Best 3D Printers from $200 to $1,000,000 (Yes, 1 Million Dollars!) 2018

today we will be discussing my top pick 3d printers for any budget from $200 us all the way up to $1,000,000 let's get started how's it going guys Angus here from make his muse and yes I hear you loud and clear every single day I am bombarded with requests by people for the best 3d printer for their budget and I get it buying a 3d printer in the market is very difficult especially when you have a certain budget to work with and there are so many options I can't really specifically decide for your needs and your use case however what I can do is tell you my top pick 3d printers for a given budget now they might not be suitable for your situation but it might not you in the right direction to making the correct purchase so full disclaimer these are just my my choices and this is just my opinion and you're completely responsible and on your own for making a final purchase let's get started with the cheapest budget range I would recommend for a 3d printer in 2018 200 bucks alright guys you've got 200 bucks to spend on a very low-cost 3d printer what should you get well the end of 2 is a kree allottee branded machine that comes to me on high recommendation a lot of my friends on youtube have tested this machine and they find it to punch well above its price point which currently is a hundred and sixty dollars or sorry 170 dollars u.s. with them with very low cost shipping now I usually recommend for the budget-conscious the Tron Cioran XY x1 which is this machine here and I still very much like the tron see if you've got very little money or you're not sure you're going to commit to 3d printing this is a very low cost kit that's safe to put together for kids because it has no mains wiring and it's very small and very easy to get going but both these machines the end or two and the Tronics Y don't have cooling fans which limits the print quality out of the box so you'll need to do modifications for both these machines to get them to print to the best of their ability which will be pretty darn good in the case of the end or - well well above its price point in the case of Tronics Y x1 pretty good but it's still not going to compete with machines at much higher price points okay let's double our money $400 u.s. or less what would I recommend well it's a pretty big no-brainer the CR 10 or any of its permutations are a surefire bet of a machine that will probably print very very well and last a long time be quite reliable and has a massive community around it the original CR 10 is priced at 385 now on gearbest you can get the smaller one the CR 10 minute I quite like that one for a little bit less and you can get the extended larger versions too I wouldn't really go too big because the CR 10 original is already very very large in the XY and z coordinates heated bed well designed aluminium extrusion construction which is quite rigid and it just comes in a few parts you just put the gantry in place a few bolts in and you're good to go this machine is hugely popular and for good reason it's a very low price point for what you can actually get off it now honorable mention is the Cetus 3d mark 2 now a lot of people don't like the Cetus because it has a locked-down slicer and yes the slicer although making improvements is locked down unlike other other printers where you can run any slice you want with standard g-code you can feed in custom g-code now into their slicer but it's a bit of it's a bit of a workaround I am putting the series 3d in here though at price at 300 us though because it's one of the best printing machines I own in a tall period I only print in PLA although you can get a heated bed for it and this is the results you can get off this little machine it's it's insane so I don't I don't know why this machine isn't more popular than is and a lot of people will say I'm a fanboy for seen us and yes I am because it does stuff like this with a scenario of that it has a weird surface on the print print bed which you do need to print a raft but if you're ok with that I can highly recommend also it has Wi-Fi which works really well and is super handy because it doesn't have any interface on it so the CR 10 and the cedars are the two machines I would recommend for a $400 US or less budget but what if we have six dollars to spend what would you get well it's a bit of an unusual strange price point we're getting up beyond the budget printers but not quite within the reach of prosumer printers but now with the release of the pressure mark 3 the original Purusha a3 mark 2's kit has dropped down in price to bang on 600 bucks and this machine has as a humongous following if you've been following makes music for a while you'll know that I respect Joseph crusher quite a lot and this machine has made waves in the 3d printing community and now it's cheaper than it has ever been it's a kit you do need to assemble it but the instructions are the best I've ever seen bar none and you will get this machine together and it will print for for a very long time it has the mesh bed leveling but it does not have the removable print surface that the newer mark 3 does so keep that in mind if you need that sort of thing you will have to spend a bit more coin but I do very much like the Purusha mark 2's although keep in mind as well even on the silent mode it is quite