When I started out with 3D printing, I quickly felt overwhelmed — and wished someone had given me a few honest tips. Those are exactly what I want to share here, from my own experience and from a guide that helped me personally.
First things first: learn the theory before you start printing like crazy. Understand the difference between FDM, SLA and the like, what an STL file is and how filament behaves. And take your time with your first printer — settings like bed calibration, print temperature and speed make the difference between success and frustration.
Especially at the beginning, good material is worth it. Cheap filament or resin often leads to inconsistent prints and is harder to work with. And keep an eye on the printer, especially during long prints — that's a safety issue too.
My best advice: don't upgrade right away. Many beginners (myself included) want to install new firmware or hardware straight away and end up introducing problems. Work with the machine as it is for a while. And when things get stuck — take breaks. Frustration is part of it, but so is the joy of your own prints.
Stay curious: the technology keeps evolving, so read articles, check out trade shows, collect ideas. Then getting started quickly turns into a real passion.
Source: threedom
Desktop resin printers often fall short when you want to print a life-size helmet or a big batch of parts. The Anycubic Photon P1 Max tries to solve that, and the review from 3DWork is one of the most thorough I have read about it.
The main figures: a build volume of 285.5 x 214 x 300 mm (18.3 liters), nearly three times that of the standard Photon P1, and a 14-inch 12K monochrome screen with 24.8-micron pixels. It has a C7 ball screw with linear rails on the Z axis, a 3.5 kg steel build plate, a Wave Release film, and a heated 1.9-liter tank that holds up to 40 degrees and works with resins up to 8,000 cps.
During the reviewer's tests, there were no print failures caused by the machine itself over several weeks. Adhesion stayed consistent across the whole plate, fine textures such as folds or feathers came out well, and there was no visible difference in curing between the center and the corners.
The drawbacks are clear too. The steel plate is heavy and its flat surface collects resin, the lid lets smells escape without an active extractor, the monitoring camera is 640x480 and looks orange, and large-format washing and curing stations are expensive. When something fails, the resin wasted is also greater.
In short, the P1 Max delivers what it promises and suits cosplayers, prop makers and batch production. It is not the best choice if you mainly print miniatures, have little space, or are using resin for the first time. The author notes that Anycubic lent the machine and that this did not influence the content.
Source: 3DWork
The first round of the patent battle between Stratasys and Bambu Lab has ended, but the match is not over. On September 17, a federal jury in the Eastern District of Texas found that four companies linked to Bambu Lab willfully infringed four Stratasys patents and set damages at 27.6 million dollars. It is the first verdict in a lawsuit that started in August 2024, and a second trial is already waiting. Bambu Lab said it disagrees and intends to seek review and file an appeal.
A few days later, on September 22, the company unveiled R1, a 55 W CO2 laser engraver and cutter. It is the first Bambu product that is not directly about 3D printing, and for me it is the most curious news in the whole story.
R1 cuts and engraves wood, acrylic, leather, paper and fabric, and it also engraves glass, stone and painted metal. It handles plywood up to 18 mm and acrylic up to 20 mm, across a work area of 600 x 300 mm. The most interesting feature is Auto Laser Alignment. Anyone who has used a CO2 laser knows how tedious it is to align the mirrors with thermal paper and screws. According to Bambu, the system detects the beam and corrects it with motorized actuators in about a minute.
Some of the solutions come from the printers: vibration compensation, which avoids ringing on 3D prints, and power adjusted to speed to keep a uniform tone. R1 uses the same MakerWorld account and the Bambu Suite software. Preorders are open at 2,499 dollars in the United States and 2,499 euros in the European Union, with shipping from October.
Source: 3Dnatives
This month I came across a MundoBytes guide on 3D printer calibration that sorts out something nearly everyone has experienced: half an hour of printing thrown in the trash because of one small setting. The central idea is simple. Almost all failures can be fixed with three things: the Z offset, the temperature, and machine maintenance.
In the basics section, the text insists on leveling the bed often, whether by hand or with a sensor, and on adjusting the Z offset so the filament sticks without jamming the nozzle. As a temperature reference, PLA runs between 190 and 220 °C and ABS between 230 and 270 °C, and it is worth keeping the bed stable to avoid sudden shrinkage. For the first layer, it suggests going slowly, around 25 mm/s.
What I liked most is the diagnostic list, because it goes straight from symptom to cause. If the first layer won't stick: clean the base with alcohol, slow down, and use a brim or raft. For warping: a hot bed and, with ABS, a closed enclosure. Stringing on Bowden systems is fixed by raising retraction starting from about 8 mm. For overextrusion, lower the flow in the slicer; for gaps between infill and walls, raise the overlap to 20–25%. Elephant's foot improves if you lower the bed temperature slightly after the first layer, and cracks in tall parts can usually be corrected by raising the extruder temperature by about 10 °C.
I find it useful that the guide reminds us of the boring things: using filament from recognized brands, avoiding damp filament, and checking belts, screws, and cables from time to time. It is the kind of reading worth bookmarking for the next time a print goes wrong and we don't know where to start.
