3DPrinting

If you want to print miniatures that are actually miniature in scale, a resin printer is probably the way to go. That said, you need to wash prints, cure prints, properly dispose of waste materials, etc. This article talks about their differences and shows somr a/b comparisons halfway through it. You can get pretty good detail with a small nozzle on a FDM printer, but resin will still blow it away.

As for a budget printer, most are generally pretty reliable but if you want good results you're probably going to need to fiddle with them. You'll also probably need to fiddle with them to keep them running and/or optimized (for example, better fan shrounds for your hot end, etc). I didn't mind somewhat ugly prints from my i3 Plus, so I didn't need to do very much fiddling beyond some basic mods over the 5 or so years I was fairly actively using it - especially after I replaced the bed springs with silicone and printed snug fitting thumb wheels.

There's nothing wrong with an "old" printer. I bought a Monoprice branded Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus a little over 7 years ato and from a pure feature perspective it's not that different than the base Ender v3. The biggest advances are in quality of life things, like z-offset calibration and "auto leveling", but it's worth saying that most budget printers can't adjust their extruder mechanically to be in plane with the build plate like say a Voron, so they compensate by tweaking z-height as the extruder moves between high and low spots. Geared reduced extruders on direct drive setups are also preferable over driving the extruder directly from a stepper motor like my old i3 Plus or early Ender v3 models.

Printers are generally very modifiable, so if some new whiz-bang feature comes out in a few years you'll likely be e able to adopt it to your printer.

I've got a 3v2, and I would not use it for d&d sized minis.

It's a decent machine, but it's definitely a hobby on its own keeping it happy.

Creality has never had anything decent for support for their Printers.

The support comes from the community., and third party retailers

Ender 3 is a very competent platform, and capable of printing a lot of stuff from large functional prints down to wargaming miniatures (I have a Ender 3 Pro thats fairly modded, and I've printed stuff from both extremes of the scale), If you are going to be printing a variety of things then I think its a solid buy for you, but you will have to deal with figuring out the right nozzle size, slicer settings, model position and supports for it, to get smaller prints to come out well (Remember, FDMs best detail resolution is on the left/right/front/back, it doesnt have as much detail in the up and down, so you have to position detailed models accordingly). And even at the finest details you might have layer lines that show up once you throw paint on, but they typically only really stand out if you hold it up right to your face.. On a wargaming table, for example, no one would most likely ever notice.

If your prints are mostly going to be small, and detail oriented, then I would suggest a Resin printer if you can swing it. It will give you significantly higher detail, and if you print multiple at once, save a lot of time as well. Cause with resin, it doesnt matter if you are printing one or a dozen at once, it still the same speed as one. Unlike FDM.

as a last piece of advice.. A good 3d printer is expensive. Whether you pay that price up front in cash, Or you pay it in time tinkering and experimenting, Is up to you. Ender 3 is cheap cash wise, but You'll spend some time tinkering, and dialing, to get the best out of it.

I can't speak about the printer choices (I have a prusa mini), but I can talk a little about miniature printing.

At the level of detail you probably want, filament dryness is vital. Damp filament strings loads and generally doesn't print cleanly, losing you all the detail.

When you start off, you should be fine as long as you put your spools back in their bag with the dessicant pouches (could be worth buying more). But once you can, either making/getting a dry box or buying a filament dryer is probably worth it.

Bambu A1 Mini is on sale. Add a 0.2mm Nozzle and you have a perfect machine for miniatures

You can get resin printers under $250. The elegoo mars 4 is $223 on Amazon, if you go second hand you can probably get a 3 for a bit cheaper. If you're going to do miniatures, the difference is still very significant.

Do not get a base ender 3. Get something direct drive with input shaping and auto bed leveling if you can. If you want a printer that "just works" where (after some setup) you can just press a button and get a print, auto bed leveling is a must-have IMO. I don't have one myself, but I think the neptune 4 for ~$220 is a good option, anything else with similar specs would also work. Look at some reviews on youtube.

The A1 mini is $200 right now (you have to manually choose NOT to do the AMS bundle on the site though that's also worth considering at $350 for a multi-color/material printer). It's an extremely good printer for the size, and the 0.2mm nozzle and the correct settings will do minis very well.

Check out this video on doing minis with it: https://youtu.be/gw2BuLw9hNE?si=c8HQmq0URGU6-qZc

I have a Sovol SV07 Plus, that is the newer version of the SV06 Plus… or in other words, the mechanically identical, but larger, SV06. It’s easy to assemble, it’s bigger than the A1 Mini. Now, you don’t know how big your printer needs to be, until you find out that it’s too small! I found that the 22cm square offered by my old Ender 3 was enough for most things, but it wasn’t enough for everything. I also had a 12cm square with a Monoprice Select Mini Plus V2(the name was the biggest thing lol) and that was quick to become restrictive. Would I suggest the A1 Mini, that has halfway between the two? I don’t know. But at the same time it comes pre assembled (it might not be a concern for you) and easy to use. In short I would recommend the SV07 as that’s the small and less expensive version of what I have, but the SV06 should be mechanically identical so that gives me hope it’ll perform equally well. The downsides are a less than stellar control unit (the hardware inside the touchscreen), a weird as fuck cooling fan that is super loud, and instructions that trick you into believing that the packets of screws are numbered in a meaningful way. Don’t. That said it prints everything with ease, it’s really fast and that fan might be loud, but at the same time works wonders. I love it. Oh! Also. Once I ever so slightly fucked up the Z offset, making it scrape quite thoroughly the build surface: nothing got damaged, build surface included!