loud this I 3 kit has quite light loud steppers and it will disrupt a room even on silent mode unless you'd sound a bit quite a bit just my two cents and it's a bit of a wild card I'm gonna throw in the up mini two now my first ever 3d printer was an up Mini and it did me years of faithful service so the up mini 2 built on what the at mini was good at and added a HEPA filter added Wi-Fi and all these features that made this little machine fantastic it only has a very small print following 120 cube but you can print polycarbonate filaments on this little machine it's a very strange sort of niche application machine it'll print small very high quality parts in nylons or polycarbonate or abs but not very large but for the price point you're getting quite a lot of printer and actually interesting to note Cetus and up are owned by the same parent company tear times so you can run both of these machines on the same up studio software it's just it just communicates over Wi-Fi to both of them and it works really well I really like the up mini to the spool holder absolutely sucks just get rid of that get an external spool holder but it's a great little machine with that with a really nice metal carry handle a bit of a fanboy for these machines but if you want engineering quality parts you can't really go wrong ok we're moving up the ladder to one grand what can we get for a thousand big ones well is it really a surprise the new Prussia I three mark three is a fantastic printer that I've been testing review coming out soon it's the newest version from Joseph Purusha I just mentioned that the i3 mark 2's is now cheaper because of this one being released but if you have a bit more money you can get this machine and it's better in pretty much every aspect the print quality is the same but it's quieter it has mesh pad leveling but it also has all these smarts like detecting filament outages or collisions and the bed is removable which I love hum 3d printers by the way the up mini to has a removable print bed too which is awesome but I just love how it being able to take the print bed out of my machines and flex them to print to get the parts off instead of hacking at them and ruining your bed level and damaging machine overtime not very elegant so you can't get the assembled mark three for a grand or you can buy the kit which I just recently assembled over on my side channel make his muse live while I was talking to other people so it's very easy and very casual to put together with a few fiddly bits but not too bad and a fantastic in the instruction manual so you get the kit for 750 or you can get the assemble machine for a grand also I'm not talking about shipping for any of these machines but you you really will get a good machine with a fantastic warranty and support network around it if you can spring a little bit more than the Chinese machines like the CR 10 ok now we're reaching into the prosumer segment for 3d printers $2,000 is a lot of money but it really starts to open up doors in terms of quality of prints and the sort of machines you can purchase and the technologies you have access to so my pick for a $2,000 budget is the PIO poly moai this is an SLA or stereo lithography 3d printer that uses liquid resin and a UV laser to cure it or polymerize that liquid resin into a 3d print this allows you to achieve pinpoint accuracy and phenomenally low layer heights of down to 20 microns if you really want to i was actually fortunate to test apo polymer in its pre-production state in fact you can see my review right here on their website and it was like Kickstarter project which was phenomenally successful and shipped very much on time and now you can buy it for $1,250 us and it's if you want high detailed prints liquid resin technologies like SLA or DLP other way to go because you cannot achieve the detail you want for figurines or small jewelry parts in FDM which is fused deposition modeling which all the other machines I've mentioned you just can't do it the nozzle sizes are like point four millimeters it's just not up to scratch but with resin technologies like the pure polymer I you really can now a bit of a disclaimer with the moai it is a very manual process in terms of getting the bed level and that first layer accurate you do need to know a bit about running these machines it is a bit of a learning curve getting the mr. parts ready for the machine with support material and that kind of thing so for the price point you're getting a really high detail printer but there will be a bit of a learning curve in terms of running it and the resin is quite messy you need to wear gloves and the parts need to be post cured with a UV light afterwards but if you're okay with that you can achieve incredible prints with this machine absolutely insane let's bump our budget up to three thousand dollars us what can you buy for three grand that would make financial sense well in 2015 I was fortunate enough to test and review the cubic on single and this is one of the few FDM machines in the prosumer market with an actively heated build chamber allowing you to print very large parts in ABS plastic that any worry of warping at all in fact it has a really clever bed that mechanically levels itself like with motors not none of this mesh bed leveling sort of software compensation it moves the bed to make it level that's what you're