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I wasn’t expecting results like this from a $299 budget 3D printer


You no longer have to spend a fortune to get a quality, automated, hands-off 3D printer. This is a sentence I didn’t expect to write just a few years ago, but it’s reality today. Here’s how I used an off-the-shelf, untuned cheap 3D printer to print something that even my more expensive printers would have struggled with.

In the past, expensive printers meant hands-off setup and use

Auto adjustments just weren’t accurate on cheaper printers

The print head of the Voxelab D1 3D printer with an auto bed leveling system inside. Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

My first 3D printer was an Ender 3 V2-style machine that had zero automated features. There was no automatic filament runout detection, no auto leveling, no auto adjustments at all. And the 3D printer I started out on cost $299.

The only way to get any automation back in early 2022, when I started 3D printing, was to spend well over $1,000. It just wasn’t conceivable to get a fast, accurate, and automated 3D printer for under $1,000 then. Plus, even spending over $1,000 didn’t guarantee any of those features.

Toward the end of 2022, newer models, like Bambu Lab’s cheapest-at-the-time P1P, launched at $699, a substantial price savings over the $1,500 X1 Carbon. But, if you wanted a full-size build plate with automated features, it wasn’t going to come cheap.

Modern entry-level printers offer high-end features

Elegoo’s $299 Centauri 2 blew away my expectations for a 3D printer

These days, even entry-level affordable 3D printers come with a slew of automated functions. A few years ago, I picked up the Bambu Lab A1 mini for $299, and it was spectacular. It had a smaller print volume, but the quality of the prints it put out blew me away.

These days, you can get full-size Core-XY printers for that price. It’s truly mind-blowing. But, are cheap 3D printers any good? They used to not be, so has that changed?

I fully believe you can get an extremely solid 3D printing experience without spending a fortune. Right now, there are several 3D printers in the $200 to $300 price range that offer many of the same features that used to cost thousands.

For example, you still have the Bambu Lab A1 mini, now at $219. The larger Bambu Lab A1 is $299. Elegoo’s Centauri 2 is $299. Flashforge even has a multi-color printer for $349.

The thing is, all of these printers are fully automated out of the box. Sure, sometimes a little tuning can help take your print quality to the next level, but out of the box they’re fantastic.

Every printer I just mentioned features automatic bed leveling, automatic filament runout detection, and some even have automatic pressure advance and flow rate functions built right into the print head. That was unheard of just a few years ago.

How well do these printers work though? I’ve been using the Elegoo Centauri 2 and have some thoughts on its performance.

Even difficult-to-print supports are a breeze for this budget beast

I wasn’t expecting it to have such good results

Elegoo Centauri 2 Batman pen holder print on build plate with tree supports. Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

While I haven’t run a ton of prints on the Centauri 2 yet (and I do have a full review coming soon), the prints I have run blew me away.

For starters, I have done nothing but the automatic setup and calibration of the printer. I have done no filament tuning, and I’ve not even run Elegoo filament through it yet. What I have used is SUNLU PLA+ 2.0 on the standard Elegoo PLA profile, and it has worked flawlessly.

Just last night, I wanted to run a pretty difficult print on it to put it to the test, so I found this Batman pen holder model on MakerWorld. It required a ton of supports, which are my worst enemy when it comes to 3D printing.

I decided to just slice it and send it. I opened the 3MF file up in ElegooSlicer, which is based on OrcaSlicer, and made the few adjustments needed for it to work with the Elegoo printer. Really, all I did was select the filament and change the printer profile to the Centauri 2.

The only other change I made was to change the brim from auto to mouse ears because, second to supports, brims are my other worst enemy. With a mouse ear brim in place, and tree supports auto-generated based on the original model, I clicked print and went to bed. I didn’t even wait to see if the first layer came out well.

I woke up to a notification from the Elegoo app (something my old $300 printers couldn’t have dreamed of) that the print was complete. So, I went to the office and grabbed it off the build plate. The print completed flawlessly, capturing every detail in the model.

