I’ve casually discussed with several of other printers on here, but would love to casually chat about the hobby

What you print with, materials, settings, slicer, etc.

Me personally, I use a heavily modified Ender 3V2 that runs klipper with a dual z axis and direct drive extruder hotend (orbiter 2.0 on a V6)

I print a variety of PLA, PETG, and just recently got into ABS and ASA

I’m currently working on wiring up a stealth burner setup for the X axis though (in preparation for my Voron build 👀)

And I just recently finished printing the Input Labs Alpakka controller! (which is super duper cool)

But yeah I’m down to answer any questions or talk about anything 3D Printer related

tl;dr: 3D printing won't change your life but it will make your life 1% better in unexpected ways.

Last year, I spent a year-long work trip with someone who was very into 3D printing. To be frank, I initially had zero interest in it. From what I understood of 3D printing, it was expensive, required mechanical experience, coding knowledge, and ultimately not worth what you put into it.

Fortunately, my colleague didn't care what I thought about his hobby and bought a cheap printer to keep himself occupied during downtime at work. Originally, it was just something that occasionally made noise in the background. As the days went on, however, more and more doodads began to appear around the office. A cable organizer here, a desk decoration there; nothing earth-shattering.

The thing that really changed my mind, funny enough, was a simple powder scooper. During our trip, we shared a terribly designed creatine bottle with a narrow neck and no scooper. We spent months pouring out white powder by eyesight alone like amateur crackheads and I will never buy this bottle again. My colleague printed out a scooper with a long neck and the problem went away.

That was the key turnaround that changed my mindset - I had a problem; we printed a solution.

I got back from my trip and decided to try it out myself. After some serious deliberation on how committed I was to this, I purchased the Bambu P1S. It’s not the cheapest option for someone just starting and I chose a Bambu printer because a Youtuber argued that your best way to have fun as a beginner was to pick a printer that “just worked.” It was a compelling enough reason for me to shell $900. (no, I’m not sponsored, just telling my story.)

Some of my favorite prints:

• Long Scooper: the one that started it all for me. This scooper saved us a ridiculous amount of time and effort for what it is. It also gets to the heart of what 3D printing is to me - solving your individual problems with simple solutions.

• Pill Organizer: it’s got a lever that spins a wheel around, opening a different chamber for each day of the week. This one really opened my eyes to what is mechanically possible with just basic PLA plastic. People much smarter than me figured out ways to print devices with hinges, springs, and levers all without needing a single extra tool.

• Scour Pad Holder: This is the one that made most people around me go, “huh, that’s pretty neat.” You’re right, it is. No one likes touching a moist scour pad.

• Slide Wallet: I spent $74 on a SECRID cardslide wallet. While I don’t regret that purchase - I used it faithfully for four years ongoing - I did feel a bit foolish when I realized I could 3D print the same mechanism for $1.50.

That’s not to say anything about the decorative / gifting aspect of 3D printing either. I 3D printed a giant Charizard for my friend’s son the size of his head in eight hours.

That said, there is a mechanical learning curve to even the most user-friendly printers. With the Bambu series, I’d say that if you’ve ever built IKEA furniture or a 100+ piece Lego, assembly is pretty straightforward. It’s the troubleshooting that will get you. Even with basic filament and simple projects, I still encountered the nozzle clogging, filament stuck in the pipes, and bed adhesion problems.

This is a hobby that requires you to be willing to experiment and look up solutions. From what I understand, some printer brands are tougher than others so the learning curve will vary depending on your gear. I quickly learned that there’s numerous ways your print will mess up and your project will look like what the community calls the “spaghetti monster.” Unless you’re a born tinkerer, this is probably the most frustrating part of the process. However, accumulating knowledge to diagnose and solve the problem is very rewarding. I learned that the third slot on a Bambu machine is statistically more likely to jam and 0.5 kg spools are more likely to clog than 1.0 kg ones. Turns out that a lithophane needs to be printed vertically and only looks good with a white filament.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with my 3D printer and I don’t regret my purchase at all. It’s a hobby that provides near-instant gratification - you find the thing you want to print - or design it yourself - and boom, it’s sitting on your printer in a couple of hours. While I’m just taking files from the community and printing the .stl file, the skill ceiling is also very high once you add hardware to your projects (e.g. screws, ball bearings, Raspberry Pi). I’m going to continue to learn and I’m excited about where I can take this machine.

Some questions for the community:

1. If you have a 3D printer, how deep in the rabbit hole are you? Are you making your own CAD files?
2. What’s your favorite print? If you don’t own a printer, what’s a cool 3D print that stands out in your mind?
3. What’s a problem in your life where you think you could 3D print a solution?