paying for you're paying for an incredibly intelligent machine which can print fantastic quality and it's enclosed with a HEPA filter this is the machine to go for if you're a school or university in my opinion the the quality is fantastic and it has that professional design and outlook which you'd expect from a prosumer machine now you are paying a lot it's it's priced here on a maker just under 3000 US and the thing about the cubic on machines is they're so clever that if something goes wrong you can't really fix it you have to send it back or get a technician to look at it they're not as simple as a low-cost machine like the CR 10 for example so keep that in mind guys if you're gonna buy a cubic on single Plus you want to be close enough to a reseller or a order distributor like I maker that if something goes wrong you can actually get the machine back to them to fix it which is a big issue if you're getting it sent from the other country so I wouldn't recommend that I'd only buy these machines if you can actually get them back to the manufacturer or back to a reseller if something happens because you're paying an awful lot of money you deserve a good warranty there's no other two ways about it $5,000 us what can you possibly purchase that might cost 5,000 us well the forum - I again had the honour of testing your form - which was sent to me by formlabs as a loaner unit and I reviewed it on the channel and I had to send it back this is the one of the best if not the best machine I've ever tested on makers Muse it is very similar in quality for the print quality to the moai using SLA technology but it has automatic everything it has Wi-Fi built in a full-color screen on the front it has full compensation for the resin that comes in that the tray that fills up with resin is automatically filled up from it from a cartridge at the back of the machine and it has a has just so much intelligence built into it I did not have a single print on this machine fail not a single one and you'd expect that for for basically a ready to run starting price of $5,500 I mean that does include the machine and some resin and the washing tank to wash the pots afterwards and the curing oven to cure the parts and make them hard and build platforms but yeah it's a lot of money and especially for an individual the form 2 is kind of out of reach I mean $5,000 is very difficult to justify this machine however I see huge potential for special effects labs and game art and development studios where you want to get a 3d model from the game and you can actually print it out in incredible detail to show investors or study form in the real world by getting a physical model you will get incredible detail I printed this this amazing model of rocket from guardians of the galaxy at like tiny scale on the form - and you can't see the layers it's incredible detail it does cost heaps in consumables the actual ink cartridges cost a lot and the beds are consumables - they do wear out as the substrate gets damaged but if you if you're serious about very high quality prints and you can make it financially viable yeah I can't say anything negative about this machine which is what do you expect once we get into these price points this is five thousand dollars is is lots of cash but we're going a little bit higher than that let's jump up to ten thousand dollars but what 3d printer could you possibly buy for ten thousand dollars well you can buy an SLS system this is the center at Lisa and I actually was lucky enough to get some parts sent from Sentret for me to check out the quality of it SLS stands for selective laser sintering and it is a nylon powder a polyamide powder that is centered with a laser and SLS has the fantastic capability of not needing support materials the technologies we talked about before FDM and SLA they need support material SLS doesn't and it has its own disadvantages but I went into detail with a video here if you're interested but these machines can create incredibly detailed object and job objects without any supports like you can see here on their website now $10,000 is basically a starting price because with SLS you need finishing stations you need to dust off the parts you need to be very careful it's very messy and you also need to keep in mind that again going into I go into another video you can't reuse all the powder that isn't sintered you have to throw away like half of it and replace it with virgin so these machines are not for individuals and we've kind of crossed that threshold formlabs form to is like if you're really crazy enthusiastic about 3d printing you can justify if you become single again you can kind of justify Center it Lisa it's for companies it's for batch production and companies where you're going to print lots of things at once to justify its existence and we've crossed the line pretty much from prosumer into industrial at this point and if you're looking at 3d printers for industrial use for example in a large design studio or a design firm where you're gonna be printing all the time and the machine must never break down you also have to spend a little bit more even than this so let's jump up to the next price point of $20,000 for a cool $20,000 you jump up into stratasys technology the original inventors of FDM the you print is the starting point if you're serious about high-quality FDM so by buying