Recommendations of filament companies to buy PLA or ones to stay away from?

[pluggedIN 1]

For those who havn't seen it, there is this massive list of places to buy filament:

Printing Material Suppliers

The ones I've seem to hear the most chatter about are colorFabb, Faberdashery, and MatterHackers. Any other ones to recommend or ones to stay away from (either because of service or compatibility)?

I'm about to order my first non-Ultimaker filament from Faberdashery. I've heard good things about them, and I really like that you can buy it in quantities less than a full spool. Do any other companies offer that? (especially ones with cheaper shipping rates to the US )

[BrayChristopher 36]

I like the PLA from 3D Universe (and the price). They ship out of Chicagoland.

https://ultimaker.com/reply/forward/120349

https://ultimaker.com/en/community/prints/3440-random-shroud

I like bigger spools because the color is not that important to me and it reduces the "dead ends" of filament at the end of a spool.

[gr5 2,224]

In the USA I recommend colorFabb filament from printedSolid.com.

The "PLA/PHA" filaments are great.

Colorfabb is just now coming out with some new filaments including something called "ngen" which is very promising and might replace most of the PLA out there. Eventually. I'm kind of excited about it. printedSolid doesn't carry it yet.

[Dim3nsioneer 558]

Ngen is indeed nice to print but also on the brittle side...

[krys 206]

Hi there,

I can share some experiences. I agree with gr5, PLA/PHA from Colorfabb is just categorically superior to plain PLA. It's just so much easier to work with and it is stronger too. It just works 99% of the time.

That said, I will add:

For rich, vibrant and wide colour selection, I have not seen better than Faberdashery. Top quality and fantastic colours. Expensive (for me) though.

For prototyping, I buy cheap stuff, preferably from a local supplier. Adhesion issues are easily solved with glue stick and as long as it is not super brittle, cheap is better for prototypes when designing custom stuff. (I did have a supper brittle spool recently and it drove me up a freaking wall. I was very annoyed with it. So heads up!)

Colorfabb is my go to, workhorse filament though.

Finally, I will say that for yellow, I do not like Colorfabb! It's too orange to my eyes when compared with other yellow filaments. My favourite yellow actually comes from Form Futura, though I did have occasional adhesion troubles with it. Then again, I was still learning how to use my printer back then too!

Anyway, I hope this helps.

[ultiarjan 1,223]

I may be color blind but my favourite yellow is Colorfabb fluorescent green

[jakepoz 2]

I like ProtoParadigm in the United States.

http://www.protoparadigm.com/advanced-ingeo-pla/

You may notice that the Silver is very close to the original Ultimaker filament, and it prints with identical settings. I've also tried the Sapphire and it looks fantastic.