3DPrinting

The price of a capable printer has come down quite a bit over the last few years. I haven't got any experience with Elegoo printers myself, but I'd expect it to at least work well enough at first. Longevity could be questionable though.

Bamboo printers have proven to be very capable, easy to use, and reliable, but they are locked down quite a bit. If you want a printer you can tinker with, Bamboo is not the way to go.

Depending on your budget, a Prusa would be the best of both worlds, excellent print quality, reliability, and they're about as open as modern consumer printer get. If you go this route, I would recommend against the Prusa Mini. I'm sure it's a good printer, but it's quite outdated now. If you can afford it, I've heard the Core One is a great printer, plus you'll be able to add a Bondtech INDX system later for multimaterial.

The most open option (though the one with the most commitment) would be to build a kit printer like a Voron or a RatRig (Prusa also offers their printers as kits, which I would recommend if you go that route). Building a printer allows you to truly understand the machine, plus, I find it to be a lot of fun.

Prusa kits will come with everything you need to build a printer (except for some tools, I would assume).

Voron kits are all unofficial, but most who build Vorons use a kit. The LDO kits are the best, but I've also built from a Formbot kit and it was fine. Voron kits typically won't come with the printed parts, though some do. The parts need to be printed with either ABS or ASA, so not all printer will work.

I haven't got any experience with RatRig printers, but I think the kits are official, so I would expect them to be good quality. Not sure if they come with printed parts or not.

Sorry for the wall of text TLDR: Elegoo: Cheap, open-ish, questionable reliability BAMBOO: Affordable, very closed, reliable Prusa: Expensive, open, reliable Voron: Expensive, very open, large commitment RatRig: same as Voron, with a little less commitment

I will never recommend an Elegoo printer after the last two I had. Both broke in unique ways and I got no support for either one. It took MicroCenter going above and beyond to resolve the issue with one by doing a return well past the return period. The manager was horrified when I gave her the extremely long and exhausting story of dealing with their awful support. The other printer is just a pile of parts now.

I picked up an Anycubic Kobra S1 and its been pretty great so far, though my bar is pretty low at this point, TBH.

That being said, they do use their own version of OrcaSlicer, but it works well enough for me, and you can flash some additional firmware into the printer to open it up more.

I own multiple CC now, they are good for almost every material you can throw at it, pretty reliable as well. Hotend can be changed pretty easily, dunno if there are any third party ones, you can buy third party nozzles stock ones are good enough for me.

I've had the Elegoo Neptune 2S, Neptune 3 Pro, and now the Centauri Carbon and in general I am really happy with it. I'm not happy at the company in regards to their promises regarding the color changer for it, but for the most part they've been a decent company.

9I have the cc2 and had the Neptune 4 pro before that.

My honest view on elegoo.

While you get some amazing deals on their latest machines. When things go wrong. As in bad design issues. You will often find the community is the only real help. And that can take some time.

Elegoo seems to have a release a new version fix strategy rather then help existing customers.

They will stand by warremtee as far as replacement parts go. But their prices honestly mean any design issues are built in for the model you buy. (Given as a company. They do work on small margins. I. A field where such issues are common. It's hard to blame them.)

That said, the community is pretty darn good. And they are fairly open with their software etc, So alternatives etc are possible given time.

On the whole as an occasional user with a little technical ability. I consider them a good buy. But would hesitate if I needed them to be reliable for any form of business. I'm poor and find the fiddling fun sometimes. And can wait a bit and struggle when I have a project. If you do not think that way. Spend more on a printer with more support.

ATM the CC1 is likely the best deal on a core xy out there. But many community upgrades are advisable.

The CC2 fixes many of those needs. But it's lack of internal website introduces more. IE Linux is a pain. And their website has occasional issues.

Orca are openly working on support for CC2 web issue. But ATM generating it's GCode and moving via usb is required.

Centauri Carbon has a flaw with the USB cable that connects to the print head breaking due to constant mechanical wear.

I don't have one these but this is the issue I found when searching about it. I don't know how serious it is but if you search it's a main topic of this model.