I bought my first 3D printer nearly 4 years ago. It was a bottom of the range Ender filament printer that cost about $300. It was a bitch to assemble & frustrating to learn to use, but once I got the hang of it worked pretty well most of the time.
The quality of the models made with a filament printer is not as good as a more expensive resin printer, but perfectly adequate for wargame figures, & there's no hassles with noxious fumes. The most frequent problem is failed adhesion to the base plate which happens occasionally for no apparent reason. There are a number of reasons this can happen, but eventually you learn the signs & can ID the issue & fix it without too much hassle.
After I proved to myself that 3-D printing was the future for wargaming & also useful for my work, I bought a second printer, a better model that cost about $350. It had a better control unit, but otherwise not a lot different. I wanted two printers for two reasons: To speed up production, & to provide redundancy in case of breakdown. A few months ago the second machine developed a fault in the extruder that I have been unable to fix. The first machine is still working as good as new.
I bought the first two printers on-line, but Jaycar now stock them locally with a good range of models. These include the Creality Ender-3 V3 SE on special for $250. From looking at the display model I could see that despite the low price, it was a significant up-grade from the old models I have & the price was more than right, so I bought one.
The old models came as a box of many bits that were a real pain to assemble with inadequate instructions that I needed to supplement with youtube videos & advice from Nick Bowler. The new model is mainly pre-assembled into just 3 modules which are easily screwed together & also has a manual that is easy to understand.
The old models require manual levelling with 4 knobs which is tedious & needs to be re-done frequently. The new model has a self-levelling mode, which though slow is just one click.
Feeding a new filament into the extrusion module of the old design can be annoyingly tricky & I've found the module is such a tightly packed mess of tiny components I was unable to replace a fault & re-assemble it. The new model has a larger, simpler, & easier to use feed mechanism which looks less prone to fault & easier to maintain.
The old machines use a mini memory card that is fiddly & easy to lose. The new one uses a bigger memory card that is much easier to use.
The control screen is a further improvement over my second model.
The only problem I had in getting the new one going was bed adhesion. My first tries had no adhesion. But the problem was easier to fix than on old modules, as the most common causes, the base getting out of level, or the z-offset drifting off optimum are much easier to adjust. The self levelling function is one click so I'd done that so I knew that was right. The Z-offset (the height of the nozzle for the first layer) was factory set at -1.5 but is easily adjusted from the control panel. By trial & error I found that -2.5 was the Goldilocks spot.
Previously, I wouldn't recommend getting a 3-D printer to anyone except serious nerds becasue of the frustrating idiosyncrasies of the machines. (I was fortunate to have an alpha nerd mentor in Nick to supplement youtube videos, plus engineering experience to help me learn the ropes). The new model is not only remarkably cheap, but significantly easier to use. It's still a bit more complex & fault prone than a 2-D paper printer, but not excessively so.
While making the computer files for a model from scratch is a very difficult task requiring the mastery of very complex apps, there are heaps of ready made files available for download at moderate cost or free. Apps that convert those files to the right format for the machine are free & pretty easy to use.
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