What is your favorite filament?
Lately I’ve been using inland brand natural Pla. It prints so nice and I find that it adheres to the print bed really well. My go to filament brand used to be Amolen but some of these cheaper filaments have gotten so good in recent years.
Yeah, "cheap" filament is largely good quality now, and only the unbranded Chinese-made stuff is actually "cheap."
I also really like Inland (Microcenter) because they use good manufacturers. Esun makes their PLA/+ and Polymaker manufacturers their ASA. I will also buy directly from both of those companies because of my exposure to them via Microcenter's house brand.
I'm also a big fan of Atomic Filament and Overture and Prusament. Atomic and Prusament can be pricey, but man are they some of the very best I've used.
I second Micro Center's house brand, it's been really reliable in my Ender 3.
I hate that I'm 5 hours from the nearest Microcenter. At least they ship some items.
I didn’t know that they worked with polymaker for their ASA. I knew that Esun is their PLA/+ manufacturer though. I do miss those esun masterspools since they have switched to the cardboard spools. I’m glad that the spooless filament refills are still available. So far I’ve heard great things about atomic and I’ll have to give them a try. I also like overture a lot for their PLA and their PETG.
The Inland ASA is listed as Inland PolyLite ASA, and PolyLite is a PolyMaker trademark. I read this text on their site like 30 times before I made the connection.
Stay away from Esun's matte PLA. It is almost impossible to get it to adhere to a PEI sheet, and it STINKS while printing. I love their PLA+, so I was quite disappointed with the matte.
Overture's matte is great though, and not smelly.
I use three regularly: Polyterra PLA for low cost filaments, Polylite PLA Pro for my fastest prints or prints needing a little strength, and Polylite ASA for anything functional, for outdoors, or for high temp. The ASA surprised me with how easy it's been to print. I've printed with 3DBestX ASA I think, and it's OK, but not nearly as easy as the Polylite ASA. I bought a roll of ApolloX ASA recently but haven't tried it yet.
If I need PETG, ESUN PETG prints the easiest, I've found. Not as easy as ASA (I have a heated chamber), but it's the least aggravating PETG. ESUN PLA+ prints great, but is a bit more shiny than the Polylite PLA Pro, so it's a personal preference. The ESUN PLA+ has slightly higher temperatures and I've had one print failure recently from poor layer adhesion when I was pushing it as hard as I could with print speed.
For my Monoprice mini select with a V6 hot end, I use whatever PLA is on sale. Right now Amazon Basics silk PLA, and two rolls of elegoo PLA. I rarely print high demand parts with the Monoprice. Right now it's only printing 18650 holders for a cell balancer I'm building.
I love prusament filaments but with shipping and duties I don't keep them stocked. I'm not sure who supplies it but I've had solid results out of spool3d.ca abs and petg filament, also really like Canada Filament's carbon capture PETG, stocking up on more of that and the carbon capture pla. Had really nice results out of Worday ABS as well.
Polymaker polyterra. I especially love their army blue and black filament. They print nice and matte, and the colors print almost identical between their different colors. I always thought polymaker was a more expensive brand, but polyterra hits that 20usd/kg for pla price point that hatchbox and other budget filaments used to dominate
I like the polyterra line too. My favorites are the cotton white and sapphire. I’ll have to give the army blue a try sometime. I’ve tried a spool of their polycarbonate and it was nice though difficult just due to the nature of polycarbonate. I also used to think polymaker was expensive brand but I’m so glad it’s affordable.
The muted red polyterra feels like terra cotta a little. The matte additive is really dense, so parts feel heavier than other parts (polyterra PLA and PETG are the two densest non-filled filaments I've used). Whatever the additive is, it also increases the strain to failure by a lot, so it's less brittle.
My only complaint about polyterra is that it is not as good at layer adhesion as the regular PLA/PLA+. I can't push my printer to the limit on speed without getting a part that wants to separate at the layers, so I have to slow the print speed and slow the fan down, and I usually print a little warmer.
I'm finishing up my first Polyterra PLA+ print right now. It has less of the additive so it's advertised as a satin finish more than a matte finish.
For what it's worth, I just bought my first 3kg roll of filament for a big project, and I chose polyterra PLA in black.
