I've been wanting a 3D printer for years but was never able to convince myself to take the plunge. Finally, when a part that I wanted for my upcoming workbench build was nowhere to be found, I jumped in.

I did some research online to figure out what I should get. I worked off of the criteria that I wasn't looking to break the bank on my first printer, but didn't want the bottom of the barrel. Bottom line is that I wanted it to be a good experience.

Amazon was my shopping mall and they have a lot to choose from. First I had to learn whether I wanted a resin printer or a filament printer. Resin seems like its more for making toy figures and not for building workbench parts.

Once I got through that, I had to figure out what features are important. I learned that auto bed leveling was critical. I also wanted something fairly quiet. Options on Amazon ranged from about $150 to over $1000. Some of the common brands you will find on Amazon are Voxelab, Creality, Flashforge and AnkerMake. Each brand makes multiple levels of printers with an array of prices.

Selection

Creality Choices

As I poured through reviews, I landed on Creality as the preferred choice. The only question was which one. I went to the Comgrow shop on Amazon who solely sell Creality. From the many reviews, I understood that their customer support was far superior than going direct to Creality. There are a number of lineups from Creality and Amazon isn't great at being able to compare them so I've done that here. These are just the Crealiity printers. At some point I'll compare to others, but there was a lot of good reviews on these. All of the Creality printers can print from an SD card and can resume on power loss. In increasing price order, they are as follows (as of FEB 2024):

Even though I had narrowed down to Creality from Comgrow, you can see there were still a ton of choices. Part of my decision came down to money. Being new, I could not see outlaying a ton of cash when I didn't know what I was doing. In my head, I had $300 as a target so that eliminated a lot of the higher end stuff.

As you can see, speed, size and material are big factors in price. Everything else is more of a nice to have.

Too Many Choices

I landed on the Ender 3 v2 Neo from Creality. I bought it from Comgrow and not directly from Creality as many reviews mention poor customer support directly from Creality, but that Comgrow had really good support.

I'm very happy with this as my first printer. If you are looking to just play around with 3D printing, I would recommend it. If you are planning to do a lot of printing or even creating and selling stuff, I would recommend spending a little more on your first printer. Maybe go with the CR-10 SE. That one has a much faster print speed, WiFi and does an auto Z-offset.

Whatever you choose, good luck! I know I will be upgrading and expanding in the future. But for now, you can check out my experience with the Neo.

Ender-3 v2 Neo

Full Video Review