Source: MundoBytes
Klipper has become the standard for many printer owners, but an article by Aleksey Sviridkin on the Ænix blog asks an uncomfortable question: what happens if a project rests on one person? The author makes clear that this is his personal opinion, and he backs it with fairly specific arguments.
The main thesis: Klipper's code is excellent, but the project is not organized like an organization. CONTRIBUTING.md names only Kevin O'Connor. There are four reviewers, but only he has commit rights to master, so the bus factor is one. The issue tracker is effectively closed: one open issue says the tracker is no longer used, and discussion has moved to a forum where more than 200 PRs are waiting.
As an example, the author looks at PR #6826, which adds listening on a TCP socket alongside the Unix socket. By his estimate, based on the mkuf/moonraker Docker image, more than 400 people would use such a feature, yet no substantive answer came. As a result, features that are not in the core end up in forks. Snapmaker changed about 20% of the codebase for its U1 printer, and Creality and other vendors ship frozen older versions.
The author argues that forks are expensive for vendors because of rebases and backports, and urges contributors to send changes to mainline wherever the intake channel works. For commercial forks, he proposes neutral foundations modeled on OpenTofu, Valkey and OpenSearch.
You can disagree with much of it, but anyone choosing a printer and firmware benefits from knowing which ecosystem they depend on. For me, the main takeaway is that an open license does not guarantee open development.
Source: Habr (Ænix blog)
Anyone who prints with resin knows the print is only half the job. Afterwards comes the messy part: lifting a part still wet with uncured resin off the plate, carrying it to a wash station, letting it dry, then curing it under UV. Every handoff is another chance to get resin on your gloves or desk. UniFormation's new S10 tries to remove those handoffs, and I find the idea genuinely interesting.
The S10 uses a 16K mono LCD with a 405 nm light source. When the print ends, the platform rotates to drain excess resin, a cover slides over the vat, and the part moves to a wash tank that holds up to 9 L. It is washed in two cycles, with the platform moving side to side and then tilting to drain, before turning to face a drying port that blows air at 35-45 degrees C, all behind one closed door.
It is not fully hands-off yet. You still need to take the model out, remove the supports and post-cure it, though an optional plug-and-play curing module snaps into the machine. The build volume is 223 x 125.9 x 200 mm. It ships pre-leveled with automatic resin feeding and heating, and pressure sensors are meant to catch foreign objects in the vat. It works with Chitubox and Lychee as well as the company's own slicer, which has five resin profiles.
For print farms there is also an optional S10 Fluid Hub that serves up to three machines and recycles the wash fluid in a two-stage process to make IPA last longer. The maker is aiming first at tabletop gamers and miniature painters. A Kickstarter campaign is coming, so real-world results are still to be seen, but a cleaner resin workflow is something I would like to see succeed.
Source: 3Dnatives
Stratasys has announced the F870 FDM system, a large-scale additive manufacturing platform. It is in a completely different league from consumer FDM printers, with a maximum build size of 1000×610×610 mm.
The announcement was made on September 9, 2026 (local time), and Toyota's production engineering division in North America and Rivian Automotive are reportedly adopting it. Its uses include automotive jigs and manufacturing aids, large fixtures, assembly tools, and inspection gauges. The appeal is that it lets factories print the tools they use on the floor themselves.
A notable feature is that it uses a temperature-controlled chamber that heats the entire build space, not just the build plate. Large parts tend to warp because of temperature differences, so heating the whole chamber seems like a sound approach. Even for hobbyists using FDM, fighting warping is a familiar problem.
The supported materials are Nylon 12CF, ASA, and ABS, plus a new material, FDM ABS Draft (Gray). Carbon-fiber-filled Nylon 12CF in particular is said to offer the strength, stiffness, and durability needed for jigs and fixtures on the shop floor. The company explains that it can produce large jigs and end-use parts while maintaining the repeatability, durability, and throughput that manufacturing sites require.
It is a very different world from desktop machines, but it was an interesting story that shows how far FDM technology has been scaled up for use on automotive production lines.
Source: MONOist
The Creality SparkX i7 is a moving-bed FDM printer sold with several filament systems, and the review from 3DWork helps clarify which one is worth the money. It starts by pointing out that Creality does not sell any version called CFS Line. The official configurations are four: Standalone, Autofill Combo (CFS Mini), Nano Combo (CFS Nano) and Color Combo (CFS Lite).
The technical base is solid: a build volume of 260 x 260 x 255 mm, a maximum speed of 500 mm/s with accelerations up to 10,000 mm/s², a direct drive extruder with a quick-change hotend, a hardened steel nozzle rated to 300 °C, a bed that reaches 100 °C with a textured PEI plate on both sides, and automatic leveling with a strain gauge sensor. It runs Creality Print, which is based on OrcaSlicer.
