Open source didn't compete on quality for price. I could pay 2k plus 40 hours of my time for a Voron or buy something that just works. I think Prusa only put out their CoreXY offering after they realized Bambu was eating their lunch. The Apple model works because people want to print rather than tinker.
But for 3D printers that worked out of the box under $1000, Prusa had no real competition itself.
The Mk3 came out in 2017 and I swear Prusa just sat on their laurels. I was a Mk3s+ owner (well, still am) and was pretty disappointed how little improved with the Mk4.
Bambu’s competition was Prusa and they clearly strived to improve over what Prusa had accomplished.
I wasn’t really sold on the 4/4S, but I recently upgraded a 3S+ to a 4S and am amazed how much improved. The new touchscreen LCD is a huge improvement over the old two line monochrome LCD. Remote access and wife printing is a nice plus — I don’t even run OctoPi anymore. Automatic bed leveling and no more Live Z tweaking for each sheet has been a major quality of life upgrade and eliminates one of the major pain points in swapping out nozzles. The nozzle is much easier to swap out and is now high flow. Add in Input Shaping and it prints significantly faster.
I hadn’t had any experience with the new platform prior to this upgrade and I skipped over the MK4, but the 4S upgrade is a significant step up over the 3S/3S+. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the upgrade kit — that took much longer than expected to complete (about two days) and I regret not buying a new printer instead. But, I have a 3S I plan to upgrade to 3.5 just to get the new electronics; that upgrade is far less intensive.
If you haven’t tried out a 4S you might be pleasantly surprised by how much nicer it is than the 3S+.
Similar experience with PRUSA for me -- I had a MK3S+ (which I loved) and paid ~$250 for the upgrade to the MK3.5S. Very, very impressed, for a modest investment I now have the new color LCD, a good chunk of the MK4 features and the print speed is at least 2x improved (if not better, I haven't quantitatively measured it but it's noticeably faster).
I went for the 3.5 upgrade as the upgrade from 3S+ to 4 was almost as much as outright buying a new 4. I'm glad I did it this way because now I'm thinking of getting the CORE One and then I'll have 2 excellent printers.
Heh, whoops. Definitely a typo, but in all seriousness the printer is actually usable by wife now, so that is a huge plus. She could use it before, but hadn’t learned how to adjust Live Z and thus didn’t like changing the sheet. If you do it wrong you can drive the nozzle into the sheet.
The problem is even with Prusas recent efforts to catch up with the Core One, it's expensive, and they still dont have a viable answer to the AMS. The MMU is still a hot mess, requires tinkering, isn't stable and overall just doesnt come close to an out of the box experience.
They still seem to be thinking the primary audience of 3d printers is people who tinker. It's not been that way for a long time. People just want to be able to unbox, plug it in and print. The second you add in the "oh just spend 5 hours tweaking this spaghetti mess of an MMU" you've lost them.
"hot mess" is not a fair assessment. The MMU2 was terribly unreliable, but the MMU3 is OK. It's surely more complicated to set up and requires more space than the AMS, but on the other hand, I think AMS concept is just plain bad. It's incredibly slow and produces a ton of plastic waste.
Bambu Labs printers are not cheap. Even their entry level A1 printer is twice the price of an Ender3.
Sure, it is a better printer, but it is clear that they are going for scale, and most of what makes them better is in the software rather than in using premium hardware.
initially maybe but the way the printers are built makes for cheap mass production. Theres no special sauce in the hardware, it's all low cost off the shelf stuff, it's just optimised very well.
> Open source didn't compete on quality for price.
Well, Open Source did compete on one quality very well: being open, hackable and staying that way. With this being removed from Bambu lab printers it seems as if this is a very much valued aspect for many 3D printing enthusiasts, yet few people were willing to compromise for this aspect.
Apparently it is true, you don’t know how much you value something until you don’t have it anymore
I paid ~$750 for my 350mm Voron 2.4 kit (and, sure, 40 hours of my time. But look, you want to do 3D printing, 40 hours are just a small initial investment).
It really depends upon the target market. That's fine for hobbyists. But I use the Bambu X1 for small-scale prototyping in a company, and it has to be usable out of the box. We can't justify an entire week of labour for each printer we buy.
The Bambu has been ideal for that reason. Every material pretty much just works, and the quality is excellent. The cloud integration and janky LAN mode is the downside, and this current topic even moreso.
Yeah, I've got an A1 that I bought on sale. It's sitting next to a Prusa MK3S. I was doing prints for my nephews for Halloween and the A1 would do a print in 2h and PrusaSlicer estimated 9h for the MK3S. And I have, so far, not had a single failed print on the A1. They're rare on the MK3S too. But... the MK3S is "start the print and it'll be ready in the morning" and the A1 is "start the print and it'll be ready by lunch, and if you need to iterate you can have another one done by 3pm"
> But look, you want to do 3D printing, 40 hours are just a small initial investment
No. None of this crap. I want to 3D print. I don't want to service industrial machinery in my spare time. Why should 3D printing require spending weekends troubleshooting machines just to keep the thing working? I want to print models not play repair technician.
