Prusa MK3S

There are lemons, but generally Prusa is excellent for that, yes. My Mk3s has been working reliably for six years. The only problem I ever had with it was an error I made in assembly. I can go six months without using it or use it every day all day for a week and it prints reliably either way.

I got a second hand Prusa Mk3s about a year ago as my first printer, around 300 € perhaps. I'm still enjoying it a lot, even though I'm now eyeing one of their upcoming (more expensive) models. I think it depends mostly on how you expect to use it. There may be alternatives that give you perfect prints with minimal fuzz. But for me it was great to have a machine I dare play around with. Like getting a tractor before a race car :)

I've put 10's of thousands of hours on MK3s and the PINDA works fine as long as it is mounted well (which isn't always the case) and set to the right height relative to the nozzle. The automatic calibration routine - on a well built printer, which also isn't always the case, runs exactly once after you've built the printer. Fine tuning is possible, and can be quite useful if you want to play around with the degree to which your prints stick to the bed, for instance for automatic print release tricks (and bed temp as well). The fact that you have all this control comes at a price compared to say a Bambu A1: you need to know a bit more about how a printer works. But that knowledge will come in very handy when sooner or later you want to do something that isn't in the manual. The MK4 loadcell is a solution for some problems and a the cause of some others, it is not the best implementation of a loadcell either but it is smarter than the way for instance the Creality K1 and variations are set up (they have four, underneath the bed). I would recommend against the Creality series printers by the way, they're dirt cheap and wicked fast but they break all the time and the stock extruder is complete junk. Finally, the best investment you can probably make alongside any printer is a multi-roll filament dryer with a heating element and a fan. That more than anything else will affect your print quality. We do the bulk of our work on Bambu's now, but for really high precision stuff we wi…

I bought a Prusa MK3s during lockdown (don't think I'll do the upgrade to the +, doesn't seem much changed), it is amazing. I've never owned a 3D printer before, and it was painless to put together, took about 1 hour to tune and fix one assembly glitch. It's sitting right next to me printing right now. The other thing I bought myself was an M1 mac. I just got frustrated with cleaning my butterfly keyboard again, and just said, "fuck it, I'm buying one". It is an amazing machine. Battery for days, nice, light. It's probably my favorite computer ever (well, after my first – an Apple //e).

To counter your example, I run a Prusa Mk3s and recently bought a mini and have quite literally never run either printer without OctoPrint. I've got no interest in shuffling around sd cards in order to print models, nor do I want it connected to my primary pc that gets rebooted regularly. And in their defence, I've been running OctoPrint for about 3 years and never had an issue with it across any updates.

> Bambu totally delivers there. They really commoditised 3D printing and brought the price down. Prusa's MK3S delivered consistently good, zero fuss, straight out of the box prints with auto bed leveling for $999 before Bambu labs even existed at all. Bambu brought Core XY & multi-filament to the "mainstream" (for however mainstream 3D printing is at all), absolutely, but if you just wanted a 3D printer that consistently worked for an affordable price? Prusa beat them to that by years. They just didn't advertise the shit out of it on YouTube like Bambu did. Prusa unfortunately then kinda just... relaxed? Not sure what happened, but MK3 -> MK4 was pretty meh, the XL was delayed, the Core One a good response but still lacking on the multi-material front, etc...