I would not recommend 3dstuffmaker to anyone any more after learning what i have, it has taken me over 12 months to get it to a high quality machine,
I should really upload some pictures of recent prints, I can print at rather hi speeds as well, like 100-150mm's Much faster than many printers available on the market, many are around 40mm's
To achieve this, i had to change pretty much everything on the printer, the heart of it, the hotend, to a high quality and i made a custom extruder.
Also re-enforced the frame to make it more rigid ect..
My printer was horrible when i first got it, i had to pretty much rebuild it from the ground up, costing me huge time and some money, on a positive note, i know exactly what goes wrong when and if it does.
Questions,
Do you want to build one yourself ?
pros- you understand how it works, easy to troubleshoot yourself, and you can easily replicate it. Cheaper option as well, print a wide range of materals including trimmer line for your brushhcutter, needs to be nylon, you can get one running for about $500 and it will perform the same as a $2000-$3000 price range machine that runs out of the box, If your good at building things, I would say do it because you can make an incredible machine that you could never buy in a regular consumer market.
cons- takes time to build, you really need the time to do all the research and understand how it all works, dont let this put you off, i believe anyone can do it, some may do it faster than others, but its an investment of knowledge that can assist you with other things in life maybe
Buy one that works out of the box?
Pros works right away in most cases, but i found alot of the out of box solution need a fair few adjustments to get it right....
con's something breaks can be a pain to troubleshoot it, you maybe stuck into buying a particular style of filament, some companies may lock you into using PLA or ABS only and maybe their own brand , A company called Cube does this, and it sucks, also costs alot more for the same results at the end of the day
And what do you want to print? big things ? how big? what material do you want to use?
Software.
You have slicer software that slices a 3d model into layers, " slic3r is very common as well as replicator g and kisslicer"
Host software, something like pronterface that controls the machine and delivers the Gcode from slicing software.
You can change to what ever slicer you want really, and there is a bunch of host software
check out these printers, lulzbot.com I use their Budaschnozzle hotend, they have a very good design thats made for hi speeds, I would call their printer out of the box solution
I would rate them very similar to makerbots latest 2x printer, as they both have pretty extreme speeds upto 200mm's. Which is what you want, you dont want to wait for hours to print some small part, it would take about 30 mins to print a iphone case, where others may take upto 4 hours or more, ..
Next kinda printer something like mine or a solidoodle, they are meant to be out of the box, they often need quite a few adjustments and use low quality parts, bearings are shit ect.... for e.g. on mine, the print bed warped within the first 20 hours of use, extruder was a crap design, hotends breaking, thermistors breaking... a big headach Its either a hit or miss and eventually it will need to be rebuilt... once its done they are fantastic machine
At the end of the day, you can spend the time, save some money and build a custom machine that works as well if not better than any pre built printer that would cost you around 2k to 3k
These Are FFF fused filament fabrication, I saw the peachy printer for about $100 when it comes out, its a SLS selective laser sintering, It has an extreme Z resolution as it uses a drip system that increase the level so the z resolution is just extreme, How ever at the moment the material it uses it not as robust as FFF style printers, plastic extrusion.
Before you buy anything, id recommend posting here what your thinking of buying, ill check it out for you, i have accumulated quite a bit of knowledge over the last 12 months on this topic.
On another note, If you were to build one yourself,
These are the two models id go for
This is like mine, http://reprap.org/wiki/File:Assembled-prusa-mendel.jpg easy to build, So easy my friends 14 year old brother made one.
If you were good with building things, this is the one to go for
http://reprap.org/wiki/Rostock
however both can be built without to much trouble really.
the rostock just looks awesome in operation, the way it moves the hotend is completely different to how my prusa mendal moves X Y Z