I bought a Makerfarm i3v kit a while back and am pretty happy with it. I haven't printed out any Pin stuff yet but have printed quite a bit of other stuff with it.

3d printing has a pretty steep learning curve before you can consistently produce good parts. Maybe an off the shelf printer would make it easier though.

It depends on how much tinkering you want to do with it. Do you want something that you take out of the box and print or do you want something that comes in a kit and you put together, then mess with to get printing well? If you want something you take out of the box I would recommend one of the Davinci printers.

I have a 12" Makerfarm that I assembled from a kit and it took me the better part of 6 months to get it printing well. On the other side of that coin I bought my Daugther a Davinci Jr and took it out of the box and produced a good print within about 15 min.

The Makerfarm is more flexible and can produce better prints but it takes a lot to get there. It is probably the same with most kits.

You for sure don't want a kit then.

Davici just released a new printer called the Pro that will allow you to use 3rd party filament so that is for sure a bonus over the other models that require you to use their branded filament. I think it is supposed to be out for sale the first part of December.

You will find good and bad reviews for just about every printer out there. The reason being even if you buy an out of the box ready printer it still takes a bit of tinkering to get them to print at their best.

I think a lot of people buy a 3d printer and think they are going to be plug and play like a normal laser printer and that's just not the case.

Whatever you end up getting I would recommend getting something that uses 1.75mm filament as it seems to be easier to find and has a bit better selection. My makerfarm 12" is 3mm and I will probably be converting it to 1.75mm in the not too distant future.

As far as resolution it all depends on how long you are willing to wait for the print. I normally print at either .3mm or .2mm and if I need something super good quality I print at .1mm. This is the layer height so every layer of the part is that tall so when you go from .3mm to .1mm you are making 3x as many layers so it takes at least 3x as long to print. For larger prints its not uncommon to have something print for 18hrs even at .2mm layers.