I wasn’t sure how the supports would come off, though, and after I snapped the first support off, I was even more surprised. These supports released as cleanly as my Bambu Lab P2S, if not cleaner. I went through, and each support perfectly snapped off the print with little effort.

A few places I had to use some flush cutters to separate the support structures from each other, but all supports snapped cleanly off the print itself.

I was honestly blown away by how well this model printed. Nothing broke when removing the supports, everything looks fantastic, and I have zero complaints from this untuned $299 3D printer.

  • Elegoo Centauri 2 3D printer.

    Brand

    Elegoo

    Build Volume

    256x256x256mm

    Printing Accuracy

    ±0.1 mm

    Connectivity

    USB, Wi-Fi

    Heated Build Plate

    Yes, dual-sided flexible spring-steel plate

    Feed Type

    Dual-gear direct-drive extruder

    Elegoo’s latest Centauri 2 brings all the features that we love about the Centauri 2 Combo to a more affordable package. With the same build volume, print speed, and even nozzle and bed temperatures, the Centauri 2 delivers an affordable yet capable 3D printer for the masses.


  • FlashForge AD5X 3D printer.

    Brand

    FlashForge

    Build Volume

    220x220x220mm

    Connectivity

    Wi-Fi, USB, Ethernet

    Dimensions

    16″D x 14″W x 18″H

    Weight

    24.25 Pounds

    The FlashForge AD5X 3D printer is one of the most affordable multi-color 3D printers on the market. It features a built-in 4-spool auto filament changer built right into the side of the unit—no external accessory required. With an open frame, you can easily print materials like PLA, PETG, and many others. It offers 1-click auto leveling, prints at up to 600mm/s, and comes with a pre-installed 0.4mm nozzle with the option to swap it out for a 0.25mm, 0.6mm, or 0.8mm nozzle depending on what your needs are.


You don’t have to spend a fortune to get quality 3D prints anymore

If you want to get quality 3D prints these days, you don’t have to spend a ton of money. Really, all you need is a few hundred bucks, and you have the perfect entry-level system waiting for you.

This Elegoo Centauri 2 could use a little tuning for pressure advance, and I could probably get some extra speed out of it by tuning my flow rate. But it’s not necessary to get a quality print. The 3D printer did exactly what it should right out of the box—print a fantastic model.

So, if you’ve been holding off on starting your 3D printer journey trying to save up for something like the Bambu Lab X2D, think again. You can easily get away with something far more affordable.



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Recent Reviews

I tried using Excel to track my life for a week—and saw patterns I’d been missing


My phone is full of life-tracking apps, but it became increasingly apparent that they don’t talk to each other. So, I decided to try logging my sleep, spending, routines, food, and work in Excel for a week to see whether consolidating everything would make the data easier to understand. By Sunday, patterns had started to emerge that I wasn’t previously aware of.

If you want to try the same experiment, download a blank copy of this workbook template for free. After you click the link, you’ll find the download button in the top-right corner of your screen.

What my daily tracking actually looked like

Several apps, one disconnected routine

A frustrated woman holds her head and screams while surrounded by smartphones and multiple notification bell icons. Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek | Prostock-studio/Shutterstock

On paper, my routine wasn’t complicated. But in practice, it meant jumping between apps throughout the day. Sleep, workouts, food, spending, and work all lived in different places, and while each one worked fine in isolation, none of them shared context. A bad night of sleep never showed up next to too much screen time, and I never explicitly linked a stretch of low-energy habits to a slow day at my desk.

That separation is what prompted me to try using Excel. I set up a single workbook with five named tabs: Sleep, Habits, Food & Drink, Work, and Spending, plus another Dashboard worksheet that brought all metrics together. Nothing complex—just a shared structure where everything could exist in the same format instead of being scattered across apps.

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Windows, macOS, iPhone, iPad, Android

Free trial

1 month

Microsoft 365 includes access to Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on up to five devices, 1 TB of OneDrive storage, and more.


The structure that made the experiment work

Building a system simple enough to survive a week

Each tab stayed intentionally lightweight so that I would actually keep using it.

