I know 3D printing has lost its hype and buzz of late but I am thinking of getting one to tinker around. Looking for suggestions from anyone if they have owned/used any of the beginner friendly machines from creality or other brands.

If you want to tinker, get to know how things work, Creality, Ender have good entry-level printers. If you need it to work every single time w/o investing lots of time tweaking and tuning the HW and SW, get something like a Prusa mini. I'm using a Prusa mini for ~2 years for prototyping and there is zero "setup time" per use, the software is great, the firmware is in most cases ahead of the "competition" since they just copy Prusa firmware and make it work on their printers in lots of cases. If you understand Linux distro analogies, Creality/Ender is like Arch Linux/Debian - enough finesse to get you going but with enough tweaking if you know what you're doing, you can get it to work beautifully. Prusa is like Ubuntu - just works out of the box.

I know 3D printing has lost its hype and buzz

Buzz has nothing to do with utility. The herd will always explore novel things; True users are born from needs. It's a great tool for builders.

If your volumes are low, you can also try to find someone who can print it for you. I found a small 3d printing shop in my city. I just send him the design files whenever I need something printed and he does it pretty cheap with really good output and filament quality. A better option IMO since they have commercial grade equipment and saves me a lot of upfront cost and hassle

@helpful-gigabyte-47939 Is it available to order online?

@ripe-knife-78526 https://www.prusa3d.com/

@melodic-jordan-81418 Possible to find out what exact equipment your vendor has?

@acceptable-flag-71699 I’ll ask him

I was also interested in this but I researched a bit and as per reddit communities, it requires good command over CAD if you want to make stuff on your own. So personally I've dropped the idea for now and will stick to some local shop as praneet mentioned.