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.
That’s curious, about the red filament. And thanks for the detailed response. I appreciate it.
Yeah, I have no idea what’s up with that. The first time I didn’t think anything of it, the second time I thought it was an odd fluke, the third time I was looking at it quite askance, and the fourth time was with a spool of red ABS rather than PLA which did the same damn thing despite three other spools of other colors from not only the same brand but even the same package (it was a 4x250g sampler pack) behaving more or less correctly. And that made me mighty suspicious.
It’s still usable if you handle it carefully, but the end of the filament tends to snap off in storage or during handling, i.e. when loading and unloading it from the printer. Cooking it in the filament dryer doesn’t seem to result in much of a change on that front, either. I have no idea how this affects the final mechanical properties of the printed part, but I’ll bet you a dime it won’t be a positive impact.