The CFS Nano screws onto the gantry, cuts the horizontal footprint by 37% and switches colour in under a second. It does not support TPU, does not detect tangles, and its open rack offers no protection against humidity. The CFS Lite is the most complete option: a sealed box with desiccant, tangle detection, an RFID reader and TPU with a Shore hardness of 64D or higher.
In testing, quality straight from the factory settings was good, and a single-colour Benchy took 17 minutes. The weak point is purging. With default values, the ratio of purge to useful part can exceed 15:1, and on pieces weighing around 30 g the purge comes to roughly half a kilo, so it is worth adjusting retraction and purge by hand. A PLA spool left in the open rack also degraded within a couple of days.
Overall the review gives the SparkX i7 3.8 out of 5. According to the analysis, the CFS Nano is the interesting choice if space is tight and TPU is not needed, and the CFS Lite if the environment is humid. What I value most about this kind of review is that it talks about purge and humidity, which is where the real money gets spent.
Source: 3DWork
A team at MIT has presented ShiftLens, a system for 3D-printing objects whose surface changes its appearance when you press, slide, or turn them, with no sensors, batteries, or screens involved. It was developed in the Human-Computer Interaction Engineering Group at CSAIL. What interested me most was the idea that an object can show its own state.
The example is a reagent bottle: when the cap is screwed on tight, a checkmark appears, and when the cap is loosened, a hazard symbol shows up. Both images are printed directly into the bottle wall. A door sign also switches between two displays with the flip of a lever.
Technically, ShiftLens combines a layer of lenticular lenses, like the ones on flip-image postcards, with a pattern layer underneath where the images are split into narrow, interleaved stripes. When the lens layer shifts by a few millimeters, the lenses magnify different stripes, and a different picture becomes visible. The movement comes either from the user's own action, such as unscrewing a cap, or from a built-in mechanism like a switch or a wheel.
Lenses, colors, the base body, and the mechanics are all produced in a single print. The team used a Stratasys J55 with material jetting, where water-soluble support material fills the gaps and is washed away afterward. The limits are real, though: structures thinner than 200 µm cannot be printed, at a 5 mm lens pitch there are at most ten states, and the geometry is restricted to translation and rotation surfaces.
Source: 3Dnatives
I read a beginner's guide published in 2026 by Pea3D, and I thought it neatly organized the questions that fill a newcomer's head. The guide splits the printing process into three stages: modeling, slicing, and printing. For design it suggests Tinkercad, Fusion 360, or Blender; for ready-made models, Printables, Thingiverse, or Cults3D; and on the slicing side, Cura, PrusaSlicer, and OrcaSlicer are mentioned.
The settings section was the most useful part for me. A layer height of 0.1–0.12 mm gives fine detail but makes prints take longer, while 0.2–0.28 mm is faster for functional parts. For PLA the guide gives 190–220 °C for the nozzle and 50–60 °C for the bed; for PETG, 230–250 °C and 70–80 °C. To find the best temperature, it recommends a temperature tower test. If you want a sturdy part, it stresses that raising the wall count, for example from 2 to 4, is more effective than increasing infill density.
The troubleshooting part is short but on point. For warping, it suggests raising the bed temperature by about 5 degrees, wiping the bed with alcohol, using a brim, and blocking drafts. For clogs, it lists cold pulls (atomic pulls) or cleaning with a thin needle; for layer shifting, it lists checking belt tension and acceleration values; and for stringing, adjusting retraction settings and drying wet filament.
The finishing steps are not forgotten either: removing supports with side cutters, wet sanding from 200 up to 1000 grit or finer, and applying primer before painting. I also liked its note that vapor smoothing with acetone works only on ABS and ASA, not on PLA or PETG. The closing message felt familiar too: early failed prints demand patience, but it is from them that we learn the most.
Source: Pea3D
Flashforge has announced the CJ270, a desktop inkjet photopolymer 3D printer. It uses MultiJet Printing (MJP) technology and produces high-resolution models in more than ten million shades. Machines like this have existed for a long time, but they have mostly been expensive industrial systems such as those made by 3D Systems and Mimaki. According to the author of the review, this new model is within reach of small businesses and even well-off enthusiasts, which is what caught my attention.
Like stereolithography, it uses light-curable resins, but the model does not grow in a vat. Instead, it is built up by jetting layers onto a platform. Each layer is leveled and cured with UV light before the next one is applied. The principle is similar to an ordinary office inkjet printer, except that photopolymers are printed instead of ink on paper.
Seven materials are fed through the head assembly at once. Six of them make up an expanded CMYK set: in addition to cyan, magenta, yellow and black, there are white and clear formulations. The seventh is a water-soluble support resin, which noticeably simplifies post-processing. Any one of the seven heads can be replaced separately if needed.
Because the minimum layer height is only seven micrometers, mechanical finishing is generally not required. For me the main question now is price and the cost of consumables, but the fact that a full-color inkjet printer of this kind has arrived in desktop form looks like a step forward for hobbyists and small studios.
Source: 3D Today
