Speed
Print duration is dependent on two components:
- How fast is your print head moving? I run velocities/accelerations similar to you partially because I have a 350 which is pushing the limits of 2020 extrusion and 6mm a/b belts as well as…
- How much filament you’re laying as the print head moves. This is influenced by your nozzle diameter, which in turn influences what kind of line width and layer height you can expect. It’s also influenced your extruder’s ability to melt plastic (eg volumetric flow). For ASA/ABS I limit volumetric flow to 35 mm^3/sec, or PLA I limit to 25 mm^3/sec, and for PETG I limit to 20 mm^3/sec
My print speed is often limited by volumetric flow - not the actual speed of my print head, so I haven’t bothered chasing higher ceilings. Granted, tend to print I print large/chunky/functional things so my goal is to lay down as much material as possible. If you’re chasing lots of fine detail, a smaller Voron can go faster than what I have but isn’t going to be that much faster than where you are now.
Print Quality
Thanks to a combination of CoreXY (rigidity) and Klipper (pressure advance, input shaping), I have basically zero ringing/ghosting show up in prints. It is worth talking about quality expectations though. Harsh lighting can reveal that layer lines are not perfectly aligned layer to layer. Not sure if this is a Voron thing or is it’s just more obvious now that my layers are a lot more noise free.
First layer
Automated gantry leveling (Klipper will get the bed and gantry to be ‘perfectly’ in plane thanks to 2.4s being able to mechanically move the four corners of the gantry independently - trident does similar, but moves the bed instead), a klicky probe and a Z calibration macro, and bed mesh make my first layers extremely consistent print to print.
One caveat: because the printer is enclosed and big (if you go for a 350), if you print sequential objects without letting the printer fully heat soak, the first layer will progressively get a touch higher and higher between prints as the printer expands in the z-axis.
Apple is almost the tale of two companies.
From the software usability perspective, they have the “it just works” reputation and that might be true if you’re doing really basic stuff. I’ve found both windows and Linux to be much more user friendly if you want to do mildly advanced things.
Their hardware is generally pretty solid but comes at a premium, especially once you start talking about increasing RAM/SSD capacity. I have both a MacBook pro M3 pro and a Snapdragon X Elite Lenovo Yoga slim 7x. The 7x can give great battery life, but is much more inconsistent in doing so. On the other hand, the 7x has an amszing 3k OLED screen, has a removable m3 SSD, and you can upgrade to 32 GB of RAM for around $100.
What I find interesting is that a large swath of developers have macs. I get it for some use cases (ARM emulation on ARM vs doing it on x86), but it seems like it’s a bit of a status symbol for others.