The biggest problem with 3D printers at present is it is an industry occupied by drunks working out of their mother's basements.
Things are about where they were back when Steve Jobs started kicking cows out of the barn so he'd have a place to build computers and Bill Gates really did live in his mom's basement, while smoking boat loads of pot.
With 3D printers, the problem is made worse by the fact most of the parts needed to build a printer are made by slaves in China, who don't have any incentive to build quality parts. There's also a lot of outright, predatory price gouging going. There's no plausible reason why a top quality printer should cost much more than $300. There just plain isn't anything about the component parts that would make the cost of actual materials much over $60-$80 at the wholesale, bulk purchase level. At present, you go in knowing you'll pay an outrageous premium on just about everything you need.
I got into 3D printing for one reason. I needed a way to prototype a patent pending device I'm working on. That makes it more of a business necessity than a personal luxury, otherwise it would likely have been quite a few more years before I got into it, in a future where the industry should be in less of a state of anarchy.
Over the course of a several month period, I bought and returned four different defective printers. The best of the bunch was semi functional for about a week before the electronics failed altogether. That one was based on the open source Hadron Ord Bot platform. These guys have three different kits available from $419 to $699 depending on how complete and/or assembled it is:
http://www.automationtechnologiesinc.co … er-machine
I paid a little less on sale a few months ago, for the partially assembled option, without electronics. I don't know that the Ord Bot is the best platform, but I think it's a good one and I've never seen anyone say anything bad about it. As near as I can tell, it seems to be very solid and is capable of producing good quality prints.
The motors the kit comes with are 46 ounce as I remember from doing some research on them. I swapped those out for some 76 ounch motors available on the same site for $8.99 each. I haven't had a chance to test them yet, so can't offer an opinion on them one way or the other.
The kit I got was fairly easy to put together, although I had to make a run to the local hardware store to pick up a few over priced metric machine screws.
The hardest part I've found so far is NOTHING comes with instructions. Your computer building skills are likely to come in less handy than your ability to do online research to track down the information you need from dozens of incomplete and not necessarily reliable resources. Just figuring out what parts you need can be a very frustrating challenge. There are electronic "kits" available, that are often incomplete and frequently not as described. From my own experience, I'd recommend avoiding SainSmart as much as possible. Customer service is terrible, the kits aren't as advertised, the parts aren't fully assembled and parts needed to complete the assembly are missing.
I started out going with the Ultimaker 1.5.7 board and after getting two defective boards in a row, have abandoned that idea. There are a variety of different boards available and all of them seem to have their devoted fans. On giving up on the Ultimaker board, I decided to go with the RAMPS 1.4 as it looks like it'll do everything I need it to do, and it seems to be the one that has the largest following and the most documentation available. You can find tons of different offerings in a wide price range on Amazon.com for just about anything 3D printing related, including boards and other electronics. I also found Pololu to be a valuable resource for wires and other misc. stuff. Their website is here:
http://www.pololu.com/
Their customer service is great, their prices are fairly competitive and they don't stick it to you on postage for small orders. Unfortunately, 3D printing is kind of a sideline for them, so they're definitely not a single source for everything you'll need.
I'm probably in the minority in not being a fan of duel extruders. Everything I've read suggests they're a pain to set up and keep calibrated. More than that, though, I have a hard time seeing where they're all that useful a feature. Every layer has to be the same color, so I think the question one has to ask is how many things you think you might print where a banding effect with different colors would be a big plus. IMO, the applications are pretty limited, but I won't say it isn't something you should rule out if you have applications where it would be especially useful.
IMO, the ability to print from a SD card is a more important consideration.
I'm about three months more experienced than you are, so feel free to take all of the above with a grain of salt. You wanted layman's terms, which is all I really have available to work with anyhow. I still don't have a working printer as I'm still waiting on parts, and it has been more than a little frustrating tracking down essential information and components. Hopefully it won't be too much longer, but I think it'd be fair to say that if you're looking for instant gratification, building your own is not the way to find it. If you have a patient side you're able to tap into when necessary and enjoy learning new things, it can be interesting.
About the best suggestion I could make is to do lots of research on the different options and maybe put more focus on building a functional printer as simply as possible for your first project, rather than getting too carried away with a lot whistles and bells.
If you decide to buy a printer instead, while I don't think any of them are good, the one to avoid at all costs is the garbage put out by XYZPrinting. The product is pure junk, the company is run by crooks and it is virtually impossible to ever get one to function properly without pretty much rebuilding it and hacking the daylights out of it. If there's an advantage to building your own, it's that you'll probably end up spending as much time working on it as you would if you bought one slapped together by a drunk in his mother's basement, and at least when it's finished, you'll know how to fix it.
DISCLAIMER: One man's opinion, subject to change without notice, and not intended to be critical of those holding views different from my own.
