Everybody is complaining about the price, but c'mon this thing is designed printed and assembled in Prague, the EU. It creates local jobs for people with fair wages, social security and good quality of life, we should strive to have more of our stuff produced in the west.

Happy to see him design another printer, I really love my MK3.

I love my MK3, which I've upgraded to the MMU MK3S, but have had a bunch of projects where a larger printing area would be desirable (I print a lot of board game organizers, to reduce shelf space usage, speed up set up/tear down, improve playing ability during the game, etc., so usually this means 3-6 distinct sets of prints on the MK3S).

I have a good bit of experience on the Voron 2, and was thinking I was going to build a 2.1 - the CoreXY design also has the benefit of being able to print faster without quality loss, as well as being very amenable to designs that have built in enclosures, which is a godsend for printing ABS (and building exhausts to get the fumes out of the house), but with how great my experience with my current Prusa has been, I'm going to wait and see how it shapes up. It'd also save a ton of work, as the Voron is an entirely DIY design.

The real test will be comparing it to the Ender 3, which seems to be the form factor/market the mini is trying to go after. Even if the mini is 150 bucks more than the Ender 3, if it prints even slightly as reliably as the MK3 then the Ender 3 may be done for.

With low cost printers like the Ender 3/Maker Select/etc, after the first 50-200 hours of printing, you can end up spending more time on printer maintenance than printing. There's also small problems that can happen that for non-technical users would be the end of their adventure into 3D printing. That is easily the greatest pain point at the Ender 3's price point.

...with this being said, though - I'm happy to see a "entry-level" Prusa. One thing that lags the cheap printers are security measurements. I guess no one is keen on burning down their house, just because this giant hotglue on rails went rogue.

On their website, they state that they are:

- monitoring FAN RPM

- Have self diagnostic

- Have a high quality PSU

- and, even more important, use thermistors.

Taking all this into account, this might justify the price bump, if you aren't able to add all this to, let's say, your Ender or any other printer by yourself.

Design wise they're very similar to something like a cetus, or many other Chinese printers with similar mechanics with a major difference: Smooth rods and bearings instead of linear rails.

In my own designs I've pivoted away from rods in favor of rails and seen much greater quality, accuracy, repeatability, and speed, even with cheap knock off rails from China, and most of the industry is moving that way as well.

What's curious is you can get a machine similar to the mini, using linear rails, and more metal or injection moulded parts over 3D printed parts, for just a little bit more than the mini.

Prusa has quite a good reputation though, so I'm skeptical they would release an inferior machine at a the same price point, so like I said, really curious to see how well these works.

1. It looks like you are going to fight "ringing" with lack of rigidity.

2. Its a bowden extruder... which I suppose is a necessity due to the lack of structure. Still I would rather have direct drive on every machine.

3. It's very expensive. You can buy an Ender for $200 or less on sale... or around $230 normal price. Upgrade the board to a 32bit Bigtreetech for $60 with Trinamic drivers... plug and play.

4. Most people find they want a bigger printer... not smaller.

This is my initial reaction. I am always looking for innovation in this space and most of it is happening in the "industrial" realm. For example, I wish they would make an SLS machine or a "beginner" industrial machine.

The companies like Creality are just dominating everything.

We need prosumer/industrial machines that have features you can't get with $750 dollar machine.

Print jobs can easily go 24 hours and fires are fairly catastrophic. I think Prusa just hit the ball out of the park with this pricepoint and approach assuming they are using their usual reliable, vetted components. I have never seen a report of a fire with a Prusa.

My Ender 3 Pro cost 230$ and came with a magnetic bed.

Added about 30$ for Automatic Bed Leveling.

Adding a 32-bit board would cost at least what? 50$? ( The stock Ender 3 board has so little memory I had to remove LCD support to get Unified Bed Leveling working)

Max quoted hotend temp is 280 °C so unless Prusa is condoning heating up PTFE to life threatening temperatures it has an all-metal hotend, so another 30$ for a middle of the road one?

Adding steppers... I think we've hit what the Prusa costs, except you hacked together this kit so now it's on you to support it, and also the prices I listed are not for high quality parts.

Then there's just the fact, Prusa will make a 3d printer that just works, and if it doesn't just work, they'll make it right. Good luck if that 50$ Aliexpress-sourced 32 bit board conks out, and have fun tearing it down and returning it to stock if Creality wants to help you out.