I'm looking for a black & white laser printer with a scanner for home office use. The only fancy thing about it is that I'm running Linux and I don't want to install any driver packages from the manufacturer. I want to plug it into any laptop running any Linux distro and start printing and scanning with no fuss.

Brother printers are very popular, but if I search for any Brother printer and "linux", all I can find is stuff about the drivers and how to fix the various issues that come with those.

If I understand correctly, modern printers should just work via something called IPP/AirPrint and they should also work over USB. Is that correct?

What about the scanner? Does that also just work over IPP?

By no BS I mean none of those online requirements or ink subscription nonsense.

Scanning isn't a huge focus but having at least some multi-page scanning functionality wouldn't hurt.

I've heard Brother is the go-to brand in the past but are they still? I thought I heard they were also starting down the anti-consumer path but I could be wrong.

I'm not kidding when I say I print like half a dozen times a year so whatever type of printer it is the ink/toner/whatever needs to have a long shelf life.

Thanks!

I haven't really messed with printers in probably 15 years or more, but it felt like any time they were brought up, there were two flavors:

• Older printers, which decided if they wanted to work or not based on absolutely nothing at all
• Newer printers, which are covered in DRM and mostly a nickel-and-diming scam

Now, for the former I remember having some issues, but generally just clearing the printer's cache (or whatever it was called) would fix most of the problems. I think the bigger issue is that I always helped people set up cheap Walmart-sold inkjet printers that had more hardware issues than software, along with ink that would go to shit instantly.

But I was out today at a thrift store and they had a Brother for $25, with an entire extra unopened toner cartridge (I think that's what it's called?). I asked them if it worked, they said it did, but if it didn't I could return it by tomorrow.

So I brought it home, assuming something would be wrong with it, but in about 10 minutes I had it plugged in, connected to my wifi network, and connected to my computer. I tried scanning-- it worked fine. I tried copying-- it does that no problem. It took longer to install the drivers on my PC than set up the printer itself.

So are printers really as straight-forward as I experienced with this cheap used one, or am I just lucky?

I don't intend this to be a sales pitch or anything, I just wanted to share my impression of the Bambu Labs P1P 3D printer in case anyone on here was curious and maybe considering buying one themselves.

I have owned a few Prusa FDM printers over the years but recently tried the Bambu Labs P1P after seeing tons of rave reviews, especially in terms of how fast it prints. Anyone that has done any 3d prints knows that print time is among the least enjoyable aspects of the hobby: lots of waiting.

Right out the gate, the P1P is a solid device with impressive construction given its relatively low price tag (I got it for $600 USD). And this thing easily rivals high performance machines in it's same "category", like the Prusa mk 3 and 4. And those are typically more expensive; the P1P comes 99.5% assembled at that price but a Prusa machine fully assembled is around 60% more expensive.

Most of the "assembly" is just removing packaging, like zip ties, that kept the unit safe and secure during transit. Then you connect the power cable, screen, spool holder, and filament tube. And that's it. The whole thing took maybe 10 minutes.

Getting the WiFi to connect is impossible for me at the moment, but I don't mind copying sliced gcode to the included microsd for printing. Sure, sending the gcode over WiFi would be super cool, but my Prusa doesn't do that so it's not like I've lost something. I'm hoping to eventually figure it out but that's not a deal breaker for me. I'm guessing I just need to temporarily move the printer next to the WiFi router but I haven't made time for it because I'm enjoying just printing off the card.

With the included 0.4mm nozzle (a standard size), it prints typically 2 to 3 times faster. Something that takes 23 hours might take 11. Something that takes 3 hours might take 1. For larger and more complex prints, you can get stuff done so much faster. For smaller and simpler prints, you no longer need to plan batches either first thing in the morning or overnight, you can just start them whenever. Whatever you printed before, you can print 2 to 3 times as many in one go in the same amount of time.

I don't have the AMS system but hope to get that at some point. If it has the same high quality build and performance as the P1P then I'm certain it will bring me simple multi-filament printing. And although I'm not nearly rich enough to afford more than 1 AMS, you can technically connect up to to 4 at once. Each unit holds up to 4 filament spools, so 4x4 means you could theoretically use 16 different filaments in a single print. The colors you could have! But each unit is like $350. Ouch.

I only have 2 real gripes with it so far. First, it purges way too much filament at the start of a print. I get why it does that, it absolutely ensures that your filament is always properly primed to assist in printing that critical first layer correctly, but it feels very wasteful to have a seemingly-excessive amount of filament thrown away with each print.

