It was definitely worth it for me.

I previously had a Ender 3v2 and an Ender 5 Plus and the E5P had constant issues in which I tried to upgrade it step by step to address those issues. However, never really could fix all of them. The last issues I just gave up on was the bed. While it worked fine, I never really could get a good first layer on the bed, when I calibrated the Z-offset correctly on one side, it wasn’t good on the other side because the nozzle was too far away from the bed. I rarely could get the bed mesh range under 0.4mm which was quite annoying. But smaller prints, it printed well.

Last year in October, I decided to build a Voron and got the 2.4 LDO kit for 350mm. Took a bit of time to get it all assembled and some hiccups here and there but since it is up and running there is really only one issue that I haven’t quite figured out yet (the A motor sometimes doesn’t want to turn, after re-plugging the cable and restarting, it works without issues).

But I could print PLA, ABS and ABS-GF on it so far. I am also currently building the Armor Turtle AFC (filament changer) for it.

But 770€ for a 250mm V2.4 sounds very low to me so I would assume that it is 2nd hand. This could be fine but keep in mind that the printer also could have issues, issues you might not know about where they would be coming from because you simply bought the machine as a whole. So, identifying the problem could be a bit annoying.

Other than that, I am really happy with mine, I usually get 0.1mm difference in the bed mesh range (running a voron tap as probe), the print speed is great (but I also didn’t optimise it and just used the speed settings from the default profile in Orca Slicer)

Yeah, got the mail yesterday. VIP member for 6 years and immediately cancelled it.

I mean, I am okay with paying for something that I use but double the price just like that? Nope.

relaible!!! I want to start a print and return once it is done. Not worrying about print failures

Well, any printer will do that if you calibrate it well enough. I have seen many people not doing anything in that regard and complaining that they can’t get anything to print.

However, getting to that calibration can be easier or more involved.

Works with a good slicer. Back in the day I used PrusaSlicer with UV-tools to convert it to Anycubic fileformat.

I only used PrusaSlicer for FDM prints; for resin, I use Chitubox or, more often, Lychee Slicer. “Good” is fairly ambiguous here because what would a “good” slicer look like to you? Either of the ones I mentioned would be good and are fairly popular.

resin vat mixing (vat tilting is good enough) to prevent resins from seperating during long prints

I don’t think that most consumer resin printers have this sort of feature. The Lift and retract of the built plate should be enough to keep the resin well-mixed and any resin that is separating because of that wouldn’t be something that I would consider buying again anyway. Funnily enough, since you mentioned Anycubic Resin, this was specifically my experience with it that it easily separated. Never had this problem with other manufacturers like Elegoo or Sunlu.

at least two washing containers (first stage dirty IPA, second stage “clean” IPA)

This would be hard to get “out of the box”, but you might be able to get a replacement container for the wash station separately (at least that is what I did).

I noticed none of the printers have magnetic/spring metal build platforms. Are they outdated/no longer required?

This is mostly an upgrade that you can do to add a magnetic sheet on which you then can add this flexible built plate. This is still around like WhamBam Flex plates. I used that on two of my printers but never bothered to do that on my current printer because with the right raft and bottom exposure settings there isn’t much need to do that, also it is messier.

cleaning liquid: Is isopropanol alcohol (IPA) still the goto?

Pretty much for any “normal” resin. Water-washable resin has gotten more popular but the majority is still cleaned with more aggressive solvents like IPA.

Cure and Wash? No idea. all the solutions I have looked at seem to be still similar to the old anycubic cure and wash. The Prusa CW1 on the other hand looks like a well-thought-out solution.

I think this should be answered based on what printer you choose in the end. My first Printer was an Elegoo Mars 2 Pro with a combo wash and cure box from Anycubic. I always had to remove the models from the built plate before washing them, which made a mess and I used so many paper towels to clean that up.

With my Saturn 4 Ultra, I can just take the built plate and put it into the Wash bucket and let both the built plate and the models get clean which is so much more convenient and I have less of a mess to clean up because it is just IPA that I have to wipe up and not Resin and then clean the surface with IPA again and wipe that up too.

As for the Printer, I am pretty happy with my Saturn 4 Ultra at the moment. It is affordable and I could quickly get it to print because of the Auto levelling feature (which isn’t really auto levelling) and the integrated exposure test which is much faster than what UVTools would generate. The VAT tilt is a bit dangerous because of a potential resin leak of the release film, leaking into your printer’s internals, but it will speed up the printing process quite a bit.

The other features like the camera weren’t that interesting to me but the 16K version has, for example, a light (which the first gen was missing) so you would also be able to check the printer in a dark environment. On the other hand, the AI detection for print failures is still something I would consider a gimmick because it would only do that from one side, the side facing the camera. A failure on any other side would not be detected.

Unfortunately, I also don’t have any other experience with other brands or printers, I only ever had Elegoo printers from the Mars 2 Pro, the Original Saturn and now the Saturn 4 Ultra and was fairly happy with all of them in what they brought me.

the gold old “that is their problem, I did send the data”

As someone who is currently building an LDO Voron (Voron 2.4 LDO Rev. D) most of those things are already included (like the Z-end-stop, the NiteHawk and panels)