Hello everyone, just registered here because me and few friends of mine decided to get into 3d printing world several months back. Our goal is initially to master this art, and reach a good level, who knows, maybe good enough to start designing stuff and sell them, especially small gadgets and such.
Let's go to the point, our first printer was a DIY Geetech i3 pro c, we build it all, but in the end it had some kind of problem making it work, as it refused to print correctly, so we sold it to someone expert who probably managed to set it all good to print. After that we decided to get something already assembled so we wouldn't have to hassle building it, and maybe doing something wrong that could keep us from printing. We raised the budget to around 600/650€ and we got a xyz davinci 1.0 pro, now since we're pretty inexpert on the matter, we trusted the marketing we saw around, but i feel the overall quality and support isn't very good.
So the printer was shipped, we unboxed it all, plugged it and tried to calibrate it following the instructions (actually a dozen of a4 sheets stapled together, not a sick initial impression, but whatever) and we noticed that the nozzle sensor couldn't reach 2 of the 4 corners of the printbed, we tried everything and in the end we noticed there were 2 supports on the side that could be regulated in order to make the printhead move further in the front, so that it could reach those 2 corners, we did everything, and luckily for us we were able to calibrate everything alright this time, we started by printing one of the demo projects present into the printer's memory, it came out ok, it had some imperfections but well, it's a first try with the demo project, so it doesn't really matter, and it's now that we tried to print a project of ours, a toothbrush holder, so basically a cylinder with some openings, the project was not really good, but the printer added its own, making it almost a mess, also because of the wrong scaling of xyz standard slicer, so we went looking for another slicer that allowed us to set more settings (we found out on the internet that the default program isn't that good, it's pretty bad actually) and avoid scaling problems. It's when we realized that the only decent program that could work with our printer was simplify3d, but it's not free, and we couldn't manage to find other slicers that recognized our printer, and since we want to avoid flashing it, we might just send it back, (it's still within the 2 weeks of trial time) and get something more open source, supported by more free slicers. Also another issue we had with it, is a PLA filament from bq keeps breaking probably because we had to hang the full reel outside the printer with a support (the original comes in a cartridge that needs to be inserted into the printer itself.
tl;dr What do you suggest we could get for 600/650€ that is more open source possible (especially slicers) and needs little hassle to get working?
Thanks in advance and sorry for the Wall of text, i just wanted to explain our situation. :)