Second gripe is that the default spool holder is awful to access. You are likely to put the back of the machine facing a wall and that's where the spool holder will end up facing: the wall. You need to ensure the printer is a little more than two spool's width away from the wall - at the very least - so you can slide your spools on and off. Thankfully the bed doesn't move back and forth like with traditional fdm printers, thanks to the corexy technology, so you can more easily plan out where to put it and how much space it will need.

I haven't messed around with them yet but I just got additional hotends for it that I will be testing soon. The pack I got contains 0.2mm for prints that require very fine detail, 0.6mm for prints where detail is slightly less important than speed, and 0.8mm for when you want to go fast and don't care how much detail you get. Because they use a proprietary construction of hotend, you must use theirs, but the upside is that it's fairly fast and simple to switch them out. Most hotends, you just replace the tip, the actual nozzle. But because filament can gunk up the threads, you need to run it hot to unscrew the nozzle, which is very dangerous. With the P1P, you just pull off the magnetic faceplate, undo a few screws, swap the hotend, put the screws back, and pop the faceplate back on. In just a few minutes, you're done. And no need to turn on the hotend either; just unload your filament prior, let it cool down, and swap away. A much safer and more pleasant experience.

Overall, I'm in love with 3d printing all over again. It's the same feeling I got all those years ago when I did my very first 3d print. And sure, the Prusa is still great when you want high quality detailed prints. Going slow and steady wins that particular race still. But I get quality that is 90+% comparable to what the prusa gives me in exchange for literally 2x to 3x print speeds. That's an easy trade for me. And the slicer software estimates that some of my larger and less detailed prints could print in right 2/3 the time using the 0.6mm nozzle instead of the default 0.4mm. That translates to roughly 7 hours on my Prusa (0.4), 3.5 hours in my P1P (0.4), and 2 hours on my P1P (0.6). Given how much easier it is to swap out nozzles on the P1P, I can see myself actually doing that not frequently for certain prints that, like in my example, see substantial benefit.

I'm very excited to see how this machine holds up in the long run!

Last time I owned an inkjet was well over a decade ago. I had a nice HP color laserjet that Just Worked™for almost a decade (and PS, I bought it used), and then I just lived w/o a printer for the past 3-4 years. Now, I'm window-shopping for inkjets, it sounds like the whole "use-our-ink-or-die" business model has only gotten worse.

Are there any good inkjet printers where I can just use it like a normal printer, just buy ink (cheaper than the printer was) when I need it, yada? Or should I just write off the entire industry (again), and go straight to the laser printers?

And does anyone actually have a decent (color, all-in-one) printer that works reasonably well with their (YourDistroHere) Linux machine?

Danke

ETA: Thanks for all the feedback. I'm now prioritizing a Brother laser (maybe just mono), or possibly an Epson Ecotank.

Side-note ... how cool is it that we have so many Linux-folk in our midst!?

Thanks again.

I'm thinking about getting a new printer. My needs are basically to print out textual documents 2-3 times per month from macOS. I don't need to print photos. I will not buy an inkjet because of the outrageous price of the ink. I would like to have fax support (my spouse sees a lot of doctors and they still use fax machines a lot, and we're not comfortable sending personal medical info via a fax service on the web), and it would be nice if we could also scan documents. So I'm thinking a multi-function device.

We currently have a Brother 7840W MFC with print, fax, copy, and scan. It's over 10 years old (maybe 15?) and I dislike it. It's been slowly losing functionality over the past 5+ years. The WiFi went out, but I was able to connect it via wired ethernet to a computer and share it from there. The drivers insist that there's a paper jam, but there isn't and it prints just fine (but sounds like some of the internal mechanical components are going to die any day now.) The UI of the printer is awful. I recall having to use the phone pad to enter my WiFi password, and it was like texting on a Motorola StarTAC. (Like if you want the letter "C" press the number "2" three times, etc.) The drivers and related software don't work like normal macOS software. (Disclosure: I also once wrote a scanner driver for Brother and it was horrible, but they shipped it, so I'm not real comfortable putting their software on my computer. But that was 25 years ago, so maybe they're better now?)

I've heard horrible things about the drivers and software of most other major printer makers - HP, Epson, Lexmark, etc. I'm guessing what I'm looking for doesn't exist, but I just want a multi-function device in as small a package as is reasonable, and with a UI on the device and software that doesn't suck and that won't die on me in < 5 years. Does such a thing exist?