Guides

Short answer: a 1kg spool of decent PLA or PETG costs somewhere between $14 and $26 at the brand’s own store, and ASA runs a few dollars more. Right now the cheapest PLA I track is ELEGOO PLA at $13.99/kg, and the cheapest PETG is ELEGOO Rapid PETG at $13.99/kg. That number moves, though. Filament goes on sale constantly, and the same spool can swing 20–30% in a month. So instead of writing numbers that are stale in two weeks, every price on this page is pulled from my filament price tracker, which checks each brand’s store every morning. ...

If you’ve been circling the Prusa CORE One+, the feature everyone asks about first is the heated chamber — and it’s the right thing to ask about, because it’s the single biggest reason to pick this machine over an open-frame printer. But it’s not the only thing worth knowing. Here’s a plain-English tour of what the CORE One+ actually is, what the chamber buys you, and the smaller features that add up to a nicer machine to live with. ...

I don’t need a printer that goes faster. The one I have now is fine on speed. What I keep bumping into is a wall the machine can’t get past no matter how good my profiles are: one nozzle, one melt zone, one material at a time. Every color change is a purge. Mixing a flexible part with a rigid one in the same print is a non-starter. Different nozzle sizes in one job? Forget it. ...

Bambu’s P1S pricing has stopped pretending to be a sale. The $699 MSRP is still printed on the product page with a line through it, but the actual price has been $399 through Black Friday, New Year’s, June, and again right now. That’s the price. The strikethrough is decoration. I’ve got about 1,200 hours on my own P1S at this point and it’s still printing like it did in week one. That’s worth stating up front, because it colors everything below: I’m not comparing spec sheets from the outside, and I’m also not neutral. The machine earned its keep. ...

If you’ve been loosely following Bambu Lab news, you already know they’ve been on a tear. In the span of about a year, they released multiple new machines, discontinued their flagship X1 Carbon, and just this week dropped a brand-new printer that undercut everyone’s price expectations. It’s a lot to keep up with — so here’s a breakdown of what’s actually out there right now and what each machine is trying to do. ...

If you just got your first 3D printer and opened Amazon to buy filament, you were probably hit with dozens of options immediately. But two names keep coming up: PLA and PETG. The good news is that these are the two best filaments to start with — and for most people, they’re the only two you’ll ever need. Here’s what they actually are, how they’re different, and which one to reach for first. ...

If you’ve been printing in PETG and it’s working great, you might wonder why anyone would bother switching. The answer is simple: put a PETG part in direct sunlight for a few months and see what happens. PETG doesn’t handle UV exposure well. It yellows, gets brittle, and eventually fails. For anything that lives outside — a garden fixture, a car mount, a mailbox bracket — you need something built for it. That’s ASA. ...