With the k1, Bambu labs, and prusa xl all coming out I’m really starting to look at my 3 year old SK-GO as “slow”. Do you think it’s worth waiting for awhile and seeing if the competition heats up more or should I just pull the trigger on one of the current high speed machines
These new generation printers seem to be a lot more user friendly. My starter (and current) printer is the Sidewinder X2 which I got for the larger build volume, 32bit board, TMC2209 stepper drivers, direct drive extruder, etc. It’s been pretty good but I’ve also replaced/upgraded a ton of stuff including swapping out the stock glass bed for an aluminum bed due to major warping.
If I was to buy a new printer today I’d 100% go with a CoreXY machine to eliminate the bed swinging back and forth and causing so many issues. Other neat features would be multi color/filament extruders but that’s also something I could live without.
You can either go cheap up front and upgrade parts/tinker later or spend a lot up front and have a more user friendly experience. Most printers are capable of the same quality so you’re really just paying for reliability and features.
The dual extruder and auto bed leveling are really appealing, but this seems to limit choices a lot. My budget would probably be $500 give or take $200, does that change your recommendation at all?
I don’t have any specific recommendations buy your budget is enough to buy something midrange and have money leftover for filament and any mods you’d like to do. I’d suggest starting your search by figuring out what print volume you’d like to filter down your options and then further filtering by features like auto bed leveling, direct drive extruders, and 32-bit mainboards. Whittle the list down to a handful of options in your price range. Once you have a short list, you can check reviews on each model and pull the trigger on something. The Ender models are pretty popular and have huge community support. I have the Sidewinder X2 like I mentioned and it has been good to learn with, but I haven’t kept up on all the new printer releases to suggest anything better.
I second every bit of this. My first printer was a sidewinder I upgraded like crazy and converter to klipper. Ended up just wishing I started with a corexy. Mine had a bit of a bend in the x gantry that took me forever to figure out and was not possible to compensate for. Went to a 300mm voron 2.4 afterward and have been super happy
I’m also trying to fix my perpetually-broken X2, fun times.