Originally Posted by
Rich Harman
If you will not be making a steady income, go with an 80W Chinese machine with a fat body tube (like Reci) and a Ruida controller*.
Seven years now and my original 80W Reci is still going strong. The engraving quality is on par with the western machines, but slower. Cutting is just as good as the western machines and just as fast.
If you've got the money (quite a bit of it), Trotec would be my first choice.
Another difference between the cheap Chinese machines and the western ones like Epilog and Trotec is that the latter us encoder strips on the axis. That means that the position of the laser head is precisely tracked in real time.
Cheap machines use steppers with no encoders**, that means that the motors turn "blindly" a certain amount and the laser head is expected to be in the right location via the belts and pulleys. It works and it works very well, but the ultimate precision is a little less than the western machines - which is irrelevant for 99% of users.
*You would want a Ruida controller so that you can use LightBurn
**Even the steppers that do have encoders are not much of an improvement (if at all) since the encoder is on the motor itself and does not track the laser head like the western machines do. You will still have the inaccuracies introduced by the belts and pulleys. The encoder strips of the western machines are superior.