a machine from the original inventors of FDM you are buying you know all those years of tech not technological prowess and things that are still locked away in patents so you get a build oven which is completely heated perfectly for warpless abs printing and the components aren't gonna overheat because they are separated with bellows which is still hunter patent and you get a patent protected soluble support material that dissolves in a very alkaline solution now the you print system does come with the soluble support washing bath and you prints have cartridges Stratasys machines have chipped cartridges like your inkjet printer so you're buying a really expensive machine to start with then you're buying into an ecosystem of expensive cartridges expensive print surfaces that technically you're not meant to reuse and in a lot of cases you're buying into a maintenance contract as well because at least the machines that were at UTS when I was studying their University of Technology Sydney they would often fly someone from Melbourne to fix the Stratasys machines when they broke down as part of a maintenance contract and they paid through the nose for that but if you need a 3d printer that literally never stops working you you pay for it and $20,000 for a very large company for that benefit of a machine that you literally press go and it always works soluble support put in the bath always dissolves parts always look good it might be worth it again we're looking at industrial machines here for industrial dust dust reloading and industrial purposes no person in their right mind will own one of these in their house nor were they own the next machine price-point let's be honest up to this point we've really just been talking about silly money like $20,000 yeah it's just a drop in the ocean isn't it let's let's see how much we can buy for for $200,000 the fort is 450 MC and it's slightly smaller brother that 380 MC are industrial level FDM 3d printers from styluses these machines are massive they have a massive price tag attached to them they print in proprietary materials they come with maintenance contracts and they are absolute workhorses they will print day and day out without ever stopping and if you can justify them they will be able to serve you with 3d prints but it's a big but when I was in Perth we were quoted on a 450 MC demo model for $250,000 Australian on a demo a demo machine no no not a brand-new machine and you the price point for these machines is just another world but to put it perspective these machines are I'm not even closely related to the machines you're getting our channel at the CR 10 for example the build size of the 450 MC is only only 400 by 355 by 400 millimeters but machine weighs 600 kilograms and it's massive so it's a different world and these machines can print if you pay for the upgrade in old term which is an aerospace plastic which doesn't catch fire it resists burning and has very high temperature resistance so if you have to print in that for example for aerospace or for example for the automotive industry for prototype or medical or you know you have to design architectural work that you're has to print perfectly which I know some people use these machines for and you have to get like first shot it has to work perfectly no warping no failing and abs with soluble support again then then these are the machines that you buy and it's a really hard sell for Stratasys now to sell these machines but they still do have a market and for this price point you're gonna be paying for the machine you'll be paying for a maintenance contract and you're paying for the consumables which are roughly if I remember correctly around at a thousand dollars Australian per per cartridge which is like two and a half kilos something something roughly like that a lot of money anyway we could go even higher than this let's see what we can buy for I don't know roughly five hundred thousand dollars this is the Stratasys J 750 3d printer designed for industrial use 3d printing of prototypes what makes it special well for a start you probably end up paying over half a million dollars for it but this machine can print in full color with gradients and different types of materials I'm talking different hardnesses I'm talking different opacities and transparencies this machine can produce prints like this now this technology is known as poly jetting where it's similar to SLA or other machines with liquid resins but instead of like having a bath and a laser that polymerizes it it has print heads that jet this polymer out and then it's hardened with a UV light that passes over it so these machines are so advanced now that I don't have just have to do that in one color they can inject pigment into that resin as it gets laid down they can have multiple material baths of different geometers for example this shoe they could have printed this rubber part in a softer durometer which will be simulated to rubber now the materials these machines use are known as like analog materials they're designed to have similar properties to other thermoplastics but they're not actually the same they're actually still UV polymerized liquid resins and therefore they can't be recycled they can't be melted down again and they don't quite have the same properties for example this is digital ABS plus which will be simulated to ABS but it's