This printer represents careful design and good support, I'm going to try and get rid of my Ender 3 immediately and get one of these.

I wanted a Prusa originally but didn't feel like sinking the money into a proper printer when I didn't know I was going to use it. Instead I ended up with something I'm not using because it never works correctly and has actively damned my enthusiasm for FDM...

You won't be using it make your own chair (or at least, you probably shouldn't) and you won't be mass marketing anything 3D printed nor will you compete in the marketplace with anything that can be injection molded or stamped.

But for a quick one-off part if beats whittling out of a piece of wood by quite a distance.

On another note: soldering irons and hammers are also not for everybody, some people will never get the hang of fabrication. But once you are in the group that likes to make stuff 3D printers are just one more option in the tool arsenal.

Genuinely if you are a creative person it’s an excellent tool to extend your abilities.

Mass marketed are always cheaper and most of the time better. True.

So why creative professionals need it? Because not everything they need its mass marketted. In fact, one of the best uses is joining two mass marketted things together to create a system.

3d printing is fantastic for joining the gaps that exist between what exist in the market and exactly what you need.

Imagine you are an engineer creating a flight simulator hardware machine, or a driving simulator with VR. You probably will buy the chair, but then you will have to adapt it some way to your structure of soldered beams.

You can spend like 600 euros mechanizing and soldering little metal pieces and wait something like a month for those that make it to make it. Or you could print them and spend like 25 euros and have it ready at the end of the day, look at the problems in the design, iterate.

And even if mass a produced version of these things would be cheaper/better, often you just won't be able to find it.

Plus it's nice to be the hero around the house when I can solve random maintenance problems with a quick search on Thingiverse or a couple of hours of designing and printing. Not sure it has literally paid for itself since I got one, but it has definitely be more useful than I expected and I would say it has been borderline indispensable for my household.

"Everyone" doesn't. If you don't make things, don't buy tools.

Metaphorically, you're comparing buying a radio to buying a piano. If you just want to listen to music, buying a piano is a very inefficient step to your goal.

I love my two printers. They enable me to achieve the kind of computer precision my artwork requires in a way I don't know I'd be able to achieve otherwise, at least not in such a short amount of time.

E.g. a 3D printer can be great for all kinds of creative hobbies.

I make all sorts of things:

I work for twitch (built bits product initially), so I print a few hundred bits to give out at twitch con for my coworkers, it's a fun thing for them (I expense the plastic).

I needed to replace a bunch of boards on my deck and the dimensions of dimensional lumber have changed. So I could either pay $400 + cost of lumber to get boards cut correctly, or I could pay $175 for the lumber and print abs Shims to make the lumber the correct thickness. Shims at market price were around $75. I was able to iterate on a design and print the 80 shims I needed for about $3 worth of ABS plastic.

I also really enjoy solving problems with the printer in a pretty clean way compared to getting out in the shop. I can, in between matches of dota or pubg, iterate a design and hit print. A match or 3 later I've got a part, or a sub part (mating surfaces) done.

They're also amazing for coming up with templates for making parts out of more time consuming materials like well anything. I can cad a design up in seconds to minutes and hit print. That will get me a part that I can see if it fits. Even wood takes as long as the cad step. And you can iterate a ton.

Another good use case is enclosures and mounts for arduino and ESP32 projects. Lots of little lego parts of eletroics that need to be wired together. Getting them into a reasonable form factor usually requires hot glue and tape to make a shitty ball that's hard to work with, or leaving it on a breadboard which isn't a great form factor, or making a printed enclosure which can hit most of your needs. These can take longer, like 10 hours of iteration but that's amazingly faster than most other methods.

My friend makes furniture. I bought him a printer and he prototypes pieces on the printer. Makes full mockups of living room parts to give to potential customers.

My son does dnd, we print figurines all the time, they're fun weekend projects. He made and painted an infinity gauntlet over the summer which looks pretty sweet.

Have I gotten the $2k out of the printer in absolute value and replacement over mass produced products? No. Maybe about $700 worth of savings there. If you add the DND figures maybe $1000.

If you add the cost of learning, hobbies, time with family, and offsetting iteration and time spent with turn key manufactureres working on a prototype, yes, prolly at least $10k of value (that I wouldn't have spent otherwise).

At the end of the day, for not much space, it makes a lot of physical projects feasible mostly relying on just the computer for the design space.

