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Hello all,

We talk about the stuff we print, and the printers we use, but you know what we never talk about? The actual media we use. So, I'm gonna talk about that here. I have both resin and FDM printers so I am gonna cover then both.

Filament, 1.75mm in my Anycubic I3 Mega:


For PLA I really like Hatchbox Silver. It's excellent quality, doesn't break or jam or glob or do anything undesirable, and the silver color is a nice neutral color for printing.

At one point, I bought a case of 10 of these for $140. At the time, I felt a bit dumb - that is kind of a chunk of cash for something I thought I might never use. I've been kicking myself since then because of course I raced through it, and now it's not in production due to rona. I wish I had bought 2, more so since it's now $35 a roll... used.

Note that I can sometimes find hatchbox gray, which looks similar... but has awful reviews. All of the hatchbox filaments are highly rated, but they gray seems to have some kind of of problem and people hate it.

I also have used AmazonBasics and it's kind of a roll of the dice with them, since they don't consistently use the same supplier. Generally I've had good experiences - my last one was excellent, even - but again can't bank on it. Also, I am not fond of their wide boi style rolls, but that's just nitpicking.


Sunlu PLA Plus: Was not thrilled with this. Even after adjusting my heat settings, I have to gluestick my bed to get this to stick (I have an ultrabase and normally do nothing for adhesion). This is nearly as tricky as ABS, without any of the benefits of ABS.

Anycubic PLA: Not quite as nice as Hatchbox, but still pretty good. One notable exception was a roll of this hideous yellow stuff, which worked super, super well. I don't know why I bought fluorescent yellow filament but it was excellent and I wound up using it for a lot of stuff.

Inland PETG: I have limited petg experience. A friend gave me a roll of this to use to turn out masks and ear savers for nurses when covid first popped off. It took a while to dial in; and I never did 100% resolve stringing with it, but the actual material seems quite nice.

ABS: I don't mess with this much because it reeks and is a pain in the butt to use without an enclosure, but I have used Hatchbox black with decent success. I have to work for it, but I also rarely print functional stuff so it's not a huge issue either.


Resin: Anycubic Photon / Photon S

Anycubic Grey\White: These are really good resins and were my go-to colors for a long time. The grey is my favorite because it photographs better, if you want to take pictures of prints not yet painted. The white is just as decent for printing, but doesn't photograph as well.

these were supplanted by:

Anycubic Eco Green Plant Based: Really like this stuff, despite the fact it's another hideous color. 5.5 second layer time and I get great, non-brittle prints. My current go-to. Ugly but quite good.

Anycubic Green: this comes with the printers for a reason, it's their most idiot proof resin. I like the grey\eco green a little better since it has a tiny but of "give" post wash/ pre UV cure, but the eco rgeen also costs $90 a liter bottle and this is like $40 a liter.

Anycubic Maroon: Absolute trash. I got a bottle of this for free from Anycubic after having an issue, and it has no value to me even for zero dollars. It is very difficult to get this resin tuned, it warps, it doesn't stick, and it's ugly. No reason to buy this ever and I'm not using it even for free.

Nova3D resin - grey: trash, very brittle.

eSun bio-resin, yellow: Another ugly, but excellent resin. Quite strong, unusually so. Bad bottle design. I'd recommend it despite the bad bottles and ugly color.

eSun clear: Not 100% clear - more like a very light amber. Works OK, but I have barely used it since it's for specific purposes (cockpits, windows).

Siraya Easy: Have not messed with this much but have not been encouraged by basic tests. the supports that work with other models seem inadequate with easy, sticks to the fep, peels of the plate mid-print. I suspect that much like Siraya Blue, you need to keep this pretty warm when printing, and I don't have an enclosure, so I am not geared to get the best results. Maybe.

Probably would not buy again.

Siraya Tenacious: This is one that is a little flexible, and impact resistant. I don't print with this one directly, usually: I add some of this to my grey or white resins (3:1 normal resin to tenacious, give or take) to give my parts a little flex. In that sense, it's pretty good.


How about you guys?

I’m honestly still on my first spool of Hachbox black. It was recommended to me, and I’ve not had any issues I could trace to it.

But I’m pretty casual.

I have an anycubic photon (I'd have picked up an ender 5 by now if coronavirus hadn't impacted upon us.) I've had great results with the green resin, and have so far printed about 3.5 litres of it. I had the same experience with the maroon; couldn't even get the test print off.

After the Anycubic PLA I had with the I3 Mega, my first roll was AMZ3D black PLA. Got on well so used a couple more rolls.

Tried some grey SunLu PLA+, and found it finicky for adhesion, but produced a nice finish, seemed to flow nicely so didn't get many under or over extrusion artifacts and it bridges well.

Needed some white in a hurry, so got some BasicFIL from Amazon on a 500g roll. This has been a really pleasant surprise, and I'll be buying more, really bright, clean white, prints well and is (fluctuations notwithstanding) often a lot cheaper than pretty much everything.

I've had my Anycubic Mega-S for half a year now (shoutout to Ouze for tips on setting it up!). I've been most happy with Anycubic PLA, gone through about 10kg of it. Before corona a 5kg batch was $15/kg shipped. I print terrain and usually try to use the right color for what the terrain would be (brown for wood, gray for stone, etc) so I'm not that pressured to paint it before use. But by far the nicest results were on a random roll of satin dark blue I got with the printer. Their white is pretty bad.

Also tried one local brand that's alright, and a Polish brand called Print-Me that was trash, 60 degree overhangs were too much for it and layer adhesion was poor.