I do about a 1/3 of my printing using PETG. Don’t believe anything you hear about anyone’s claim about how good their filament is. Go find out for yourself.
Cheap filaments when tuned correctly can outperform much more expensive filaments. The best example of this is Bambu. I have had substandard success with their PETG even after re-tuning. At $25/spool + Shipping and I have to wait 7-10 days with no return privilege’s, unless you are an AMS user and need the fancy spool and RF tag, it’s just a raw deal overall.
It should be noted that Amazon delivers not only in 2 days(sometimes next day) but I tend to return 10% of my first-time spools if I am dissatisfied. This includes spools that have over 200g already used during filament tuning. Amazon has never NOT given me a credit. So it is very risk-free
Here’s what I might suggest. Get at least one Bambu PETG as a reference spool. Then try out different filament makers and master filament tuning.
The thing you want to look at to determine if a spool is likely made at the same factory is the box it comes in as well as the spool and the inspection card.
Here’s an example of what I mean. I posted an example of two filament brands that I use for PETG and PC. They are identical except for the ink on the white box.
Here’s a side by side of two such spools.
Here’s a more detailed post on these two apparently “different” companies.
If you’re looking for a recommendation, I recently purchased these two spools to try out. They both performed identically albeit they were likely made at different factories. I even used the same tuned profile for both and as an experiment, I stopped one of the prints halfway through in order to swap spools and I could not detect any difference in color or texture.
$14
$13
So the only take-away I would offer up is that if it’s more than $20/spool and doesn’t have free shipping and free returns, you should be rightfully suspicious.