not abs you have their Tango range of materials which are rubbers so there are different geometers and they can actually change it by changing the the the ratio of different resins at the same time by jetting it in the thing about the rubbers though on these systems for example with this shoe is they're not going to be as tough as an injection molded rubber or a cast rubber because of the layer by layer process and the jetting process in my experience they're more like a felt like if you have a strip of this rubber it will Bend but kind of not easily go back and they start to crack and fail over time they may have improved I mean for half a million bucks bloody hell I hope they've improved to the machines I've used in the past but and it's a big but if you're a multinational corporation designing products you might see the value in a system like this producing prototypes or form studies for your investors or to get a really good feel of a product before it goes to injection molding and tooling because that in itself could cost millions upon millions of dollars so if you can save that at this early prototype stage then these machines might be cost effective also worth noting that they also need support material just like FDM and SLA does but you can actually use like a a jelly-like resin that that jets in between all these layers so we're not going to show it here but they'll have a jelly-like resin supporting the layer above it and then they use a water jet to wash it off and again these these are UV cured materials so they're not going to be great in sunlight and not going to last as long as the real deal like FDM parts will actually last a bit longer but if you need full color straight off the machine there's literally nothing else in the world that can do this it is at the forefront of 3d print technology and you're going to pay for the privilege but there is one more technology that actually goes beyond this and it's cool DMLs or direct metal laser sintering that is 3d printing in metals let's see what we could buy for a cool million dollars this is the EOS m 400 for an absolute beast of a DMLs metal 3d printer that has four lasers working in tandem to print metal parts that have fit for end use metal 3d printing is a reality it exists right now but these machines are so incredibly complicated expensive and high-end that they only really exist in the medical aerospace and toward agreed automotive fields so there is car companies like Koenigsegg that use metal 3d prints from machines like this in their production cars it is happening today but I'll be completely honest with you guys I do not know the exact price point of the m400 4 you are definitely looking why don't you set it up well over a million dollars you will need a full-time technician or multiple people running these machines and they are a just a world above anything that I deal with here are makers views I do have a full metal 3d print from shining 3d on their direct metal laser sintering system but it was a lot smaller and you might be actually quite affordable I don't know but the thing with EOS is they are industry leaders in DMLs and you can print in almost any metal you like Titanium's tool steels for molds even aluminium for lightweight parts and unlike nickel alloys super alloys even for high temperature resistance and corrosion resistance in aerospace these machines are insane and you can easily spend over a million dollars buying it's really printer now I did note down how much how many CR tens you could buy instead of one of these and and you could buy just around 2500 2500 CR tens roughly for the price of one of these so yeah it gets pretty crazy towards the higher end and that's going to do it guys for this top picks for 3d winters in 2018 at a given price point you guys asked for it and here you go I know I know you weren't asking for a million dollar printer but come on like there's so many machines out there I couldn't help myself so I hope this video assist you in your choices of 3d printers and gives you a bit of an idea of just how many there is and why it's almost impossible for me to help you on an individual basis I do have my 2016 buyer's guide for 3d printers and it is still very relevant because it doesn't talk about specific brands it talks about different features that you want to look for it's linked in the description and I'm working on a 20-18 version which we'll start talking about resin printers as well because that version is only talking about FTM and you'll get a massive discount when that book rolls out if you buy the 2016 version so definitely check that out if you're looking to buy a 3d printer currently and it's an FTM one but I hope this video helps you and if you did enjoy it guys please see a subscribe button it takes me a long time to research all of this for these videos I'd love to have you on board my name's Angus I aim to empower your creativity with 3d printing and look forward seeing again very shortly catch better guys bye [Music]

Channel: Maker's Muse

Views: 404,116

Rating: 4.8337207 out of 5

Keywords: best 3d printer 2018, $200, $400, $600, $1000, most expensive, 3d printer, buyers guide, FDM, SLA, DLMS, SLS, maker's muse, makersmuse, angus, deveson, australia, guide, purchase, webinar

Id: XD7IZYcdw58

Length: 28min 3sec (1683 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 06 2018