I've wanted a 3D printer for a long, long time, but recently they have come down so much in price that I couldn't resist any more and picked up a FlashForge Adventurer AD5M. Out of the box it can really only handle PLA and PETG, but I've upgraded it with an enclosure kit and additional nozzle that make it capable of printing most filaments.
In fact, I have long had a Geetech G2S Pro delta printer. Sadly, I never really got it working well, and it has been damaged in various moves. It can't see any of the temperature sensors, and the lower acrylic plate is cracked. I still have yet to take a serious look at it, but it might just wind up broken down into parts. If I can get the electrics working, I might send off for an aluminum bottom plate and see if I can get it working the rest of the way now that I have more filament to play with. I was working on touchless bed leveling at the time.
The AD5M is part of a family of three printers, also including the enclosed and heated AD5M Pro, and the AD5X multi-material printer. These are all basically the same hardware, except that the AD5X has a different control board and the hardware to feed four filament types. I'm not really interested in doing multi-material without either a tool changer or multiple heads, because I don't want to be making a bunch of printer poops. Supports are wasteful enough for me as is.
The AD5M was available to me for about $211, while it was nearly $400 for the pro. I estimate I will not be far over $300 into this printer by the time I have all of the pro features, which specifically include the enclosure, a light strip, camera, heated build chamber, and shutter exhaust. The pro's enclosure is nicer as it is fully injection molded, but printing the enclosure was a nice way to familiarize myself with this printer. I will be putting in a 110VAC 400W heater, which doesn't involve the existing power supply, and probably a separate controller. The AD5M control board will run the air shutter servo, but I'm not sure yet whether it has enough of the onboard control circuitry to even run a SSR to control the heater, and it looks like the AD5M pro uses a 24V heater and a bigger power supply.
So what are the strengths of this family of printers? First and probably foremost, ease of use starting at the very beginning. This printer has a load cell in the bed, which is used for leveling. This means that it flawlessly calculates the Z-offset for you, even if you have changed the hotend. There is also manual leveling of the bed with screws, which was dialed in at the factory so I didn't have to mess with it. As the machine is maintained in the future (with belt replacements and such) it will be necessary to do this, but this is another area where this printer shines as it guides you through this process, telling you which screws to turn and which way.
The first run for the printer includes calibration of the PID settings for the heaters, as well as a vibration calibration that is supposed to reduce "ringing". This printer is capable of such rapid moves that it shakes quite a bit despite being built very solidly. While it has a plastic base (made of ABS, I think) this is well-reinforced and does not appear to be any kind of issue, and the bulk of the printer is made of curved stamped steel which has a lot of rigidity as well. All of this is handled without any user interaction besides pressing the occasional acknowledgement button on the LCD display as the process occurs.
Another reason the printer is easy to use is the nozzle system. You can buy traditional hotends (including "V6" types) for this printer which work just fine, but the stock hotends are rapidly interchangeable with a snap-in system released with levers on each side of the print head. Some of the replacement hotends also use this same system. The hotend also has an electrical connector on it with a smart interface, so the printer knows which nozzle has been installed. It comes only with a typical .040mm brass hotend, but if you look around you can find the official hardened steel .060 hotend for under $25. The pro version also comes with this hotend. It is needed for printing so-called "engineering" materials with carbon or glass fibers in them, or for TPU or Nylon. You must install an enclosure for these latter materials, and you should also heat the enclosure.
The other major feature of this printer is its speed. It is capable at printing at 600mm/sec, which puts it among its fastest competitors. Most materials will be printed more slowly, for example I'm printing PETG at 300mm/sec, which is still a fairly good clip. "High speed" PLA can reasonably be printed at 500-600mm/sec, and I did some test prints with the included 50g of FlashForge "Burnt Titanium" HS-PLA at 600mm/sec with very good results. (The pro comes with 250g of sample filament.) This printer is seriously fast, and with high speed materials and a large nozzle you should be able to knock out large parts very quickly.
