This is a rewrite of an original post published on 05/12/23. I wasn’t happy with the way it was written and my opinions have drastically changed. This is a more accurate representation of how I feel.

At the beginning of may I was minding my own business doom scrolling through instagram when I was ambushed by a well placed ad. Microcenter was offering the Creality Ender 3 Pro for the low price of $99. From everything I’d seen before the price of a 3D Printer was abound $300. The Pro’s retail price was $199.So I did some very shallow searching for opinions on the Ender Pro which all seemed to echo the idea that it was the ideal beginner printer. I asked my boss, who is into the hobby, and he said the same exact thing. So a few hours later I found myself on the way home from Microcenter with a new Ender 3 Pro.

Unboxing it revealed a collection metal beams, screws, stepper motors some stickers and a pamphlet of pictograms that I guess were meant to serve as directions for assembly. As someone brand new to 3DP there was no way for me to know how weird this was, but in retrospect it was a sign of what was the come.

So, I was able to get everything together using the “directions” but I watched an assembly video or two on youtube just to be sure. From that point on Creality leaves you on your own - its all up to you. Creality are fully aware that they are considered the entry level printer, and I would say they position themselves as such, so its strange to me that they give you no instruction about the details fine tuning necessary to print (like for example the tightness of your x and y tensioners) or anything about bed leveling or bed tramming.

Once I watched enough youtube on bed tramming I was able to seemingly get mine level enough to begin printing. Once I completed my first Benchy I was off to the races.

From this point on Id say 20% of my prints completed and of those completed prints about half of them werent flimsy barely useable wastes of plastic. This is something one should seemingly expect being new to the process right? Except from what I could tell I was doing everything correctly. As it turns out I was and the fault was none of my own, it was the imperfect hardware. As it turns out Creality as a company has a very low priority for quality control of their hardware. The chances that you get a warped bed, y bar, or otherwise junk piece of hardware are not in your favor.

I say Creality for a reason because its definitely a company wide issue. Over the next few months I actually ended up purchasing an Ender V2 and an Ender S1 and there was something imperfect from the factory or otherwise failed after a couple of prints, including stepper motors and extruders. Or maybe even an LCD screen which is what broke on my printer and caused me to see the light.

On my Ender Pro the LCD went on the fritz for seemingly no reason. I hopped on amazon looking for a replacement and once again - ambushed by a well placed ad - an Anycubic Kobra for $299. I once again did some preliminary research and came to the conclusion this was the printer to get.

Now the difference between any of the Ender’s and the Kobra was immediate. Some say the Kobra looks like a child’s toy which I can understand but I prefer it to the stripped down look of the Ender. It also comes mostly assembled and completing the assembly took maybe 20 minutes. The user interface is extremely stripped down. Theres 4 buttons to push and none of the menu options are more than 3 layers deep. Initially this scared me, what was I goign to do with the millions of options I dont really understand that the Marlin or Mainsail firmware gave me?

Well the answer was just print. Everything is done for you by the printer. The bed levels itself before every print and the bed is fixed so you only need to adjust the print head if you do something like switch nozzles. You can know absolutely nothing about 3DP and be succesfull with the Kobra, and as a bonus it prints considerably faster than the Ender 3’s.

I ended up giving one of my printers to an older friend. I knew he wasn’t really going to spend the time necessary to have a high success rate but that was up to him. I gave them the printer and explained all of the basic he was going to need to know and I felt like a complete asshole the entire time because I knew at home I had the Kobra. Everything that I was telling him was completely unnecessary with modern printers.

So I think it’s time we stop telling people that the Ender is a good first printer because it absolutely isn’t. It’s a great first printer for maybe a tweaker or obsessive tinkerer but for someone who simply wants to print and print well its the last choice you should make. They do nothing to assist you in learning how their hardware works and to be fair often times their hardware actually doesn’t work or is damaged in a way that you wont easily recognize it as a newbie. I think we can all agree that as a new comer to 3D Printing the primary thing you want to be able to do is print. If we agree on that then we must agree that the Ender series is simply not the way to go.