Phew, after having tried some cheap printers, I don't think I'd ever recommend one again without the caveat "you may get lucky, you may not. If you want a tinkering project they'll be great, if you want a printer, they may be good."
Last one I had had the heater cartridge die, the leveling sensor die and be too stupid to properly communicate via USB (a typo in the protocol meant that Octoprint was waiting for receive-confirmations). Together with terrible support which took literally the whole month I had the thing, to answer about the first issue (and not actually help).
Maybe Elegoo is better, but I doubt it.
Also, I'm not conviced of the Aluminium-profile+wheel guiding system.
So far all my printers are elegoo, they all work out of the box very well. They're support is pretty great as well, they've sent me replacement parts for things I admitted to breaking due to own stupidity (a new motherboard after I short circuited one, and a couple of led panels after a resin spill).
I can't speak of other companies, but elegoo seems alright
Last one I had had the heater cartridge die, the leveling sensor die and be too stupid to properly communicate via USB (a typo in the protocol meant that Octoprint was waiting for receive-confirmations). Together with terrible support which took literally the whole month I had the thing, to answer about the first issue (and not actually help).
Which printer was this? There's ofc. always a risk involved when buying a cheap printer, but some brands are definitely worse than others.
First of all, I'm sorry to hear you've had a crappy experience with your printer, and I hope you have something that works better for you now. What you write does however align with what I've heard about this brand previously.. The printer buying guide that I like to refer to has put Geeetech in the "hall of shame" category, with the following remark:
No quality control, useless customer support, offers paypal refunds to customers who leave 5 star reviews on their Amazon pages, offers to pay to have bad reviews deleted. Pays youtubers to lie about the machines.