Forty-two machines that people genuinely own, each with the specifications that affect what a print costs and what it can be made from: build volume, stock nozzle, maximum nozzle and bed temperature, enclosure type, extruder and motion system, and power draw.
Wattage, and why it is stated three ways
Power is the field most likely to be wrong in published print-cost figures, so each printer records three numbers rather than one:
- Idle — powered on, heaters off.
- Printing — the steady-state average once the bed and hotend have reached temperature. This is the figure the cost calculator uses.
- Heat-up peak — the transient while the bed comes up, which is large and short.
Each set is labelled with its basis: metered figures repeatedly reported by owners, manufacturer power-supply ratings, or an estimate from machines of the same bed size, bed voltage and enclosure type. Estimates are marked as estimates on the page. A power-supply rating is a ceiling, not a consumption figure, and quoting it as one overstates a real print by five to ten times.
Reading the wattages against each other
Sort these profiles by printing wattage and the ordering will not track price, speed or motion system. It tracks bed size, with enclosure type as the modifier — which is why two machines that look like peers on a spec sheet can sit forty watts apart, and why a small enclosed printer sometimes undercuts a large open one on running cost.
"Enclosed" is also doing more work in that sentence than it looks. A chamber with its own heater draws power the whole time; a box that merely keeps the bed's own warmth in draws none. Both get called enclosed, and only one of them shows up on the meter. The electricity cost method works the physics through with figures; the profiles here are where you read off which kind of machine you actually have.
What the specifications rule in and out
Maximum nozzle temperature decides which materials are available at all: 260 °C rules out polycarbonate, and 300 °C is the practical entry point for filled nylon. Enclosure type decides whether high-shrinkage materials are realistic. A stock hardened nozzle decides whether you can print a filled filament today or need to order a part first.
Those four fields answer most "can my printer do X" questions before you read a single sentence of prose.
What is not in these profiles
There are no scores, no rankings and no verdicts. Which machine is "best" depends on what you print, how much space you have and what you already own, and a number out of ten is a poor substitute for the four or five specifications that actually decide whether a printer can do the job in front of you.
There is also no print-quality assessment. Quality on a modern machine is dominated by profile tuning, filament condition and part geometry, and any claim that one printer is inherently sharper than another at the same layer height and nozzle size deserves more scepticism than it usually gets.
Using a profile with the calculators
The two fields the calculators read are steady-state printing wattage and maximum bed temperature. The first goes straight into the electricity term of a print's cost; the second, together with the enclosure type, decides which materials are worth considering at all. If your machine is not listed, find the closest one by bed size and enclosure type and the estimate will be close enough to act on.