Best under $1000 CDN FDM printer today

OK I understand that this might start a knife fight but I want to know. How are bamboo labs or Creality K1 Speedy or MAX or others. Plus any downsides or deficiency to suggestions.

-under $1000 CDN

-RELIABLE

-good print quality

-good print area

-doesn’t have some odd ball unabtainium parts.

-reasonable number of needed features IE: bed levelling etc.

-reasonably priced accessories

-anything else that will fit into the budget and meet the other requirements

Multi-colour printing not needed.

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Hands down K1 Max,

I have found it to be by far the most reliable machine that we offer here by far, it prints fast, uses mostly normal parts (basically just minus the hotend, but I have seen some mods in the past for custom hotends), and the nozzles for it are pretty reasonably priced in my opinion. A cool thing about them though is that they function exactly the same as the revo system allowing for a cold and tool-less swap process.

In terms of reliability numbers, in our tech department over the past month I have had only 4 of them come in, 3 of which were user error and only 1 was an actual issue. The number of them coming in has been less and less each month, the number went down drastically after the second revision release as well!

The print area is very nice at 300mm^3 and the print speeds are the same as that of the Bambu’s. It has automatic bed leveling both with the built in lidar along with the more traditional bed leveling approach. The printer can also do automatic z-offset calibration using load cells built into the bed. There is a built in camera for print monitoring and it comes with all the newest wifi printing features and such.

You can also root the machine to run stock klipper, this allows the machine to be connected to your network completely privately with no cloud features or anything like that. And you get a full klipper install.

From my personal experience I have found the creality printers to be FAR more reliable than the bambu’s. And when things do go wrong the average cost of the repair is FAR lower on the creality’s.

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Thanks for the objective opinion!

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Last questions, I promise.

Looking at the k1 MAX (maybe one of the cheaper ones) and they really push the wifi features (so does Bamboo) but I don’t need/want wireless. I prefer to just plug an SD card or USB drive in, the printer is next to my computer, to load Gcode file. Now the KI says it can do this but it is kind of vague about this feature.

My research says that it runs on a lobotomized version of Klipper which is missing some features, will I notice. Creality does this a lot with most of it’s printers. Is this a problem IE: will it do the job properly and if not is it upgradable to a better version in the future.

P.S. I had my fingers crossed when I said last questions so I might be back.

Yeah you can root it to a full version of klipper if you would like.

Also the wifi features are completely optional, our storefront machines are not connected to any wifi. You can save the gcode files to a usb drive and print off of that which is what we do here! Just skip over any wifi or cloud features in the setup and you will be good.

OK I’m back, last time, promise. What it the the expected life of a nozzle, just a guess. I looked on your web site for them but I can’t locate any. Not in stock yet??

Thanks.

They last pretty well, they are copper plated brass nozzles with a hardened steel tip, so you get really good thermal conductivity plus excellent wear resistance. I have gone through probably 20kg of just carbon fiber filaments on the storefront model along with a ton of other materials and the nozzle is still good!

Here are the nozzles for it: