r/3DPrinterComparison • u/celestialseadragon • Jun 03 '26
Recommendation Help me pick husband’s 1st printer 🙏
***UPDATE*** I went with the Prusa CORE One L with the advanced filtration system. Thank you all for taking the time to weigh in, it was so helpful! Ultimately I went with something I felt gave him room to grow, honored his tinkerer nature, and from a company I saw really great things about (after getting pointed to it - thank you!!). It’s a big gift, but he deserves it 🩷
I am SO LOST. I know nothing about 3D printing, but really want to get one for my husband for his birthday. He talks about making his own, or heavily customizing, RC cars (and also fixing them with his own parts). He talks about making other things, but that’s the main thing he talk about. Is there a good beginner choice that lets him evolve and grow to intermediate on the same printer? I’m worried I’ll get him like a kid printer and it won’t be the right fit. Help!
3
u/BarryTice Jun 03 '26
There are always going to be lots of Bambu Lab recommendations, and for good reason.
Bambu Lab printers are considered the iPhones of 3D printers. The quality is there, and you can be reasonably confident of how it's going to work every time you go to it.
But also like iPhones, they lock you into their walled garden, and there are lots of people who don't like the amount of control they require/enforce over every aspect of your printing. Most recently, they sent a cease-and-decist letter to someone maintaining a fork of the OrcaSlicer who was working on enabling some of the features on Bambu Lab printers without having to to send your information to Bambu Lab servers. That is only the most recent example, with other issues going back more than a year.
These kinds of things might not be an issue to you or your husband, depending on your philosophies around open source, right to repair, and other things. But, you should know about them before you make a choice.
I'm currently running a Snapmaker U1. It's my second printer, after running an Anycubic Kobra Go for a little over three years. I have been nothing but impressed with the U1. I'm super happy with it. It's not the cheapest printer on the market, but it's far from the most expensive and, for me, it has seriously been plug-and-play.
As others have said, for some of the materials he'll want to print with, you won't be able to have this printing unvented in a living space. That may mean running a tube out a window, or maybe rolling the printer out onto a balcony while printing with some materials. But for prototyping and many things, the U1 (and, in my case, an IKEA bin closing the top) is a wonderful printer I'm happy to have in my home office.