Among all of the sub-$5000 3D printers on the market today, I would definitely recommend the Titan 1 for the following reasons:
(1) Reliable: fewest moving parts of all printers. No X axis motors/endstops for sliders, no galvos with weird mysterious flare and cleaning issues, no bare silicone that clouds or becomes mysteriously opaque to UV
(2) Versatile: Large max build area, high resolutions possible, uses almost any resin with lots of examples of different resin settings available in the “Showcase Your prints Forum”
That being said, printers in the sub-$5000 range, especially those which are open resin, do have a learning curve. The most important, which will be familiar to those coming from FDM but take some thought for someone completely new, is the addition of supports. Meshmixer does have many useful auto-support generation capabilities, but you will almost certainly not be able to do everything with auto supports. You’ll have to learn the ins and outs of what requires support and how support strength of density interacts with the settings you’ve chosen.
Once you’ve learned the capabilities and nuances of your printer and materials, you and do some amazing things.
For example, earlier this week, I needed to print a GoPro frame for a tripod mount. The frame is a tension fit design requiring significant flexibility, and I’d usually use ABS from an FDM printer for this, but my heater cartridge in my hot end blew out. So I decided to print it in my Titan 1 instead (my FDM printers are often in an unprintable state for one reason or another, there are lots of parts that can fail or require adjustment; my Titan 1 is almost always in a ready to print state). For flexbility, I decided to use a 50/50 blend of FunToDo Standard Blend and 3DM ABS (for those more experienced reading this, I ordered 3DM XSeries but it got trapped at customs and I have no idea how long it will take to get here) and “soft cure” it so I could bend it around my GoPro and post-cure it in place.
I’ve printed in FTD and 3DM ABS before and knew they have similar curing speeds at 100 microns, so I dialed the exposure time down to close to the minimum, oriented the part in a direction where I didn’t need supports, and printed it.
It came out great on the first print. Really flexible (actually, probably too flexible, but that’s a whole different story) and the fit was great.
However, it would be a mistake to think that you could achieve this in your first day or week of printing. It’s not an issue of product “refinement”, I’ve talked to a lot of users and while there are some minor feature enhancements that have come up, most whom I’ve spoken to like the printer exactly the way it is now (features come with cost, both in $’s and in things which can break or require maintenance). There is a knowledge learning curve for all products in this price range that you will need to consider and be prepared to climb.
