I started, like a lot of people, on an original Ender 3. It was 2019, and for the price it felt like a miracle. But I still remember the late nights spent chasing a perfect first layer, the hours nursing a hotend through a print it clearly didn’t want to finish, and the creeping suspicion that I was spending more time fixing the machine than using it. A few Ender 3 Pros and an Ender 5 later, I’d swapped enough parts and sunk enough evenings into “quality of life” mods to build a second printer from the scraps.
If I could hand my 2019 self a machine that you can buy off the shelf today, I’d have saved hundreds of hours and a small fortune in upgrade parts. But the things I wish for now aren’t just about hardware. They’re about the whole experience: software, reliability, and an industry that stops making the same mistakes every product cycle. DREMC wouldn't have been here if its was for the the Ender 3 though...
Here’s what I wish I’d had back then, and what I’m still waiting for.
1. Bed Levelling You Don’t Have to Learn
Everyone talks about auto bed levelling as the game-changer, and it is. But in 2019, what I really needed wasn’t a probe, it was a hotend and bed that held their tram for more than three prints. The original Ender 3 required constant re-levelling because the springs relaxed and the gantry sagged. You learned to level a bed not because you wanted a new skill, but because you had no choice. Its later had Bl Touch which great qualty life, z offset can be automtically and mesh can adjust for small variance in bed surface with nozzle/gantry.
Today, a decent printer comes with a rigid bed mount, a probe, and a heated bed that stays flat. The “levelling” isn’t a craft; it’s a five-minute setup routine that you forget about for weeks. For the daily user who just wants a tool that works, that’s the real wish fulfilled: not having to become a bed tramming expert in the first place.
2. Direct Drive That Doesn’t Cost You in Ringing
Back then, adding direct drive to an Ender 3 meant printing a bracket, buying a dual-gear extruder, and hoping your X-axis didn’t sag into oblivion. It was a project, not a feature. And you lost print speed because the added weight introduced ringing you had to tune out.
Modern direct-drive systems ship from the factory balanced and light. You get reliable TPU prints out of the box, fewer retraction issues with PETG, and input shaping handles the rest. If I’d had a factory-tuned direct drive in 2019, I’d have spent a lot less time clearing heat creep clogs from a Bowden tube sitting slightly too far from the nozzle.
3. A Build Plate That Doesn’t Fight You
I owned a glass bed, a BuildTak sheet, blue tape, hairspray, the full museum of adhesion solutions. When flexible PEI-coated spring steel sheets became common, it felt like cheating. Everything sticks, everything releases with a flex, and you never chip a print off with a scraper again.
This is the single most underappreciated upgrade to the user experience. It doesn’t improve print quality. It just removes a daily source of frustration. And in a hobby that still has plenty of friction, removing friction is the whole point.
4. Silent Steppers That Weren’t a Re-crimping Project
Creality’s silent board upgrade was a revelation, but it involved opening the electronics enclosure and swapping mainboards. A lot of beginners in 2019 just accepted their printer sounded like a dying fax machine. Now, silent stepper drivers are so standard that a noisy printer is the exception. If you run a print farm or just want to sleep in the same house as your machine, the silence isn’t a luxury, it’s the baseline.
5. Networking Without a Diploma in IT
This is the one that stings the most. In 2019, if you wanted to monitor a print from another room, you set up a Raspberry Pi with OctoPrint, wrestled with port forwarding or a VPN (for external access), and prayed your router didn’t reset. I watched a lot of spaghetti develop because I couldn’t check a webcam feed from my couch.
Today, printers ship with cloud connectivity built in. You upload a file from your slicer, hit print, and check a live feed on your phone. For print farms, it goes further: remote queuing, filament management so you know which printer already has PETG loaded, and the ability to stage jobs without walking to each machine. I still advise caution with exposing your printer to the cloud, we tell family and friends to be aware of the security trade-offs but the convenience leap from 2019 is hard to overstate. What used to require a networking hobbyist can now be done by anyone, and that peace of mind is worth real money.
Beyond Hardware: The Things You Can’t Bolt On
The hardware list only captures half the story. The bigger thing I wish I’d had in 2019 was an honest, upfront understanding of what I was buying into. The market was awash with clones of Prusa MK2 clones, Ender 3 clones all marketed as “plug and play” when they were anything but. Countless buyers bought a printer to support their main hobby or design work, only to find they’d accidentally bought a project. For every person who loves tinkering and treats their printer like a project car, there are ten who just needed a daily commuter that starts every morning without a spanner.
Today, that line is clearer. The Bambu effect has reset expectations that cost effective: a machine based on older Voron 1 kinematics but wrapped in genuinely user-friendly software. I cannot delay Prusa was gold standard before Bambu for off-shelf assembled printer but price tag mostly limited most hobbyist. The wish, then, is not just for better printers but for better marketing, for manufacturers to stop shipping a product and calling it finished when it needs a community to fix it.
Tough Love: Don’t Buy a 2019 Printer in 2026
If someone walked into the store today determined to save a hundred dollars on a used, unenclosed machine from the Ender 3 era, I’d tell them no. Unless they explicitly want a project platform, a machine to tear down and rebuild for the joy of it, the value just isn’t there. For the same money, a new printer from any major brand will outperform it in speed, reliability, and noise. There are printers we recommend at every budget, and none of them require you to relive 2019.
If price isn’t the main constraint, our recommendation leans heavily toward Prusa, not just saying we are Reseller of Prusa 3D Printers (the only printer we have sold directly to consumer since we operated). The track record of long-term support is unmatched. You can still buy parts for a Mk2 today, and anything printed can be reprinted by another machine. That longevity is a feature, and it’s the one thing you can’t add as a bolt-on after the sale.
What I’m Still Waiting For (2027 and Beyond)
Looking forward just to next year, the tools I wish I had now are already emerging. Tool changers the Snapmaker U1s, Bondtech’s Indx solution, Flashforge’s entry to make multi-material printing practical without the waste of a purge block to mainstream. Creality’s filament production system (the M1) hints at a future where you recycle your own waste on-site (updated on April 2026). These are the building blocks of a printer that closes the loop.
But my biggest wish isn’t a specific feature. It’s that manufacturers commit to supporting their existing platforms. Too many brands release a new printer with new parts that aren’t backwards compatible, when the existing parts were already good and didn’t need a redesign. As a spare parts dealer, I see the inventory fragmentation firsthand. The true next-generation machine won’t just have a tool changer and a filament recycler, it’ll have a manufacturer behind it that treats the printer as a platform, not a seasonal product. That’s the machine I wish I had in 2019, and I’m still waiting for it in 2027 but Prusa latest Indx is almost there.