Besides the currently low price, those are the important strengths. The weaknesses are slightly low extruder temperature and small size. This printer is not particularly lacking in either category; The build area is 220x220x220mm, and the maximum temperature is 280 degrees C. Like most modern printers the build plate is magnetic, removable, and flexible, making it easy to pop prints off, though if they don't come off with the print then you might struggle with skirts because the adhesion is so good. The heated build plate has a 100 degree limit, which is a better showing than the hotend; free reminder, AliExpress (where I bought the printer) also has heat-resistant gloves for just a few bucks.
The enclosure I keep mentioning is part of why I decided I would go ahead and mess with FlashForge. They operate a Wiki which notably includes a collection of mods and accessories for these printers, including the enclosure kit. You can buy the kits in a variety of levels, but they all require you to print the bulk of the structure. Some of them come with a drag chain and a bracket for relocating the filament sensor from the back to the inside, and some do not. You can also buy none of them because the dimensions of the acrylic panels are provided, and you can print all of the other parts needed besides the screws and magnets, all of which are well-described in the documentation. I bought the hardware and acrylic panels for $44, including none of the printed parts, and then proceeded to mix and match my way to a complete enclosure from different designs I found partly by using yeggi.com. The bulk of them were found on Printables. I went with the rounded vertical guard panels from the original kit, this extended front shield plate, the top parts from the v3 retrofit minimal enclosure, this no-hardware drag chain kit, a remix of one of the rounded plates, and finally made some bushings to mount the (very affordably priced) AD5M Pro LED bar.
It is probably of note that all of this stuff came from AliExpress. You can get all of it on Amazon, but most of it will cost between slightly and quite a bit more except for the enclosure kit itself, which is slightly cheaper. The printer itself shipped from the US, while everything I've bought for it but filament has shipped from China, and some of that as well. FlashForge is also not giving these prices currently on their own website, and the printer itself is $299 there. This is really not cheaper than the competition, so there's less reason to go with this less known brand. They have a good track record with these printers, with steady updates to the software. You can also install the camera from the pro model, which is available very cheaply complete with a printed bracket that holds it up out of the way in the corner. This plugs in to the back of the LCD panel with an included cable. Apparently you can also plug other cameras into the USB port, but it only has one of those and I've been doing all my printing by just loading gcode via USB. It's less inconvenient than it sounds, because you've got to go to the printer between prints to get stuff out of it anyway. I have the printer in the garage, where fumes aren't an issue, but I am making plans for an exhaust system with a tiny fan in it to draw fumes out under negative pressure.
Finally, speaking of software, it's worth mentioning both that it's decent but limiting, but also that you can get past those limits fairly neatly. The control system runs Linux, and it can easily be modded using the same update system as the stock firmware. The two primary options are KlipperMod and ZMOD, the latter of which I'll be exploring soon. There's also Forge-X, which is a mod of ZMOD. If you want to control the printer directly from your PC without using FlashForge's custom version of OrcaSlicer, then you need to install at least one of these mods. The integration in the stock software is also cloud-based, and if you want to go around that, you need to use a mod. The cloud integration is both potentially invasive (it has the name and thumbnail of what you're printing) and somewhat flaky. The printer's WiFi is also inconvenient in that if it loses your network you have to restart WiFI to get it reconnected, so you're better off using a wired connection with an additional access point if necessary. I found the range of the WiFi to be decent, but not great.
With all of that said: If all you want to do is print PLA and PETG you only need to do four things to set it up: Unpack the printer, attach the screen to the frame which is done by placing it in the right position and sliding it leftwards, stick the PTFE tubing into the filament sensor and the print head, and either attach the filament holder to the back or set up another one. After that it's all just allowing it to self-calibrate, loading filament, and watching it print. It starts out by printing a half-cube, and there's a few other gcodes in the memory as well which you can use to test it, like a keychain with the FlashForge logo which came out as perfectly as one would hope with the included filament on the first try. It comes with all the tools you will need to mess with it (though you would definitely benefit from a proper #2 screwdriver if you install the enclosure kit instead of the enclosed one) as well as bed adhesive and guide rod lubricating grease. I found absolutely nothing irritating or confusing about getting set up and going, and the included quick start documentation is clear. This is a really A+ effort from FlashForge and I expect to have more good things to say about it in the future.