I've been following the 3D printer world for quite a while, and it's time to jump in. While I am an engineer, I finally have to admit to myself that don't have the time to build a printer myself (3 kids, job, ...), and I'd rather spend my time designing and printing things than in debugging the printer, so I need to buy something that I can buy and use with fairly little fiddling around. But I can't buy a $10K+ commercial printer.
The latest models of all of the 3D printers all claim to be reliable, so I can't really tell - are any of the home 3D printers reasonably close to "plug and play"? The most reliable sounding printers are the Up! and the MakerBot, but there are quite a few newer RepRap's that also look interesting (and a larger build area is certainly appealing). Perhaps I should buy an assembled printer to start with, then build something like a Mendel?
What do you guys suggest?