So I bought myself a 3d printer. I decided on getting an AnyCubic i3 Mega printer, which was pretty cheap considering. Reviews were fairly decent.
Anyway, the box arrived, and it was packed pretty well, and proved to be quite painless to do initial setup;
<figcaption>The base unit (holding electronics), and the manuals and tools</figcaption></figure> 
<figcaption>The spool of PLA the unit comes with, and the gantry that holds the extruder</figcaption>
<figcaption>The tools and spare parts the printer came with
</figcaption>
The printer came with all the tools required to assemble it, as well as various quality of life tools such as a scraper, tweezers, cutters, SD card and USB-to-SD adapter, USB cables, and even some spare parts such as a spare hot end and a spare limiter microswitch.
Assembly was painless, though the plugs were pretty hard to press in. After that, I fed in the PLA, and ran the test print (which came on the SD card);
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The test print worked out fine. A small amount of stringing, but it ‘just worked’, no calibration was done here.
I also noticed a few defects which can be fixed. First up, the fans in this unit are REALLY LOUD. The reason for this is that the fans (on the PSU and on the control board) are much too close to the bottom plate, and the bottom plate obstructs the control board fan.
The fix for this is to print a new PSU cover, and replace the control board cooler with a ducted fan. I’ll print these shortly.
I did print an extruder knob, but I had to reprint it at 103% scale to get it to fit the NEMA17 stepper. This is likely because the printer is just at factory calibration right now.
Next up for me is some calibration stuff, rotating the bottom plate to clear the obstruction on the cooling fan, and getting the fans / printing replacement covers and cooling ducts to make it work better.