Back in 2018 I bought an Ender 3 and over the years after a lot of tinkering and upgrading I got really sick of having to work on it, so I shelved it permanently a few years ago. I didn’t have very much I wanted to print by then anyway, and another print failure that resulted in a giant ball of plastic covering the hotend for the umpteenth time tipped me over the edge. I could only disassemble it for service so many times before I started wanting to give it the Office Space treatment.
But now I would like to start printing again, only this time I want to actually just print things and not feel like an unpaid 3D printer mechanic. I don’t need anything fancy, I’m still only going to print ~95% PLA with the occasional PETG or ASA maybe. Really all I want is the equivalent of an Ender 3 only reliable, quiet, and with auto bed levelling (also having an actually flat bed to start with would be nice). Any kind of mandatory (or pseudo-mandatory via arbitrary feature-lock) cloud connectivity is a hard no from me. I will use Octoprint to manage it.
Are there any cheap printers that fill that role these days? I’m well and truly OOTL
“Cheap?” Depends on your definition, but go for Prusa. Open specs, open ecosystem, open software, open upgrades. Tinkering is still completely possible (in some ways even easier) but unlike Ender 3 it is never actually necessary. The damn things just work, all the time, every time. They’re workhorses. Best of both worlds, in my opinion.
With the intention of getting into 3D printing myself, I spend quite some time researching printers. Prusa checks many of my requirements and I love their approach. But the printers really seem a lot more pricey in comparison to what the competition has to offer. I get where that comes from and I’m likely to get a Prusa in the end just because of principles. But this is something you have to consider I guess.