What printer is right for me?

[curious aardvark]

I'm with geoff - I spent a good 12 months reading up on printers till my eyeballs went fuzzy.

Spent 9 months waiting for a makibox to arrive - it never did - and as it appears to be stuck in a warehouse in hong kong, it probably never will.
But in that time the makerbot clones quality went up and their price dropped.

I am so glad I had to wait. My flashforge is a brilliant printer. You take it out of the box, attach the spool holders and bolt the printhead to the carriage.
And you're ready to go.

That said it's also very easy to service yourself, doesn't have a lot of parts and the sd card reader and control panel are seriosuly useful.

It makes it a stand alone machine - so you wouldn't be limited to a computer attached to a printer. IT could go where you went.

For the money, at the moment, I don't think you can possibly beat one.

Plus you've got the whole dual head thing. With a bit of application you can break free of the makerware software.

And should you want to build a delta robot in the future - you can make the parts on the flashforge.

Like i said I've seen a lot of different machines, read the specs on dozens (hundreds?) more, and am so glad I went with the flashforge.

Hell I've seen similiar machines on ebay for £150 less than I paid. And you know what - I don't care :-)
It was well worth what I paid.

Filament wise - it's cheap and getting cheaper. I've currently got filament from 4 different suppliers, cheapest is not necessarily the worst and most expensive not necessarily the best.
My advice, buy a roll from a bunch of different suppliers and see how it turns out.
A lot of ebay suppliers will all be selling filament from the same chinese manufacturers anyway - so cheapest option probably the best.

Specialist filaments are not cheap and it's not apparently a good idea to go with cheapest. Look up geoff's saga with cheap wood filament versus expensive laywood filament.
Not sure he ever got the cheap stuff to work.

But make sure you do your research - otherwise you'll end up wasting a lot of the more expensive filament in failed prints :-)