I have enjoyed my Ender 3v2 but my extruder and hot end are acting up and I am ready for a more reliable printer. I like the simplicity of Bambu but it seems to come at the cost of customization. Prusa seems to be more open and extendable, but at the cost of increased complexity. What would you recommend?
Personally I don’t think Prusa is really as far behind as some people claim. A lot of printers on the market are still single material bed slingers, and it’s not like Prusa doesn’t have a Core XY, it’s just a large and expensive machine (Prusa XL).
Considering they have been in the market a long time and their printers are known to be reliable workhorses, I went with the Mk4.
A lot of people seem to to think that bedslingers are inherently worse than core xy kinematics.
Core xy is definitely more compact.
In return the belts are longerz tightening them more complex (x and y can become unaligned).
Core xy can be easier for input shaping, as only the z axis mass changes.
Ellis, who is very highly regarded in the Voron world, thinks that bedslinger style printers can offer higher quality prints. My general surface finish is way nicer now that I have a higher quality extruder, but z axis artifacts are certainly a thing on my 350mm^3 CoreXY.
You can print immensely faster on a coreXY machine, that’s just physics.
And you can do it without yeeting your half completed print off the bed, either. Bed-slingers make me paranoid, justified or not.