Quote Originally Posted by Bob Falk View Post
Anyone have experience with a Creality printer? They seem to be recommended as a lower cost but quality printer.
I have a Prusa MK3i built from kit and I have two of the Creality ender 3 printers. We use the two Creality printers at work for prototyping cases for electronics, mounting brackets, etc.

The Prusa is far and away the higher quality and just simply produces better results. Also its flexible bed is great. The Creality printers came with stock beds made of a coated FR4 (i.e. fiberglass) material. The stock beds were not flat. Replaced with glass beds and while I get good results we had to do a lot of fiddling to find settings that prevent lifting of corners. Turns out that having the bed temperature ramp down during about the first 10 layers does the trick. Now items are difficult to remove and of course the glass doesn't flex so that makes it interesting some times.

With sufficient tuning and fiddling of feeds and speeds the Creality ender 3 printers work fine but I get overall better results from the Prusa. Also, the Prusa extruder pulls filament into the heater while the Creality push the filament. I'm drawing a temporary blank on the names of these two configurations... The upshot is that the Prusa is easier to load and unload if you need to mid-print. I've done several cases where we have say black PLA or PETG for the body of the case and then switch to a white filament for raised labels on the last two or three layers.

We also use the Prusa slicer for both.

If you are patient and OK with lots of experimenting, the Creality ender 3 (and now the 3 Pro is probably the one to get) is fine. You'll need to do some testing and experimenting to get best results. If you'd rather trade a little money for time, go for the Prusa.