I have had my Creality Ender 3 Pro for a while now and I have upgraded it quite a lot. Lately I have been thinking about wether I should put in some more money (better hotend, maybe new steppers, maybe enclosure, maybe part cooling fan) or if I should buy a new printer that is a more of complete package. A bit more build volume would be nice as well.
I am intrigued by the Bambu Labs printers but I don’t like their somewhat proprietary approach. So I have been looking around for competitors and I saw that Creality has shown their new K2 Plus with an AMS. I wonder if it’s worth waiting for that. The specs sound good. Is the K1 good now? I heard it had some problems in the beginning.
If open source is a big deal for you I would look into Prusa, they have a great track record and a lot of other companies are using forked versions of their slicer. I have a Prusa MK3s and absolutely love it. I had a self sourced RepRap before this and compared to that it absolutely “just works”. I bought the multi color add on and was expecting it to be very finicky, but other than some initial filament loading issues (have to make sure the end of the filament goes to a point) I absolutely love it.
I think the idea of prusa is cool but I feel like they are a bit behind. Especially regarding price to performance. That is what I gathered from the reviews at least. They are pretty reliable but not the latest and greatest tech.
The Mk4 made up a lot of ground, but I agree they are a pricey option. Personally I was able to justify the price by the benefits of open source, if the company disappears tomorrow I’m confident the open source community could continue issuing firmware/slicer updates.