Today’s budget-friendly 3D printers will likely surprise you: You can get a smooth-working machine with features once found only in high-end models. Check out the top-performing 3D printers we’ve tested under $500.
While we’d hesitate to call 3D printing a mature technology, you might say it has reached its teenage years. Through their first decade-and-change,3D printers have come down in price, grown easier to set up and operate, and become more reliable. And you may pay less than you expect: Many once-high-end features have migrated down to inexpensive models. PC Labs has been reviewing 3D printers since 2013. Today, the state of 3D printing is strong, but that wasn’t always the case. For the first several years, it was often an adventure getting one of these printers up and running, let alone successfully through our testing regimen. Issues with filament-based —aka fused filament fabrication (FFF) or fused deposition modeling (FDM)—printers were abundant. Filament feeders had to be coaxed into delivering filament from the spool to the extruder. Print beds had to be manually aligned. The extruder or hot end had to be positioned just right to minimize the gap between the nozzle and the build plate (the flat surface on which the object is printed). Objects frequently stuck to the build plate, and required careful, sometimes unsuccessful, efforts to pry them off. These and other issues required painstaking effort to resolve, often combined with calls to tech support. Not so much anymore. While they can still be rebellious at times,3D printers have grown up a lot, and achieving the 3D printer basics has gotten a lot less likely to end in a shouting match over small things. What to Look for in a Cheap 3D Printer The big difference is the change that has come to the cheaper models. Nowadays, many of those ornery 3D-printing issues have been resolved (most of the time, anyway), even for consumer and bargain-priced 3D printers. Automatic print-bed leveling is the norm, and you can usually remove 3D-printed objects from heated and/or flexible build plates with a minimum of coaxing. Most 3D printer manufacturers have either developed and refined their own software, or have adapted an open-source printing platform such as Cura. What separates more expensive 3D printers from cheap ones (« cheap » defined as $500 or less, for the purposes of this article) is often a select group of features. These include the build volume, the type of frame, the varieties of supported filament, the software, and the connectivity mix. Let’s run through those in turn. What’s the Right Build Volume for a 3D Printer? A 3D printer’s build volume is the maximum dimensions (HWD) of a part that it can print. (We say “a part” because a 3D-printed object can consist of multiple parts that are printed, then glued or otherwise pieced together.) While the smallest build volume of any 3D printer we have tested is 3.9 by 3.9 by 4.9 inches, we consider any build volume smaller than 6 by 6 by 6 inches to be small, any between that and 10 by 10 by 10 inches as medium, and any printer with at least one build dimension of more than 10 inches as having a large build volume.
