and speed. Its guided setup process doesn’t require fiddling with any settings, and Bambu Lab offers both a mobile app (to help set up the printer and monitor print progress) and desktop software (to prepare and send files to the printer). 

The A1 Mini has software similar to that of its more expensive siblings in the P1 and X1 lines, and it’s lacking only in upgrades meant for printing the trickier materials ABS and carbon fiber. If you need that functionality, check out our upgrade pick, the Bambu Lab X1-Carbon.

Bambu Lab X1-Carbon

The Bambu Lab X1-Carbon is the company’s flagship printer. It produces prints about as quickly and reliably as our top pick, the A1 Mini, but adds features for people who want the reliability of a heated, enclosed printing area and the option to print with stronger materials.

The X1-Carbon has an upgraded screen, an enclosed print bed for better temperature control, and a lidar sensor to scan your first layer for printing errors. Along with a hardened-steel nozzle, these features make the X1-Carbon a versatile printer that can work well in schools or industrial prototyping labs. It also comes with a camera that allows you to check in on your print.

What you should know about 3D printers

Be warned: No 3D printer is unbreakable. A day will come when you’ll need to replace a part or get your hands dirty in some other way.

Replacement parts are available for Bambu Lab’s A1 Mini and X1-Carbon, but not all 3D printers are equally easy to fix. You might want to avoid 3D printing altogether if you aren’t confident that you’d be able to perform a minor repair on the equivalent of a household appliance.

Prospective buyers should also be aware that the 3D-printing industry is in a constant state of upheaval. MakerBot, which was long considered the front-runner among home 3D printers, stopped marketing to hobbyists and home users several years ago in order to focus on commercial and educational institutions. We thought Prusa made the best 3D printers for hobbyists for a few years, and now we recommend printers from the startup Bambu Lab.

Many of the printers we’ve tested have come and gone within a few years. So it’s possible that you might someday find yourself without much customer support—or that a new breakthrough will suddenly leave you with outdated technology.

In addition, a 3D printer brings health and environmental concerns. When a printer melts plastic as part of the extrusion process, it releases volatile organic compounds and other particulates. The CDC recommends (PDF) using printers in a “negatively pressured area with a dedicated ventilation system,” which is not a feature found in your average home. Before buying a 3D printer, it’s a good idea to weigh how comfortable you are with exposure to some fumes.

Sustainability and 3D printers

3D printing creates a lot of plastic waste. Between failed prints, test prints, support material, and excess material purged while you’re switching filaments, if you 3D-print often, you’ll be left with a nontrivial amount of plastic that you can’t recycle through traditional means.

Though many manufacturers produce recycled filament, it’s difficult to find any that accept filament scraps from hobbyists. The few national recycling programs we’ve found are either expensive, such as this nearly $200 recycling box from Terracycle, or vague.

Prominent 3D printer maker Prusa has created a world map with smaller, local recycling initiatives that take printed plastic. (The map also lets Prusa printer owners add themselves to offer tech support, provide printing services, or just show off their printer.)

Prusa has tried to find a solution for its own larger-scale plastic waste, testing 10 different recycling plants before eventually deciding to start recycling the waste into filament on its own. In the course of that research, Prusa’s head of sustainability Vladimír Víšek learned that larger recycling plants have issues with 3D-printed plastic since the waste usually comes in very small quantities, and because it’s not readily apparent what kind of plastic a material might be.

Home filament-recycling machines, which allow you to turn bits of shredded plastic back into usable spooled filament, also exist. But they either cost thousands of dollars or need to be built painstakingly from scratch.

Many 3D-printing hobbyists turn to repurposing or minimizing plastic scraps themselves. I collect my PLA scraps in a bread-loaf pan and then place them in the oven at 300 degrees Fahrenheit until they melt into a brick. At the very least, this minimizes the tiny shards of plastic I’m throwing away.

The best way to combat waste, at least according to Víšek, is to think ahead and create less of it. His advice for more sustainable printing: Consider what you actually need to print, make sure your slicer settings minimize the amount of support material you have to print, and be sure to use up the last few feet of filament on each roll.