Vorons are fantastic printers and a fantastic kit if 3D printing itself is your hobby. 3D printing is a fantastic hobby. There's tons of fun to be had building up and dialing in a printer kit. A well tuned voron can be up with the best of the best 3D printers. If that's what you want to do go for it!
But for heaven's sake I want to print models, parts and other practical things. I have other things to do and problems to solve. My 3D printer is a tool. If I have to spend just as much time working on the machine as I do using to actually print things then I'm not interested.
Bambu is still the best game in town for a turn-key, just works printer. Prusa can deliver the same experience at double to triple the ticket price. A voron is not a replacement for a Bambu printer no matter how good the printers actually are.
>Why should 3D printing require spending weekends troubleshooting machines just to keep the thing working? I want to print models not play repair technician.
I’m sympathetic to your POV but the reason you should is that’s the price to keep things open.
Obviously many people don’t care about that. Fair enough. But then you should be prepared to deal with their shenanigans.
Prusa also does things like maintain and develop printables.com and PrusaSlicer (itself forked) which many of these closed printers fork with minimal changes.
People don’t care about this either. So again, get ready to deal with garbage when Prusa goes under.
I think it’s sad since the whole domestic 3D printer thing started as open source.
> I’m sympathetic to your POV but the reason you should is that’s the price to keep things open.
No, it's not, and the perception that it is hurts the cause of openness.
Open Source has every ability to be better, to Just Work, to not require constant debugging. Good Open Source systems manage this. The fact that 3D printers apparently have not is the fault of those printers, not any inherent quality of openness.
> Comparing Bambu to Voron is an absurd comparison
I politely disagree. I was in the market for a more modern printer, and it boiled down to either a BL or a Voron - in the end I decided against ease of use and in favor of an open ecosystem. I agree in that they are not universally interchangeable, but for some people either can be an option, each with distinctive advantages and disadvantages.
Both modern (pre assembled) Prusa and Bambu are very good at this. They guide you through the full setup process, automate first layer reliable, have decent stock profiles.
It's all just much less tinkering then 5 years ago.
It is. I have no interest in messing around with 3D printers and was annoyed by the fact that Bambu lab lied about the 15 minute setup time. It was more like 45 minutes, but after that I never touched the printer again and started printing instead.
Also, subtractive manufacturing is much harder than additive manufacturing, because you need to position the machine around an existing piece of stock and sequence your operations manually, instead of letting a generic slicing algorithm slice from bottom to top with an offset vs the intended printing location only being a problem if you accidentally print over the edge of the build plate, which is usually not possible mechanically.
it is not that. i mostly mean that for anything functional that needs to take a load you need at least petg or asa (abs is a bit old now), which require proper storage.
also there are so much stuff that are in open prs and issues for years that are not implemented for slicers.
There are countless firearm receivers that have been printed on pla plus, many with thousands of rounds on them. Sure they may turn into a puddle in a hot vehicle, but they are functional and definitely take a load. Pla + is actually preferred in that community over the others you mentioned, although asa is becoming more popular, along with filled nylon alloys.
"Take a load" = perform mechanically and or structurally at levels of force, temperatures, etc. at levels higher than the properties of PLA allow for.
Don't get me wrong here. PLA is a great polymer, However you can't really expect parts made with it to hold up when compared to other "engineering grade" polymers.
I don't think anyone expects PLA to be used for anything that requires structural stability. There's far better filaments for that application. Some of the carbon fiber infused PETG filaments for example are incredibly strong.
Not many people use 3d printing for applications that require extreme strength though, that's really not the goal many people are aiming for.
I do this for a living and people are always looking for more parts to run through the process and better filaments to see those parts end up performant.
CF-PETG is strong! For a bit more toughness and temp resistance, PA12CF35 is seeing a lot of use. Some companies out there have service departments to keep machinery running. They apply FDM more than you might expect. Alloy 910 for gears, Cf of various kinds for abrasive scenarios, like cardboard handling, in one scenario.
Well for example layer bonding is better compared to some other materials. It's just that load over time it will creep. And of course shite under temperature.
It can be a fantastic material for some functional parts.
But even if not, I don't see how it's invalidates that there are printers out there that are more or less set and forget.
Bambu printers, or at least the one in our shop runs ASA set and forget style.
It is a great machine though it does not always make the strongest parts, and single material builds is geometry limiting. Lack of chamber heat and one nozzle makes some things easy, but does not entirely avoid the trouble with higher performing polymers.
You're saying this yet anyone can buy a random Bambu and just print.
I've owned or used probably every major (and some minor) printer released in the last 8 years and for most people Bambu really will just be "plug and play" (and even if something goes wrong they'll hold hands as much as needed)
That does not match my experience. The printer I have has had parts break with light use, and a really poorly engineered z-axis homing which results in wildly inconsistent zero heights and a very high print failure rate.
> The Apple model works because people want to print rather than tinker.
Entirely this. I bought my A1 mini over the Christmas holidays and couldn't be happier with it, it's my first 3D printer. Searching for models on Makerworld, adjusting tiny bits here and there if needed and print. It just works and I don't really care about anything else, much like my Brother printer.
Curious if anyone has tried the Core XY printers from Creality? I think they use open source software and are generally in the same ballpark as the Bambu printers price-wise. Also saw they have a similar AMS style system as well.
