When I was about 6 years old, I saw my first 3D printer and was immediately fascinated. I didn't forget it, and a couple years later my local library got a printer that patrons could use if they paid for material. I printed so many little trinkets, and the satisfaction of seeing something that I designed in the physical world exactly as I envisioned it never went away.

I've followed the technology's progress quite closely in the 14 years since then, watched it get more capable and cheaper, and now own multiple of my own printers, which I've summarized here.

This was my first printer, I bought it in late 2020 because I finally decided it was time. Its an Ender, so it wasn't the most reliable machine, but I knew that going in, its massive build volume and the fact that I generally knew what I was doing with FDM by this point made me decide it was worth it, and it was. It took quite a bit of tuning, but with the addition of an auto bed leveling sensor in 2022 and some general TLC, I made this printer into a solid workhorse, and have since put dozens of kilograms of filament through it for a variety of purposes.

This printer was a much more recent acquisition, as I got it in late 2023, but I'm very happy with the purchase. I'd wanted to play with SLA printing for a while by that point, and finally decided that this was worth it on a black friday sale. It took a bit to get dialed in, and SLA had more of a learning curve than I was expecting, mostly because the slicing was completely different( especially with how you generally want to orient parts), but I've figured it out now and its a reliable printer that lets me print some genuinely incredibly detail into parts. It also has interesting applications with printing lots of parts at once, because printing time is only dependent on z height, though this is less useful because of how mechanically weak most SLA resins that don't cost a fortune are. I have had the opportunity to play with some Formlabs Tough 1500 resin, and it is magical. I'm a big fan. 

This is my newest printer, and I haven't had a lot of time to play with it yet. I bought it in September, mostly to be a high speed printer to turn out quick parts so that I can iterate faster and see what parts look like. However, the combo with the AMS lite was very tempting, so I also bought that to start to play with some multicolor printing, and even some very limited multimaterial. I don't have a lot of use on it yet, so I don't have strong opinions, but I'm very excited.