Nozzle Brands, cheap vs brand name

With all the various brands of brass nozzles out there like the Chinese ones on ebay or Amazon to genuine e3d nozzles, is there a brand that has good performance that won't break the bank?? A few months ago not knowing anything I was tempted by quantity vs quality. I got excited to buy 30 nozzles for $8 on amazon. Tho it is nice to have the spares and the variety of sizes, but I rarely needed to replace a nozzle or even tried different sizes. I have since decided to go with e3d v6 nozzles and have had little or no issues printing. I have a few Chinese ones that I have yet to try, I bought them thinking I would need spares.

I purchased a $9 Chimera clone from Aliexpress and immediately change the heatbreak and nozzle. Doing so I've had good performance. The jams were do to poorly manufactured PLA. Let's be real here we're all hackers and if we can get same or better performance from a $9 hotend over a $120, we would certainly go the cheaper route.


That being said, Is there a brand or vendor that that has comparable performance to the e3d nozzles? I'm still new to printing and don't have an ton of hours under my belt. The experience that I do have with the cheap nozzles was when I was still trying to get the printer sorted and doing basic prints. I'm always a little hesitant to make changes when the printer is finally working well. I start to tinker and end up spending hours fixing or tuning.

The main problem with clone products is inconstancy

Your question is unanswerable as this week brand X is good, but next week it will be crap and brand Y is good.

Sometimes this is even deliberate... they release some good samples, get good reviews and then they switch to the the known inferior products....

Fair point. Again the QC stinks and we should be aware that a good number will be junk.

I guess I was trying to get at is if you go to say a TriangleLabs, do their nozzles have better quality? Probably a bit better??? I suppose the best bet is still go with the name brand like e3d and you won't be miserable.

About 6 months ago I bought an 8-pack of 0.4 mm nozzles via amazon.com for $10, expecting trash. Close inspection inside and out with a microscope revealed that half of them were very well machined and the other half were not so great, but probably useable. I put the two groups in marked bags and will use the good ones and keep the not-so-good ones as spares. At $1.25 each (actually $2.50 for the good ones) it was worth a gamble. Machining brass nozzles isn't rocket science.

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Ultra MegaMax Dominator 3D printer: [drmrehorst.blogspot.com]