Just went from azurefilm to polimaker politerra recently and its amazing
PolyTerra Matte
Hatchbox has been my primary brand in the 5 years I've been printing - I've had great success with their PLA, ABS, and PETG.
eSun PLA+. It's easy to print, looks great, and is decently strong for most uses.
I switched to Atomic over 4 years ago and it's the only brand I buy now. I don't like wasting plastic and I know Atomic will print perfectly for me. If there's an issue, it was my printer's fault.
@thecitywelivein Atomic CF-PETg is absolutely amazing. And they even have some color choices for their CF filaments which I have yet se see elsewhere.
@thecitywelivein I’ve been wanting to give atomic a try but I just can’t decide which color to get. They have some really neat colors and I love the atom design on their spools.
I switched to Printed Solid Jessie filaments after my previous bread and butter supplier, 3D Solutech, went out of business. Jessie is been good so far for a relatively low price. I hope they continue to expand their color lineup because they're still missing a lot of shades I used previously. I'm still searching for a secondary brand to fill those gaps.
They named a filament after me?
Getting most of my filament from DasFilament because they are a local (German) company and offer masterspool refills. They "only" sell PLA, PETG and TPU, but so far I haven't messed with other types yet, so that's OK.
Most of my PLA is Printed Solid Jesse. It's $20/kg filament that prints like $30/kg filament.
My custom blend of SLA-resin has a matt surface with dark metallic color. Also, my most hated filament as it requires a deep clean between prints. FDM? FormFutura SBC: Gave me headaches but that's noticeably higher transmission compared to other "transparent" filaments.
Matte resins definitely print nicer in my experience. I haven’t tried too many SLA resin bands I mostly just stick to Siraya Tech fast resin because it’s low odor. When you blend your resin do you put it in a new bottle every time or do you reuse bottles?
Reuse the bottle of the base resin. It's mixed from base epoxy resin with additives and pigments. The issue in particular is caused by the pigments and with no good solution as everything you can do is slowing down the process. A printer that circulates it without dead spots could fix it but you might run into issues where it "sticks" to the FEP making it worse. An upside-down SLA printer could resolve the issues but they are rare and expensive. After all there probably was a reason why you can't buy it. You can do more stupid mixtures/washing/curing for example an soft-touch surface with a hard resin but they all fail in some regard making them not feasible (that particular had just awful mechanical properties. Worse than expected.).
I have Hatchbox PLA in most colors and it works fine for me. If I want to make something more rugged I use eSun PLA+. I also have a couple spools of Tecsonar multicolor PLA filament and those prints always come out looking great!
I've been using Jupiter PLA for most prints. I try to use PLA whenever possible because of the lower environmental impact.
It's the cheapest brand available where I live.
Whatever is cheapest on Amazon. I rarely get a bum roll. Although I did 2x in the last couple of years. Both petg wound too hot I think. It was like a brick of petg in the center.
I use filaments.ca's house brands, mostly. The price is pretty competitive if you're in Canada, and the quality's been good so far.
I’ve been really liking kingroon lately
My current go-to is printbed PLA.
I use Copymaster3D PLA most of the time. It's cheap and locally made. It's not the best (some colours have some inconsistency issues and white PLA has some crap inside), but it works for prototyping and is very dimensionally stable. I also use their Tough PLA for final parts, it's more expensive, bit it's very consistent and prints nicely at higher speeds. Actually it's main issue is that it's too leaky so you can't print it slow - it just sips on its own.
I've had a lot of luck with eSun.
For all the terrain printing I've done over the past 3 years, I've stuck to plain Overture PLA. In the Prusa printers I use, they've been the most reliable with almost no stringing.
Have you tried Prusament? How does it compare?
I have! It's just as good, but a little pricier and takes longer to get shipped to me.
Prusament PC for anything functional. I just use Matter Hackers cheap PLA for everything else. They are close enough to me that I get all orders the next day for free.
cheapest bottom of the barrel pla, works well enough, and if it doesn't atleast it only costs 11 ish $ per kilo
Where do you find your cheap pla? Cheapest one I could find are $14
diff country, im in SE Asia