Investigation discovers the surprising result that slicers introduce more error into prints than the printer itself.
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
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Not very surprising, slicers do the difficult job of determining every movement the printer will take. Printers just execute those.
When I got into this stuff, this was pretty much common knowledge. The fuck happened that it ain't now?
Printers have become appliances instead of a hobby.
Nowadays you have: Push button -> get thing.
Instead of a 30 minute process of leveling the print bed, 4 different pieces of software to get the gcode correct, a specific time, temperature, and humidity level filament needed to be kept at, a custom enclosure to prevent the draft from walking across the room causing layer shifts, and a prayer to the ether that there wasn't some type of fault on the SD card that would corrupt the gcode and gouge your brand new tempered glass bed.
Haven't touched 3D printing in a long time but about the only thing I remember related to the printer itself was doing a liquid cooling mod for the head which gave a more consistent structure output.
Otherwise everything revovled around slicing techniques & settings and snapoff structure points in the correct spots.