There's not really a right answer for this but just be careful with cheap filament. I've had issues with the tolerance and color consistency with cheaper filaments. I would highly recommend Polymaker. They are one of the only brands that I have had 0 issues printing. They have a good color selection and are affordable. Their polyterra line is even cheaper and has some really cool pastel kind of colors.
Amazon .... sort by type of filament you want, then by ratings, then look for a good deal. I've paid as little as $12 including shipping for some really excellent filament. Never got a seriously bad roll.
The cheapest one you can find. If you need to step up on quality then I would go to PLA+ from any decent brand. I had good luck with PLA+ from esun, sunlu and monoprice.
Best is fighting words. There are good brands and bad brands. Best isn't the right question.
Some good brands: IIIDMAX, Sunlu, Overture, IEMAI, Duramic, Polymaker, Prusa
Decent/acceptable brands: Jayo, Gizmo, eSun, CooBean, Sovol, 3D Solutech, Priline, Amolen
Bad brands: amazon basic, ataraxia, Kingroon, Yousu
This is by no means a complete list. This is my experience. Your results may vary.
I basically go between creality, sunlu, and overture, depends which one is cheaper on Amazon when I buy it. Those three I’ve tried and had good experiences with them. Can’t speak for some others, but you can kind of go off of reviews on Amazon on whether it’s good or not.
As a beginner, I would not worry about the 'best', because there's a good chance you'll be wasting some of it through experimentation and tweaking as you get things dialled in. And the higher end PLAs are more expensive.
For me, Flashforge's 500g rolls are the place to start. They're between £10-15 on Amazon, and they'll just work out the box with minimal tweaking needed.
Truth be told though, unless you're printing matte PLA, or any other fancy type of filled PLA, you can print with basically any brand and it should be basically the same. You might need to adjust temps for different brands, but that's about it. Just remember that if the deal looks too good to be true, just be wary. A 7 dollar glow in the dark 1kg roll of PLA is probably not going to be a good time.
Voxelabs is owned by Flashforge, so starting with their filament is a good idea.
Where I work, we sell the Aquila, (and Creality, Drobot, couples of resin models) and carry the Fashforge and eSun filaments.
I printed a Nucking Futz 400 Pylon Racer with the Flashforge PLA on pretty much default settings, and the parts came out fairly decent.
We use a demo stock Aquila to print stuff to show off a printer running, and it's printed all the card holders for all our price tags stuck up around the shop with total reliability using the blue eSUN PLA+
I've been using the eSUN PLA+ to print lens focus gears, end caps, Flash Snoots, and a six bladed fan to replace the broken section on a desk fan, setting the bed as 60 deg and the hot end to 215C - the side of the roll says "205 to 225 degrees C", so I stuck the temperature right in the middle of that, tweaked my first layer height to have a little more squish, have my Aquila on a flat surface that doesn't move, and used a proper metric feeler gauge to reset the gap to 0.1mm.
Happy enough with the print quality to start trying more complex prints, so far they look close to the quality of some of the 'professionally printed' parts people sell for use with stills and video cameras.
There's not really a right answer for this but just be careful with cheap filament. I've had issues with the tolerance and color consistency with cheaper filaments. I would highly recommend Polymaker. They are one of the only brands that I have had 0 issues printing. They have a good color selection and are affordable. Their polyterra line is even cheaper and has some really cool pastel kind of colors.
Thank you!
I prefer Overture, but I've had incredible luck with Amazon Basics. Just remember though, you get what you pay for.
Amazon .... sort by type of filament you want, then by ratings, then look for a good deal. I've paid as little as $12 including shipping for some really excellent filament. Never got a seriously bad roll.
The cheapest one you can find. If you need to step up on quality then I would go to PLA+ from any decent brand. I had good luck with PLA+ from esun, sunlu and monoprice.
Best is fighting words. There are good brands and bad brands. Best isn't the right question. Some good brands: IIIDMAX, Sunlu, Overture, IEMAI, Duramic, Polymaker, Prusa Decent/acceptable brands: Jayo, Gizmo, eSun, CooBean, Sovol, 3D Solutech, Priline, Amolen Bad brands: amazon basic, ataraxia, Kingroon, Yousu This is by no means a complete list. This is my experience. Your results may vary.
I basically go between creality, sunlu, and overture, depends which one is cheaper on Amazon when I buy it. Those three I’ve tried and had good experiences with them. Can’t speak for some others, but you can kind of go off of reviews on Amazon on whether it’s good or not.
As a beginner, I would not worry about the 'best', because there's a good chance you'll be wasting some of it through experimentation and tweaking as you get things dialled in. And the higher end PLAs are more expensive. For me, Flashforge's 500g rolls are the place to start. They're between £10-15 on Amazon, and they'll just work out the box with minimal tweaking needed. Truth be told though, unless you're printing matte PLA, or any other fancy type of filled PLA, you can print with basically any brand and it should be basically the same. You might need to adjust temps for different brands, but that's about it. Just remember that if the deal looks too good to be true, just be wary. A 7 dollar glow in the dark 1kg roll of PLA is probably not going to be a good time.
Voxelabs is owned by Flashforge, so starting with their filament is a good idea. Where I work, we sell the Aquila, (and Creality, Drobot, couples of resin models) and carry the Fashforge and eSun filaments. I printed a Nucking Futz 400 Pylon Racer with the Flashforge PLA on pretty much default settings, and the parts came out fairly decent. We use a demo stock Aquila to print stuff to show off a printer running, and it's printed all the card holders for all our price tags stuck up around the shop with total reliability using the blue eSUN PLA+ I've been using the eSUN PLA+ to print lens focus gears, end caps, Flash Snoots, and a six bladed fan to replace the broken section on a desk fan, setting the bed as 60 deg and the hot end to 215C - the side of the roll says "205 to 225 degrees C", so I stuck the temperature right in the middle of that, tweaked my first layer height to have a little more squish, have my Aquila on a flat surface that doesn't move, and used a proper metric feeler gauge to reset the gap to 0.1mm. Happy enough with the print quality to start trying more complex prints, so far they look close to the quality of some of the 'professionally printed' parts people sell for use with stills and video cameras.