How we picked and tested

No matter what price range you’re considering, we’ve concluded that the best 3D printers offer the following features:

High-quality prints: Without too much tweaking, the printer should put out smooth-looking models with layers that are 0.1 mm thick at most and barely visible.

Easy-to-use hardware: Even a complete beginner should be able to put the printer together, load filament, start a print, and remove the finished model from the print bed. The bed should also level itself or be simple to level manually, since a sloping print bed can cause printing errors.

Ample connectivity options: Ideally, you should be able to start a print over Wi-Fi or transfer the file over a USB cable. Loading files onto an SD card that you plug into the printer is also okay. A design that requires you to keep a computer tethered to the printer at all times via USB is a serious flaw but not necessarily a dealbreaker.

Intuitive software: Beginners should be able to jump right into using a printer’s software, including making adjustments to models before printing. The software should come preloaded with print settings but provide options for more experienced users to fine-tune. It’s a big plus if a printer has a preconfigured profile in PrusaSlicer or UltiMaker Cura, our favorite slicing software. Our picks from Bambu Lab use their own slicer, called Bambu Studio, but are broadly compatible.

Large-enough print volume: It would be nice to have the ability to print objects as large as you want, but the reality is that most models found in libraries such as Thingiverse are designed for small 3D-printer beds, with workarounds for combining several printed pieces to create a larger object. As a result, beginners need only a print bed that’s large enough to print models about the size of a small tissue box.

Hotend and heated bed: A hotend that goes up to 300 degrees Celsius allows you to print the most common filaments, including PLA, ABS, PETG, TPU, nylon, and polycarbonate filaments. A heated bed, which ideally goes up to 100 degrees Celsius, prevents prints from warping, helps models stick to the print bed, and allows you to print using a wider range of materials.

Compatibility with any brand of filament: Some companies embed chips in the spools of plastic that feed into their 3D printers, requiring you to buy refills directly from the printer manufacturer. Proprietary filament is generally more expensive, and if the company that makes it goes out of business, you’ll be unable to use your printer.

Suited to everyday life: The machine should look at home sitting on a desk. Ideally, it isn’t too big or heavy, and it should be relatively quiet so you can’t hear it from every corner of the house. Although some printers are marginally faster than others, large prints can take days, and even small prints take hours. A quiet printer is much easier to live with. Printers should also be able to print in polylactic acid, or PLA, plastic. While melting any type of plastic releases volatile organic compounds and other particulates into the air, the CDC considers PLA to be a safer option (PDF). PLA also has a sweet, inoffensive smell. Still, it’s best for both children and adults to use a 3D printer in a well-ventilated room.

Enclosed printing chamber: Enclosing the print space keeps prints at a consistent temperature to prevent warping and other printing imperfections. It’s an especially good idea to have an enclosed chamber if you are printing with acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS, one of the two most popular printing materials, which is more prone to warping because it shrinks when it cools. Although enclosed printing chambers are nice to have, they’re not essential, and they’re actually fairly rare among inexpensive 3D printers.

We also take into account the company making the printers. Many 3D printer manufacturers have gone out of business and left customers without hardware or software support, while others have tried to lock customers into their own ecosystems using tricks such as proprietary filament. We try to weed such companies out when we can while researching printers to test, but we also keep an eye on companies whose products we currently recommend.

To test each printer, we time how long it takes to pull the machine out of the box and set it up on our desk, and we jot down notes on the initial software installation and navigation process. Then, we get to printing.

In our test prints, we look for obvious flaws. Mediocre prints have readily visible layers or imperfections but still look like a completed model. Failure takes many forms—everything from broken filament string that causes the print to stop to wild spaghetti-like misprints due to software or hardware errors.

Printers usually come with several models preloaded; we always start by printing one of those because they’re carefully optimized for the printer. Errors in such prints typically indicate a problem on the hardware end that we need to address. After the first successful print, we move on to designs we’ve found on Thingiverse.

Source : https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-home-3d-printer/