One of the best first printers right now is sovol sv06. It is basically a prusa mk3s but without the customer support and filament sensor. If you want a printer with lots of possible community mods, get yourself an ender 3(/pro/v2/s1/neo whatever) and mod away.
The sv06 is my only printer and I really like it. Did have to take it apart to lubricate the bearings but that's not too hard
I have had really good prints with PLA, PETG and TPU
Its not bad to take apart rods and bearings, clean and relube, but its usually enough to just drop tiny amount of oil on rods and just move your axis back and forth. I do it once a month
Technically, you're supposed to pack bearings with grease before installation (put grease inside bearing, plug opposite end with thumb and shove steel rod into the open side), but cheap printer manufacturers rarely do it, so that would be the first thing to do after you get the sv06. After that, your lubrication method is sufficient. But it is still better to repack bearings after a while and clean the rods.
I've not been paying attention to the Neptune 4 reviews, but my 3 Pro is awesome and Elegoo have really great customer support
I have a Mars printer which has been nothing but great
I have the non pro version. It has been great so far. My only annoyances have been the slicer software supplied by Elegoo is an outdated version of Cura and there are no profiles for the printer in any other slicers I've seen. You can recreate the profiles in the up-to-date Cura but it is annoying. There are also no custom nozzles yet and it uses a non standard size so none of the current 3rd party nozzles work.
@parallax I can vouch for the Mars 3. To some extent it depends on what you are printing but 28mm miniatures are great.
I just got the n4p and it's been pretty good. I'm still new to this hobby so I'm still tinkering to get perfect prints but all the tools and toys I've printed out have been functional and look good.
How is the volume on it? I know the 3p can run pretty quite (in terms of printers)
225*225*265mm it's been able to print everything I've thrown at it. I'm printing a bag clip right now and I rotated it diagonally and it's going at it pretty well.
Edit: formatting
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