PLA is definitely what I use most. Most of the things I print don’t need durability, really, so I go for looks. But my exceptions are not really forgiving.
I print a few things that are used in the car, like a clip for an external battery for my dash cam. The first one I printed was with PLA and it lasted less than 20 minutes after I put it in the car. Not sure how long, but about 20 minutes after I put it out there I went out to leave and it had already warped so badly that the battery dropped out and pulled the camera off the windshield. Now, I live in Atlanta, and this was right in the middle of the summer. At any rate, I picked up a spool of Sunlu PETG and reprinted it, and that one is still there and has zero warping.
But my biggest planned use is outdoors. I take care of a colony of 30 feral cats. I’ve printed a significant number of braces to hold food dishes in place - all with Bambu PETG-HF. I’ve also been working on a “tunnel” that can be attached to their housing cubes to provide a bit more protection from wind and rain. Fortunately I haven’t printed any of those yet, but the plan was to use PETG-HF for those as well. As it stands now, those food dish braces will join the reusable spool when summer returns, because they will no doubt warp beyond the point of still working. At that point I’ll be out about $60 in lost prints, and I’ll have to reprint them all with real PETG.
Now for all that stuff appearance doesn’t matter (the cats don’t care what it looks like), but it is clear to me now that Bambu’s PETG-HF is not going to work in that scenario - whereas another brand of legitimate PETG should work with no problem.
As far as the durability of PLA, indoors I use it for several light-load type things. Probably the most it endures is for 40 brackets that are attached at the ceiling all the way around a room to hold my filament spools. As you can see in the picture, it’s just a basic frame type mount and each one holds 2 spools. They work perfectly fine for that. I did make a mounting bracket to attach my TV to the wall, but made it out of PETG-CF with the expectation that I may have to replace it with PA6 - but it’s not having any issues either.
But all that just cycles back around to my original point that the only real scenario that PETG-HF works for in my case is interchangeably with PLA. It looks as good, but it doesn’t seem to work any better at the end of the day.
Now as far as how you get your regular PETG to look as good as PLA - I wish I could pull that one off. In the picture below you can see a blue PLA benchy on the left beside the best I’ve managed to get from Sunlu PETG.
But I have fared a bit better with my experiments today with black Inland brand PETG. The left is PLA, center is Inland at default settings and the right is what I managed to get after printing an entire boatyard of the things over the last 2 days trying different setting.
I can only manage to reduce the glossy appearance at the top (the parts that print quick so don’t dry as well between layers) by manually slowing the printer down, decreasing the nozzle temp and increasing the fan when it starts into those areas - but that’s an unrealistic way to accomplish it. So the best I can get is an appearance that shifts as it goes - but that’s still better than the middle one, which just looks bad.