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Just bought a Cetus 3d Extended Mk II 3D printer (US$399) arived in four days, goes together just fine. Its a very well engineered product with well machined metal rails. I also have a delta printer that came doa and never printed and the first Aldi printer which was temperamental to use and very difficult to maintain (high maintenance needed). The Cetus just bloody well works and maintaining will be easy and minimal, changing nozzles or removing to unclog (if it does) is dead easy and it comes with three nozzles sizes so theres no dodgy feeder to get jammed, or heat blocks and fans to remove to service like the Cocoon Create. For someone with only one working arm this is very easy. The Cetus on default settings has been printing around the clock all weekend just fine with my old cocoon filament (every Cetus owner says the same, its very tolerant of any brand of PLA filaments) the cocoon needed constant fine tuning to get its own filament printing and I never got it to print any other brand successfully. The Cetus is compact but solid , the plate is unheated but printing with raft everything I've done so far is perfect and easy to remove and easy to stick to its bed.
Calibration is easy via software instead of tiny hard to reach screws, there are no essential mods you need to do first it will work fine out of the box.That said its X arm doesnt lock to the vertical Z rail when power is off and being heavy can drop easily landing on the print bed with the end of the nozzle. Its something I knew from reading reviews and as I wasn't powering off it hasn't been any problem for me to place a piece of packing foam on the printer next to the bed to catch it anyway in case it fell (I'm designing an addon I can print to catch it too if I forget the foam). Really not a big deal, worst case you damage a nozzle, just unscrew and replace buying replacements is easy .
Print quality with its standard Normal setting and pre-installed 0.4mm nozzle its better than I could ever get from my Cocoon create even after months of tweaking and testing. I get a tiny bit of stringing so the default temp is a little high for the cocoon filament and I'll play with setting to fix that this week. Haven't used Simplify3D yet just the Cetus software. Btw this is a tethered printer doesn't have a card slot but its supposed to have wifi and ios app but i havent tried that out.
All in all this is what an entry level 3D printer should be, dead easy to use and more prints less waste. Was well worth getting and and I am so happy , way more than when I got my first cocoon which worked but only barely and needed constant care and attention. The Cetus may not look like much but when you feel the well machined and oils rails this just feels like something more at home in a machinists shop than something sitting on a milk crate on the loungeroom floor where mine is. I bought directly from the Cetus website, chose the Australian model and it came from an Aussie location , correct power supply etc.
I can't recommend this highly enough for anyone looking at getting a 3D printer. Hope I can say the same in 6 months time.
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