about a year ago, I finally caved having spent a long time wanting a 3d printer, looking at all the options for a while it was spending a lot of money or buy a very dubious kick starter or kit, till I found the ender 3, a prefab system with great reviews and at almost half the price at the time of anything of the same scale, and so my fun began.
I'm using the base model Ender 3, keep being tempted to do some upgrades but haven't yet, the only change iv made is to add support to shift the filament feed slightly off to the side as new reels of filament with the top mount and vertical feed will sometime ping off the coil and cause issues but only with some of the reels iv had where they are right up to the lip. I use Ultimaker Cura for my slicing and on the occasion that I try and make my own models or for tweaking others I use Blender, Cura is simple and straight forward and free, I'm sure there are programs with much more advanced options, but so far everything I have needed to produce clean prints has been provided by Cura, reading online there seem to be mixed opinions on filament, some people say just buy the cheapest others say buy the best, iv tried a few different brands and price ranges and so far iv only had 1 batch that I haven't been able to get to work, you may have to fiddle around about with temps and speeds to get it just right, but with that in mind for ease and not having to scrap the first few attempts as I play with settings iv settled on a brand called Warhorse they do a reasonable selection at reasonable prices and so far have had nice consistent prints, without having to change settings between reals. all in all, I'm no expert and this is my first dive into 3d printing all because I wanted a suit of iron man armor, I'm not there yet, but one day, this is a simple low cost set up that has made my introduction to the craft simple and easy, I can't speak on others but the reality ender 3 was definitely a great buy.
Here are a few of my past projects, including the sub-zero mask from DO3D which I am currently working on
So thank you, to Creality for my printer https://www.creality3dshop.eu/
Ultimaker for my Cura slicer software https://ultimaker.com/
Warhorse for their great and consistent filament https://twitter.com/3dheroamazon?lang=en
and to DO3D and other such communities for supplying me with an endless source of coll and interesting projects to create
Thank you all