Sleep went into a named table (T_Sleep), where I logged bedtime and wake time in hh:mm format. Hours slept were calculated automatically using:

=MOD([@[Wake Time]]-[@Bedtime], 1)*24


Illustration of puzzle pieces connected, showing a problem linked to the =MOD function in Excel, with a connection leading to the solution and Excel icons around.


How to Use Excel’s MOD Function to Solve Real-World Problems

MOD is more versatile than you might think.

Instead of overengineering the setup, I recorded screen time manually on a scale from 1 (low) to 3 (high) based on how much time I had spent on my phone before bed. Conditional formatting handled the feedback, with lower sleep values turning red and better nights shifting green.

Habit tracking lived in T_Habits, with one row per habit per day and a simple checkbox for completion. From there, I built T_HabitComp, which counted completed habits per day using:

=COUNTIFS(T_Habits[Day], [@Day], T_Habits[Completed], TRUE)

That fed directly into the dashboard, alongside a split between general habits and movement-focused ones like workouts and walks.

Food and drink sat in T_FoodDrink, structured as three entries per day for meals. Coffee was logged at the top of each day’s entry, and takeouts were flagged with checkboxes. It gave a rough sense of how each day played out, even if I wasn’t labeling it that way while logging it.

Work went into T_Work, where I logged hours worked and a productivity score (out of 10) based entirely on instinct. Some days felt focused, others felt scattered, and I reflected that directly in the score. Conditional formatting helped those differences stand out visually without needing extra analysis.

Spending lived in T_Spending, and I treated it differently from the rest. It was more of a separate contextual layer than part of the same routine loop. Data validation drop-down categories like groceries, takeout, coffee, impulse purchases, subscriptions, and transport helped me see where money was going, and I used a separate PivotTable to break down spending by category.

If you add new rows, remember to right-click the PivotTable and click Refresh to reflect those changes.

One small detail kept the whole system manageable: Excel tables automatically expand as new rows are added. That meant I never had to fix ranges or adjust formulas mid-week—structured references meant that everything scaled as I went.

The dashboard turned separate logs into one picture

Everything finally came together

A life-tracking dashboard in Excel, with summary cards at the top and trend charts beneath.

Once I started logging data, the dashboard quickly became the only part of the workbook I cared about.

At the top, I created summary cards: Average Sleep, Total Spending, Habit Completion, Average Productivity, Exercise Sessions, and Takeout Orders. Each one pulled directly from the underlying tables and updated automatically as I logged entries.

Below that, Excel charts showed how the week unfolded. Sleep appeared as a line over time; habits, coffee consumption, and screen time moved in columns; and work productivity sat alongside as its own timeline. Finally, I used a PivotChart to visualize spending over the week. Then, I removed the Y-axis from all the charts, as the point here was to emphasize relative movement and patterns, not exact values.


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That’s where the system started to make sense. Sleep, habits, and productivity formed the clearest loop. When I stayed up late scrolling, I could see it the next morning in lower sleep totals, and those days tended to feel less structured overall. When I kept habits consistent—especially workouts and walks—the rest of the day followed a more stable rhythm.

Spending didn’t follow the same pattern as the rest, and I stopped trying to force it into one. Instead, I noticed something else: on less structured days, takeout and impulse purchases showed up more often. Coffee tended to cluster on busier, slightly chaotic workdays, but it didn’t drive anything on its own—it just appeared alongside those stretches.

Individually, none of this was surprising, but seeing it layered together is what made it noticeable.

What I’ll take away from a week in Excel

For that week, everything lived in one workbook instead of separate apps. When I wanted the full picture, glancing at the dashboard made the connections in my routine much easier to notice. It felt like a useful reset—something I’ll probably return to when things feel too scattered.

That said, it didn’t replace the convenience of dedicated apps. Sleep trackers are still better at collecting data automatically, and spending apps still do a better job of capturing transactions without effort. But the experiment did change how I think about tracking in general—not as separate tools, but as one system where everything sits in the same frame.



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