How pick a suitable 3D printer

[curious aardvark]

haven't printed anything with a raft for about 8 years.
And that's on all my printers.

As long as your printbed is flat - and it sounds like your voxel bed is NOT flat. You should never need to use a raft.

The 'no supports' thing, does depend what you are printing.
I mostly - 90% possibly more. print stuff I've designed in openscad.
There are quite a few tricks you can use.

Printing in different orientations and angles works well.

Made a square card payment widget holder recently, that held the square device and my phone.
because both parts had overhangs I had to design it to print with the centre point at 45 degrees.

I don't do much artistic printing or any figure printing and pretty muich only design and make useful things.
For which, openscad, is probably the best software to use.

It takes a little bit of 'getting your head round how it works'. But once you've done that it's much quicker and easier to design things than with a wysiwig cad program.

As far as customer support goes - yeah I don't honestly think it's relevant with the majority of chinese suppliers. All 3d printers tend to use off the shelf parts - the tenlog just uses better quality parts than most.
Plus everyone has different levels of expectation from a supplier.
And different users will create/find different problems - many of which are often nothing to do with build quality but more with false expectations and lack of experience of the buyer.

So for me - the best way to currently pick a 3d printer is to go for how it's built and what it's built out of - NOT, necessarily, who built it.

[laoadam]

haven't printed anything with a raft for about 8 years.
And that's on all my printers.

As long as your printbed is flat - and it sounds like your voxel bed is NOT flat. You should never need to use a raft.

The 'no supports' thing, does depend what you are printing.
I mostly - 90% possibly more. print stuff I've designed in openscad.
There are quite a few tricks you can use.

Printing in different orientations and angles works well.

Made a square card payment widget holder recently, that held the square device and my phone.
because both parts had overhangs I had to design it to print with the centre point at 45 degrees.

I don't do much artistic printing or any figure printing and pretty muich only design and make useful things.
For which, openscad, is probably the best software to use.

It takes a little bit of 'getting your head round how it works'. But once you've done that it's much quicker and easier to design things than with a wysiwig cad program.

As far as customer support goes - yeah I don't honestly think it's relevant with the majority of chinese suppliers. All 3d printers tend to use off the shelf parts - the tenlog just uses better quality parts than most.
Plus everyone has different levels of expectation from a supplier.
And different users will create/find different problems - many of which are often nothing to do with build quality but more with false expectations and lack of experience of the buyer.

So for me - the best way to currently pick a 3d printer is to go for how it's built and what it's built out of - NOT, necessarily, who built it.

Thanks!
a special advice.