Newbie looking to buy 3d printer & scanner needs advice on affordable equipment

Hello all, I am completely new to this forum and 3d printing in general. I have a little experience with Poser & Zbrush but I am looking for specific help. I have my own part time business making custom action figures, and every time I need a certain body part or accessory I have to usually buy a whole figure to get 1 certain item and it becomes costly and I end up with a lot of parts I don't need or want. I am looking to purchase an affordable desktop scanner and printer so I can scan and duplicate the parts I need as I need them. I know this may seem a little crazy to some, but also my son wants to learn 3d modeling and it would help later on for him as well. I would like some advice on equipment that isn't too crazy priced in case this doesn't work out as I want it to and don't want to lose too much money if I fail. Thank you all in advance!!

Hi Selficide,

Unfortunately, I won't be able to advise on the 3D scanner, however, in terms of 3D printing you have some excellent choices.

The Prusa i3 is a great kit to start out with. There are also many i3 clones/replicas that are also very good. On the very cheap side of things is the Malyan range of printers. If you have a larger budget that perhaps a Flash fordge printer would be better for you.

It would be awesome to know your exact budget because we can then give you more specific information. However, in general there will definitely be a printer thats right for you and at the right price. It can be difficult to make the choice but the best thing to do is not over think it and just take the plunge.

I hope some of this helps.

Regards,
Will
3DEX Filament

This has been asked in many ways, many times...

To scan in detail, you need a very high resolution scanner, which won't be cheap. There are photographic methods, but the results tend not to be brilliant. You need laser modelling for this level of detail ideally. Structured light scanners probably won't be accurate enough, so that usually puts you into the £1000+ category.

To print without too much in the way of lines - which you would need to clean up, you need a high accuracy, high resolution machine - probably SLA for home use. At least £800 and probably quite a bit more. You could use a cheaper machine and use ABS, post print smoothing using acetone or similar, but it depends how much time you are willing to invest.

Many people who are in to high resolution modelling like this use a commercial printing company who can print using £10K+ machines, which don't suffer from the limitations of consumer priced machines. They normally design from scratch, measuring the original part, then drawing it into a CAD program. There is obviously quite a learning curve, but that's up to you of course.

You could try one of the combined scanner / printers, but I think you would be disappointed with the results.

Ok my budget is $500 to $800.....I saw a machine named XYZprinting da Vinci 1.0 Pro. 3 in 1 (3d printer, scanner and laser engraver ) would something like that work ?

I've no direct experience, but the reviews suggest it is fine as a printer, but the scanner is poor.

I think it also limits you to using the branded filament, so you probably need to factor in the cost of this. For me, the size - nearly half a meter square would be a problem, although this does give quite a large build area.

I do think it's the scanning side you will struggle with, but why not get one from Amazon, so you can easily return it if it's not up to scratch?