Hi, all. So I’m pretty new to this hobby, and this might seem like a short-sighted question. But I was wondering, how important is the brand name when buying filament? I live in South Korea, which means AliExpress orders arrive here pretty quickly and are generally a viable option. The thing is that I see filament on Ali for half the price of the reputable brand name stuff I can get in Korea. Do any of you have any experience with the cheaper, no-name stuff? Is plastic just plastic, and the brand is just jacking up the price because they can? Or is there an important difference between the filament produced by the big brands and filament made in China that I can get for much cheaper? Any and all advice would be much appreciated.
in my experience brand filament was less hassle to print with.
I bought cheapo noname filament a couple of times from different manufacturers and it was very hit and miss.
Worst case was I fiddled with printer settings for 6hours, drying it multiple times and many failed prints. Then I put in bambu filament and it printed perfectly with default settings.
But best case was just as good as the expensive stuff.
So you have to know yourself how much the gamble is worth it to you, what your frustration tolerance is etc.
Thanks for the response. I’ll see what I can dig up about some of the AliExpress brands; perhaps one of them has some consistency.