A few years ago they started to wrap them in black plastic to slow thefts. And they found it lead to them getting mistreated by shipping companies a lot more - and fewer working printers were ultimately making it to people.

I’ve seen speculation in the 3d printer community that when people see a foreign origin package that just squeaked under the import duty cost and wrapped in black they assume it’s something for some rich jerk and may treat the package accordingly. But when they see it’s a tool frequently used for regular folks to set up a side hustle, they’re nicer to it.

I’d say for people new to the hobby the best choices at $1000 (or a little under) are the Prusa MK4 and the Bamboo Lab P1S. The former say they’re focusing on quality (with speed as a side-effect) and user support, while the later is focused speed. The Prusa is also a little bit cheaper if you buy it as a kit. And building your own printer with Prusa’s excellent, constantly refined, instructions is a great way to really get to know your printer.

At the ~$500 level is the Creality K1 which I don’t know much about. Creality printers tend to be hit-or-miss though, and don’t expect support outside of other people on the internet.

Another printer you’ll hear about is the Voron, but that’s not really for beginners.

If you want to build your own printer, and have the spare change, Prusa is still a top teir hobby printer. If you want to save some cash, the Ender printers are reasonably close in quality and significantly cheaper. I would personally go Prusa MK4 if I was starting over again. My MK3 was fun to build and has been very solid for years.

Whew, I’m glad I’m not the only one who is just a broken person.

It’s among several good options right now, we’ve entered a new era for fast, high quality home 3d printing. I got the MK4 because I’m already in the Prusa ecosystem, I expect (from experience) that this machine should just work for many years, and I know that if it doesn’t Prusa’s support is the much better than most companies at the price point. Additionally, I have some specific applications in mind that I think their “Nextruder” and load sensor will excel at.

That said, Prusa is trying to hurriedly catch up to recent competition and they have shipped a somewhat incomplete printer (at least in terms of firmware). If you want a full look at current state of the MK4 this Tom Sanladerer video is going to be better at it than I am.

I used to joke that if people didn’t eat the gummy bears per the instructions their first layer calibration would take 10 extra tries. Now that there’s no first layer calibration that won’t work.

Congrats! This one came a day ahead of the original estimate. I wish you the same fortune.