Purchase Advice:

Get a Prusa first. Learning this hobby is a 3 edge problem. You need to learn to model, learn to slice, and learn how to print. If you buy a Prusa, it comes with the entire package. The printer part is dialed in and set up to work with the slicer. There is a LOT more going on in this area than most beginners grasp. The printer firmware needs to be dialed in, the printer hardware needs to be set up correctly, and there are a bunch of gcode routines that need to be programmed so that the printer can do stuff like start and end a print or pause in the middle of a print, but there are also things like how to handle thermal runaway. Like a Prusa comes with fans that have a tachometer output. The printer software us checking that this tach output is running when it should. If the fan gets jammed with filament a Prusa will pause and warn you about the issue. Most Asia direct cheap printers are barely able to start and stop a print, and you need to check them for thermal runaway bc many people have had house fires when their cheap printers didn't have thermal runaway.

If you buy a printer that you need to tweak and "upgrade" and you do not know how to model or slice, you will have a very difficult time. It is nearly impossible to determine why your print is failing when there are three major potential sources of errors. If you buy a Prusa, your printer will be dialed in to the point it will work. It can still use calibration and tweaking, but it WILL print reliably. This is not the case with most other machines. With a Prusa, you are buying the Slicer, the Firmware, the G-Code routines, the support, you support the Open Source community, and lastly you get some hardware. This is not the same as buying a box of mass produced hardware from Shen Zhen.

/r/3Dprinting Thread