I don't use my 3d printer to 'fix' things around the house that often because it's frequently cheaper to work around it or buy a replacement. The times a high-value item breaks in a way I can fix with a printed part are rare enough it certainly doesn't justify owning one.

That said, if you really like designing mechanical things or working on electronics projects or similar, a 3d printer is a total blast. I'm currently using mine to make molds for real ceramic parts.

I don't think anyone is saying that China is incapable of creating high quality products - they very obviously are. But being capable of doing something doesn't mean that that is the product strategy being employed, or that if it is being employed, that it's the only or most popular one.

I would absolutely trust a 3D printer manufactured in China from a company that used quality component and put thought into safety from the start. I've put my money where my mouth is, and own a Milkshake3D (granted, it is an SLA printer and not FDM.) But I wouldn't purchase one of the budget FDM printers manufactured in China at this point in time. If Creality's printers look to hold up well with the new protections, I might reconsider them in the future.

It has nothing to do with racism, there's an obvious strategy most of them shared in the 3d printer space, and that was slap their name on a random 3d printer using the cheapest possible materials to get to a feature list

Search and see how many no-name printers are using exactly the same displays and various bits from the "named" Chinese sourced 3d printers.

https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=S...

There are definitely companies in China being more selective than average now. Creality printers started off looking just like no name copies with slight changes, but they've been starting to innovate a bit more of late.

But it's not at all shocking, or racist, that people would group a market that operates in a certain way.

It's no more racist than saying SV tech companies vs Eastern European tech companies, we know they have differing cultures

Apple products could be built anywhere.

>You can buy an Ender for $200 or less on sale...

This is exactly why I love the idea of this printer so much more! You could get an ender for $200 (plus $60 to $100 to improve the worst parts and make it less likely to catch fire). But you're still manually leveling, you're still fighting with scraping prints off the bed, you're still missing stuff like filament run-out detection, automatic firmware updates, spring steel PEI print surface, crash detection, power panic, stealth mode, and a lot of other safety features.

And at the end of the day, an ender 3 is gonna cost $260 to $300 and require the user to know what to replace fix on day 1 for a safe printer, while this is $350. And outside of commercial manufacturing, most users don't ever max out their print area with most printers (at least from what I've seen spending a lot of time on 3d printing forums).

I'm super excited for this, because $800 to $1000 is just to much for the average person to spend on an easy to use printer like the MK3S. This is only slightly more expensive than other "starter" printers, and has most of the niceties, safety features, and support.

But,I will say that my creality has been a bucket of pain, to the point where I almost exclusively use my prusa these days. So perhaps that's reason to hope this is more than just a crappy bargain basement printer warmed over.

I am part of a Spanish 3D printer group called "clone wars", and dozens of people there have bought Enders because they are dirty cheap.

It really takes a master degree in engineering to solve most of them, because they want to print professionally expending 300euros.

That connects with the point 4, yes people want everything, expending nothing. But that they could get it is a completely different thing.

As the print bed goes bigger, the mechanical deflections increase with the square of it.

The price of things like milled precision beds or original linear rails, increments non linearly for a tolerance when the size of the bed increases.

My next printer will be smaller, let's see how they'll price the kit version.

That's fair, but then you've added an extra processor which adds a lot of cost. I don't want to tie up a full computer and the associated space just to run my printer. Many people don't have a spare computer they can dedicate to printing either.

From what I've heard, this is not reliable in the current implementations. If the computer goes to sleep, is under high load, or crashes this can result in a failed print. Of course you could build in more and more safeguards for this sort of thing (buffer the gcode, have some "emergency stop" movement which moves the head up and away from the print and decreases the temp of the hot end if there is a break in the stream of instructions) but this is a lot of additional effort when you could just as easily push all the gcode onto an SD card on the printer.

Write file, insert, pick job, walk away, done.

For very long prints, SD is my goto. No failures.

Of course China started at the bottom of the value chain and moved up. The point I'm making is that China is no longer just a mass of undifferentiated cheap labour and low legal standards - it's a serious industrial power with a lot of unique strengths. A lot of low-skill, low-cost manufacturing has already left China in search of cheaper labour, but China is likely to remain a powerhouse in many industries for the foreseeable future. They're heavily investing in automation and are well-equipped to remain competitive despite rising labour costs.