What 1st printer for 15yr old son?

[curious aardvark]

lulzbots are way more than $600.

Printrbot would be a good choice. The simple hasa reasonable build volume and excellent reputation.

software wise take a look at autodesks suite of free software: http://www.123dapp.com/
Pretty comprehensive and not too tricky to learn. Everything from original design to 3d scanning of existing objects.

And also openscad. Despite what lambdaff thinks - it's very easy to use, great learning curve and - if your mind works the right way - so much simpler to use than a drawing based program. I started cad with it - never really been able to get my head round traditional cad packages. And there are so many simple turorials online that anyone can start making printable objects with openscad in minutes.
And the beauty of it is that it only produces manifold objects. So you just create the object and it's ready to print.

http://www.openscad.org/

But yep - that's one lucky kid :-)



One other to consider is the wanhao duplicator i3. http://wanhaousa.com/products/duplicator-i3-steel-frame
Most of the initial issues seem to have been sorted out and it is a larger build volume. And only $399 - so plenty of budget left for filament, glue sticks, scrapers, tape etc :-)

Althiugh those are all good things to farm out to friends and relatives for gifts :-)