Funny thing, except for the occasional 3D print that becomes a pile of plastic, they're pretty good. Keep it clean, level, change the nozzle occasionally, use good quality material, and it's pretty good.
For 2D printers: they are just money pits due to the toner costs; and do everything they can to make sure you buy Their toner. Buy a name-brand color laser, use it sparingly, and it's a wonderful way to have the occasional color picture, graph, or research report w/color diagrams. (I have a Brother, which I like.)
It certainly depends on your printer. Some are incredibly reliable, and some are known for being crap.
Of course, you can upgrade them, but if you have an off-brand printer it can be hard to find good upgrades to fix the problems.
I started off with a clone of a decent printer, but the clones are iffy. I lucked out and got a good one! The next one I bought from that brand was crap.
I recently printed a Voron v0.1 and it's been decent so far, and I'm working on some upgrades. Luckily it's really popular and there are lots of known upgrades. The kit was more expensive than my other 2 printers combined, and it's a lot smaller... But I'm planning on using it to completely retrofit at least one of the other 2 now.
I have an Ender 3 with a few upgrades (metal feeder, new springs for platform height adjusting, new silicone boots to keep the head isolated & insulated). What brand was good at first but the 2nd was terrible?
I find that when you 'dial in' the particular material (best speeds / feeds / temperatures) then yes, you get reliable performance.
But, I find that every spool of material -- especially PETG types --- require some experimentation to find when there is good adhesion to the glass plate, temps, speeds, etc.
And, yes, I printed this RJ-45 clip a little while ago in PETG that I know well, and the part looks good; I think I 'overbuilt' the supports because the center is packed full of material.
TronXY. My XY2-Pro printed really well straight from the box. My X5SA-2E was total garbage and needed at least 2 upgrades to print at a basic level, and I never got it printing well.
The XY2-Pro is actually an Ender 3 clone, and I think that's part of why it was so good. A friend of mine got a new Ender 3 V2 and it was smooth sailing for her. I definitely recommend the Ender 3 as the budget printer for newcomers. Prusa is another one, though obviously a lot less "budget".
One nice thing about the Ender 3 is that through its sheer popularity there's a vast library of printable upgrades and attachments. Probably this is true of some of the other popular models.
Except HP LJ 2100 - that thing will outlive your entire carreer. Our ops dept. threatened helpdesk with stabbing when they wanted to take the "old" one for themselves and get us something "new"
They have problems, but they're usually easily solved, and you'll never fight with drivers.
Furthermore, the cheapest 3D printers are _made_ to use with generic supplies, it's not like the "give away the inkjet, sell the ink" model you see with 2D printers. They're almost universally based around open-source software and mostly-open hardware now, so there's a thriving ecosystem of mods and upgrades, which can be bewildering but you don't need any of that at all to get started.
The problem is that they're mindblowingly slow. A typical 3D print might run 5 or 10 hours, to make a functional object like a desk pen organizer. And because parts of the thing get hot, you don't want to leave it unattended -- fires are rare but they can happen. So, you have to plan your prints around your life, or vice-versa.
Mercifully, the default mode of operation is just to read files from an SD card that you sneakernet over to the thing. That gets annoying if you're doing a lot of small prints and tweaking things (and there are network options for that, or direct USB connection), but it's a godsend when your printjob is longer than your workstation's typical uptime...
Not at all, more precisely, they are annoying but in not in the same way.
Most cheap 3D printers are children of the reprap project, and the hacker spirit is still there.
3D printers are often made of cheaply available standard parts, and use the same type of filament. Not all printers can print all materials, but there are no technical measures preventing you from trying, and they tend to be mod-friendly. On the software side, they almost all run open source firmware, and take standard G-code. G-code is generated using a slicer, there are several of them on the market, also typically open source and compatible with all sorts of printer from many brands. Everything is interoperable, even when a brand has the whole vertical. For example Prusa makes filament, printers, slicer software and has a repository for models, and none of these are tied to the brand. No DRM, no huge drivers, no overpriced consumables, totally unlike 2D printers.
The flip side is that you feel like you are buying a new hobby rather than a tool. It is certainly a useful tool, but especially on cheaper printers, sometimes, things don't work right out of the box, you have to make some adjustments, understand its capabilities, know what parameters to use out of hundreds, etc... It is rarely "push a button and get your part", you have to know what you are doing, and even then, sometimes, it fails. That's how they are annoying.
I was kinda waiting when 3D printing will be commercialized to few brands that fight with eachother, DRM everything yet are popular because they are just cheap, but thankfully (and weirdly enough) that hasn't happened.
You don't. You need to slice your model first (and right there you have hundreds of tunables). Its a bit like using CUPS to control a CNC machine - the machine's definition of "printing" is quite different from CUPS
