Thank you for that information and advice!
I’ve been following this 3-D printer craze for the last few years. Reminds me a lot of the early personal computer period in the mid-1970’s. I really wanted an Imsai 8080, or Altair. They were super-expensive, at least to me and my meager salary. You had to laboriously flip toggle switches to enter machine code, and it cost a lot to add things on to get anything done. And they did very little. Few reference materials, few magazines, but people traded tips. Then within a couple years innovations came rapidly and prices plunged, giving us far cheaper but more powerful machines.
Same thing now. They’re expensive and you can’t do a lot without spending more money. But the innovations are starting to happen rapidly now. What you buy now, will be fun to play with but will be very obsolete in a year. Buy an expensive one now and fund R&D for far better machines in the next couple years. That’s when they’ll be useful to the common man, for making more than refridgerator magnets. For now, I’d buy a cheap 3-D printer just to play with one.