Sovol SV08 or Prusa MK4S

If you are willing to spend the money, I would highly recommend a Prusa. The quality of service and support alone is worth the extra money. If the cost of a Prusa bothers you, I would point you at Qidi as a more budget friendly brand. If I was starting over and looking to buy my first printer, I would be looking at the Core One or the Qidi Plus 4. And Qidi is set to release their own AMS called the Qidi box for the Plus 4 here shortly.

Edit to add: There is nothing to fear from Klipper. MainSail is easy to pickup and use.

I have a prusa M4 with multi-material head, and I am super happy with it. It started as a M3, and has been upgraded twice to become what it is today.

It was expensive, but prusa really does have great support for free, which is worth a LOT. And the upgradability means you end up spending less if you keep with the hobby over years.

But one caviat, I have the printer set up and my friend's house, because he has more space and free time. So most of what I know about it comes from his experience, not mine. I do lots of CAD, but I don't often actually touch the printer myself.

The SV08 is a decent printer if you're willing to tinker and regularly recalibrate the shit out of it. Sometimes it's absolutely perfect after THE right calibration move. Sometimes it's absolute shit and nothing prints properly and/or sticks to the bed and you need to recalibrate it. I've found that heat soaking it for at least 1/2h before each print and recalibrating the probe as soon as printing is slightly less than perfect helps a lot.

My takeways:

• Taco bed is a minor issue if you can properly probe.
• It's FAST and the print volume is excellent
• Everything is automated and/or software controlled so fixing issues can be quite a nightmare if you're used to all-manual troubleshooting (I come from an Ender3)
• Build quality is OK. It probably needs some costly upgrades to get to Voron-level (Stealthburner hotend, thick aluminium plate, enclosure etc.)
• The DIY upgrades ecosystem seems very active.
• Klipper+Mainsail are amazing

Get a Sovol if you're a tinkerer and you want to maximize speed and build volume per currency unit.

Get a Prusa if you want a high quality printer out of the box.

I've got an SV08. It's not a perfect printer, but making a printer without the problems it has (e.g. the bed takes nearly an hour to settle after it's reached temperature, so it needs a long preheat for all but the shortest prints) would require making it much more expensive (e.g. a thick aluminium or graphite bed that wouldn't warp would add another 20% of the cost of the printer). That specific problem is sidestepped with the MK4S by simply having a much smaller build volume rather than because it's higher-end and more expensive. I've not needed support from Sovol (yet?), so can't comment on whether they're still super slow like they supposedly were right after the SV08 launched.

The review from The Canuck Creator of the SV08 was not awesome. They may have fixed those issues.

Can you explain a bit more your context, what you are looking for, tinkering or not, internet mandatory, opensource, etc...

We have one mk4 in our Hackerspace, 4 x MK3 and 1 x XL. The MK4 just churn out parts from various inexperienced people and seeing more usage than any other machines without failing. All the parts are available to reprint if needed. It's a good choice BUT it's expensive and you may want something else.

I have 2 Vorons at home, works good for me but too complex for my wife to launch a print by herself. So she is more confident to print at the Hackerspace.

There's a variety of printers but without knowing more about you, it's hard to recommand something

How do you feel about building a printer?

The SV08 is basically a Voron 2.4, and while I think that it’s not bad for the money, for close to the same amount you can buy a Formbot 2.4R2 350mm kit.

A standard Voron 2.4 build will be easier to add a tool changer to compared to a SV08 (efforts are ongoing though). It runs mainline Klipper, which will also open up a myriad of other options. The Voron is much more of a project though.

I recently traded up my Sovol SV06 for a Prusa CORE One and have MK4Ss and an SV07 Plus at work. The Sovols are good budget machines in general, but the SVO6 was so much more reliable than the SV07 Plus, which required a lot more troubleshooting. The MK4Ss and the CORE One are great if you have the budget to spend on them. They're reliable and good quality. The community of users is large and any issues you might run into have typically been troubleshot by others already.

I have a Prusa MK4 and i really like it. Even though you would get better quality prints with the same amount of money else where, its just good enough for my needs. And i love having the peace of mind that the owner behind it really likes open source. I do not have the feeling that i get features stripped away from me or some other corpo bullshit ruining my day. Use it since 2.5 years (~5 prints/month) now never had to fix anything.

Got an sv08 as an upgrade from a ender 3 v2, it's quite the improvement, it's been faultless, hit print and forget.

Negatives are the firmware updates (Files could be way better organized/handled) and I suppose if sovol ever dissappeared getting nozzles might be a pain.

Really glad I got it.

I like the sovol sv06 Plus. I have 3

FWIW, I've been a long time Prusa user, but I'm returning my Prusa mk4s and wouldn't buy one ever again.