Anyone have MarkerFarm Printer - Your thoughts?

Hey guys, does anyone have a MakerFarm printer, either the Prusa or Printerbot? I'd like to hear how you feel these compare with other top printers on the market today.

Jacoby

I have the 8" Prusa i3 and it's fantastic. Beats a lot of the $1k+ printers out there. You honestly can't go wrong with the MakerFarm kits, high quality and also comes with fantastic customer support from Colin.

Get it!

I also purchased the 8" i3 Prusa kit. I am very happy with it. I had some issues getting it calibrated but that was my own problem, not the kit's. Colin could not have been more responsive with customer service. I cannot recommend him enough. Overall, I would buy this kit again, and may do just that for a gift.

I have only ever owned a Makerfarm i3 8" and love it. I get some spectacularly good prints. I compare my "torture test" prints to photos I find on the web all the time and mine are as good and in some cases better. I was at a craft show this weekend and a school had a few 3d printers set up in a booth. They were all running as fast as possible to make fun stuff to give away. None of them were i3's and none of them made any better prints than mine. They all had the same flaws we all get, loops under bridges, rough top layers, etc.

I like the openness of it so you can work on it. I surround mine with foamcor to make a heated chamber. It's not perfect or sealed but I think I works well as I'm not having any problems because of drafts I don't think. All I do is pull the foamcor away and then I can easily work on anything. If the chamber is built into the printer, you have to work inside a little box through a door or you have to pull panels off. In reality though, once you are set up and running, you really don't need access to anything except your hot end to make adjustments. At any rate, I still like the open architecture.

Finally, the price is right. That was my major motivation to get it. Now that I have it I doubt many more expensive models are any better. 3D printers, no matter how expensive and sleek, all have the same limitations. And those are resolution. The prints are only as good as that extrusion diameter, calibration and clean print speed. More expensive printers may be able to print faster but few of us are into production. We are doing one-off's and I'd guess we all have adequate time for a slower print. Nothing wrong with having a fancy painted sheet metal printer with glass doors and bells but for the money, the Makerfarm i3 is a fantastic printer from for either a starter-printer or for a main-use printer in my opinion.

Below is one of my torture tests. Look how clean those towers are (not a single string) and at the quality of the arch. I haven't seen a single photo on the web that looks better than this one. FYI, I used KISSlicer for this. It lacks some controls I wish it had but it's the cleanest of all the slicers I've tried.

Attachment 598