3D printers are a scary thing to buy, because they're littered with bugs and often break. This one surprisingly works pretty well with minimal setup. It's far from a perfect machine, but is at least as good as any other I've worked with at its price point. Please do note that this is a standard 3D printer on stepper motors with PLA plastic, and prints have the standard lattice structure.The good:Dremel DigiLab provides an absolutely excellent cloud-based website to manage the printer from. It's all-inclusive, and has all the tools needed to print. The website is intuitive, and since it's in the cloud can be done from any device with internet without a download. Uploading a .stl, adjusting the print parameters, rotating, rescaling, managing a queue, and organizing a print project is all done with a click of a button. It also has a great 'Slice' feature to convert files to the right format. A print can be entirely started over the website, but the printer does require a confirmation that you've removed the object after printing before it'll let you start another (which is a good safety measure)The prints produced are high quality. I've tested a variety of slants/curves, and am certainly satisfied with the output. Different pieces printed easily assemble together, so it's not warping, and I really don't have any complaints about its fundamental ability to produce a print. It's also way faster than the printer I worked with over the summer (which was almost as expensive), which is a huge time-saver.The layout and design of the printer is clean, and everything is contained within the main box. The panel on the top and side both open, and can be opened during a print (though it will pause to warn you they opened) which helps a lot for fixing small printing errors. The touchscreen is responsive and has no issues.These are some important pros, and since this printer succeeds at these fundamental concepts, I chose to give it 5 stars. However, it does have some drawbacks.The bad:The first one is common, but annoying: Dremel requires a proprietary PLA filament that's pretty expensive ($50/kg). Unlike other brands, Dremel doesn't check that inserted filament is actually their brand, but they say the printer is only built to accept that, and void warranties to fix issues caused by any other brand of plastic.This second issue can easily be avoided by not making the same mistake I made, but is still a bit concerning: They provide multiple layers of plates to stack together to construct the build plate. During one print, I missed the top layer and the printer built on the plate below (which looks very similar, but is made of a weaker plastic). The extruder tip proceeded to shred through this plastic, causing significant cosmetic damage to this plate as it built. There does not appear to be a safety mechanism to stop the print if it encounters resistance like this, and it happily chugged along before I pulled the plug. This was my error for sure, but could've been prevented by a safety mechanism, or even a sticker saying 'This is not a build plate' on what really looks like a build plate.The third one is minor, but the metal plate behind the extruder has been taking some roughage as it moves back and forth to print - I don't think this will cause any long-term issues, but it indicates a lack of fine-tuned calibration and is a bit concerning.The print queue feature seems cool, but doesn't work at all on the touchscreen - I tried a factory reset, but no luck. If I hit the button, it loads for a second, then returns to home screen and does nothing. Queuing works as expected online however, so this one's no big deal.That might seem like a lot of cons, but 3D printers are infamously buggy, and the fact is I went from having a printer in a box to having it working with a print in hand in just an hour or so. Overall, there are flaws, but this printer excels at what it set out to do and provides high-speed high-resolution prints with minimal errors.
