Cheap vs. Quality (Page 1 of 2)

I have 4 printers at this point a used sd4. took a little effort to lear and get good prints. Two folger tech kits they were kit builds with a couple missing parts. And a monoprice mini that some one had returned.

I think most of us here have a mixture of good and cheap.
You need to shop around compare price and quality.
and this subject has been beat to death over and over in some form or another.
Just type the tittle of this post in the search block and you will see.
This can be a volatile subject almost as heated as politics.
Tin

I think you have pretty good summary of the pros and cons of quality and cheap, and I think I agree with pretty much all of them. I want to add some respectful discussion about factors that you did not covered and get ignored in the most of the discussion--personal preference.

I agree with the saying most of the time, "You get what you paid for". Stuff that cost lot more usually have its reasons, the dollar price usually reflect how much human labor behind the product for a good reason. The question is do you really need the extra quality or service that you are paying for. I still have some high quality macbooks running os6.5, they are solid build and still work just fine but I don't really use them for obvious reasons. There are practical limits for how good quality parts you want it to be. But why people pay for the quantity or quality they don't necessary need? I think answer to this question are very much personal preference. Factors includes but not limited to:
Are you big fan of 3D printing?
If you are, you want the best of everything on your printer. You can give up time spend with your family and save your beer money to install a latest hotend upgrade, there is nothing wrong with that.
If you are not a big fan of 3D printing, 3D printer is just a tool, a machine, you probably just want to spend minimal amount of money to get it work. Just think about the regular printers, I have two 2D color laser jet printer at home, if they break, and I can not fix it in 2 hours, they are going to end up in recycle bins. Am I willing to upgrade their laser bean and lens to achieve doubled resolution? No!

Can you profit from 3D printing? 
There is a guy in facebook group have 20 Monoprice maker select v2, and he decide to sell them all and switch to 20 Monoprice maker select plus. Sounds crazy, but he use them to print cookie cutters and profit from it. That makes big difference I think.

What do you enjoy?
Some people enjoy turn their 3D design into reality, they don't really care what mod they can make or how much the filament cost, they don't necessary want most fancy machine with most fancy part, but they want as problem free as possible.
Some people enjoy add almost every mod possible to improve their machine.
I enjoy machine repair. I have 20+ different brand 3D printer, bid from ebay for parts, $50-$150 each, I enjoy get them back running again and print reliably with minimal cost. I don't consider 3D printing as my hobby because I have 20+ laptop at home for the same reason. It's like some of my friend enjoy repair human with minimal cost, they call themselves doctor. 

I think it is a lot easier to go quality, the most challenging part is have the money. But you need to know a lot to go cheap without compromise the print quality and reliably. No matter what decision you make, cheap or quality, keep in mind that in hobby business, what you buy is not the product, but your happiness, as long as you enjoy it, nothing else matters. (If you can afford it)

I would certainly prefer to spend more money for better quality. But when you are just starting to find out with 3d printers, for example, then I took the cheapest one to see if I want to do this in the future.

THAT, RIGHT THERE!  that is probably the #1 reason why a lot of people walk away from this hobby.

I read about 3d printing and joined this group for about a year before I bought my first printer which was a solidoodle 2.
Just starting out I had a lot of problems. ( I thought it was a piece of junk) so I Spent more money and bought a Makerbor 2X
(Dual extruder)  which is a propitiatory machine which was also a mistake.  in the last 6 years I have learned a lot about 3d printing and realize now that 90% of the problems with the Solidoodle was Operator error!

Thanks
Dale

Great analogy, Tin.

I currently have two SD4s, and yeah, each one has it's own little quirks.
About to pick up a 3rd one.
should be interesting figuring out what it needs.

I would think it would be as simple as a separate profile for each printer You can name a profile in repetier anything you want .
Name your printer after star ships, states ,presidents, animals whatever and you make make corresponding labels for the physical printer.
Joseph prusa runs over 200 printers in his print farm so running multiple printers is quite doable.

If I where ever going to set up a farm or run multiple printers then I would simply do what I do now and not even have a PC running or connected to the printer. My main FDM has a Viki II display from Panucatt devices which has a micro SDcard port right on the front. I just slice all the files I want to print and then put them on the sdcard as gcode files and access them through the LCD.

The only time I have a computer connected to that machine is when I am tuning it and need access to the firmware or control of it.

That was my point. If the SD has such issues then it might not be the best to consider for a print farm of say 5 plus printers. Of course since I only have three and they all have unique purposes I am probably just flapping my jaws. I personally cannot imagine ever finding a market or enough customers that would require me to run 3 printers at the same time, much less 200. I guess Texas is just not on the 3d printing parade yet. The only business I have been able to drum up is printing custom made light pipes for my employer. Even then they only need one or two a year.

seems most members on here have not yet enjoyed their 3D printer loosing its com port due to other USB devices that sync or use bi directional com port being installed or used while 3D printer was off line and the other device permanently high jacked its com port. that issue can also happen with other 3D printers just not usually permanent just interrupting other same units before or during print. search my archives about 6+ years ago for how I know this will happen and how it ruins your month trying to find why 3D printer no longer connects and even SD techs had no clue about it. I had to learn about it myself and since I have always assigned com port in high number like 12-24 so other devices wont grab 1st port not used/assigned again and steal my 3D printers com port as SD printers only check like com 3,5 or an assigned port in cinfig settings. and if you have as many devices and profiles as my Thinkpads and dock stations do that wont cut it. I can connect 24 devices to my Thinkpads and some of them on USB just grab next available when connected. same as my hot swap drive  bays can.

now remember this is over 3 years old so... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihR9SX7dgRo

also its an extremely over priced lease agreement that you never own is why its dormant still. who wants to pay $10,000 for a dumb training course then 3 year lease @ $40,000 per year for a borrowed 3D printer when industrial powder printers are available for less to purchase.

hence I stick with what I have that gets the job done good enough til better affordable option comes.

Repetier-Server identify your printer by serial number of the main board instead of com port number, assign different name to your printer will make things easy. I tried connect 4 printer at the same time and it works very well. Major issue with repetier-server is often caused by windows 10 automatic upgrade, don't forget to disable automatic upgrade.

You can also install OctoPrint server on windows 10 or linux machine, but I'm not sure if OctoPrint identify printer by serial number or COM port.

You can assign different printer name in firmware or with M550 command, you can find out which printer you connected to in the log window.

For more advanced user, you can change product ID in the firmware, and then modify the USB driver .inf file add corresponding product id and product name assigned to different printer. Then your printer will be recognized as different product from same vendor and whatever name you want will show up after the COM port in device manager.  Major disadvantage is you need to disable windows driver signature enforcement.