Original Prusa MK4
prusa3d.com
prusa3d.com
Crazy to see how far Prusa has come with his stuff, I still remember sitting and laughing in a hacker-space with him a couple years ago. He is one of the few people that actually stuck to the open-source rep-rap philosophy even after success (fun fact: he has a tattoo of the open hardware logos to remember his roots).
0: https://blog.prusa3d.com/the-state-of-open-source-in-3d-prin...
Prusa forked Slic3r into PrusaSlicer and continuously deliver great improvements and still keep it open source. If you go to the PrusaSlicer page, their github link is right there. And they support Windows, Linux and MacOS. They also attribute Alessandro on the website and the launch screen. The Prusa github also seems to have all their projects and software.
Bambu Labs forks PrusaSlicer and the github link is no where on their site and they only support Windows and MacOS On a piece of software that already had Linux support and the only acknowledge it's a fork on the github. Fortunately the github is still the 2nd link in google. But they aren't really committed to releasing their work if they won't even link to it. And their github has like 2 projects.
Prusa created printables.com to clean up the mess that is thingiverse. Creality created Creality Cloud and then just steals your models even after Naomi Wu advised them not to do that. Prusa runs competitions, has prizes.
Prusa seems to want to keep things open source, try and create a community. But like most open hardware, it's expensive relative to the competition.
As an Apple user, I completely understand the need to not mess about. But I also like to use opensource where possible. Especially for things I want to tinker with. So it's really surprising to me that what seems to be the majority of the hobbyist 3D printer community, a community that tinkers by definition, wants more closed, less repairable hardware. And more propriety software. They just want the cheapest appliance they can get for the money. I think this is what broke my brain. We started open, and could remain that way. But we'd rather not.
It's hard to fight against the might of cheap Chinese manufacturing. I hope Prusa works out a good strategy to survive before we end up in a situation where all the 3D printers requires Windows or MacOS and a login to some cloud service that I don't want.
This has increasingly been a problem, repeatedly. Cheap overseas manufacturers see open-source projects as free money. They are basically legally immune for what they do, can easily outcompete the original designers and project, the plans are free and cheap to modify, what's not to love? And so it's happening to not just hardware but also software, with Android being borrowed into "HarmonyOS" and so on...
That said, I think strongly copyleft licenses even in commercial hardware are underappreciated. Arduino is the great example: sure, it has got tons of clones. But that's kind of the point: that other people make it, and get more people using it (Arduino themselves focused on quality of their in-house produced, and also goodwill of customers). If you have it open source, people can actually copy and modify and improve it, that's the spirit -- although I'd agree it may be tough to secure enough funding from first party product sales to sustain development of the project. In that case, I'd suggest looking for a stable stream of sponsorships/donations, through platforms like patreon or liberapay. And of course, if you're a user, make sure to donate!
Getting your lunch absolutely eaten by some kickstarter printer in near silence, announcing the first few minutes of pre-orders for your already delayed printer will take months, near zero build up to the launch of the MK4...
And they won't even let the win from that just sizzle a bit, they need to take all that heat and dump it into the murky depths of Open Source Licensing.
The Prusa XL has been over a year and a half late. We had to preorder it, plunk down $200 as a deposit... and wait as they redesigned it over and over and blamed part shortages. Now, out of nowhere, "MK4 - Buy Now! No Preorder!"
So they're alienating people plonking down $1,000 for a printer by letting people from an unrelated queue jump in front of them...
And then shaking the faith of people who already waited this long for the XL. It starts to scream "we won't even be able to make enough XLs and would much rather you just forget about that".
-
Edit: Wow and actually something I didn't even realize, when the MK4 page first went up, there was no lead time...
So that's going to be another awfully sticky situation if enough XL owners actually take them up on that offer. Suddenly new buyers who were told no lead time will end up being bumped further and further back, since there aren't two queues: Printers ship by order date, and XL owners will all have order dates before new buyers.
> So if you ordered the 4 know that those swapping their XL orders have bumped all those that ordered quickly. I was scheduled for delivery next week and now its June.
Placate people you already disappointed for a year by disappointing a new cohort of users. Some companies just do not know how to let themselves win.
Doesn’t seem to really be caused by switchover orders, but bad systems in place. And this product does seem to be pretty popular already.
Prusa also makes the open source XL if you want an CoreXY model, or you could go with a Voron which is also open source.
I would say the higher price tag is more like "Prusa" using its name as a quality assurance system where if you want to get something working without much hassle (since nearly every other mk4/mk3s clone that has been out there really really sucks except the ones from Prusa) you have to pay the premium.
This is not to say they are necesarrily doing a bad job on open sourcing or abusing, but just a mark that "open source hardware" doesn't necessarily benefit the customer as much as "real world features".
I have had an Ender-3 V2 for a few years and it definitely doesn’t suck. I did add a BL Touch sensor for auto-leveling, and OctoPrint for remote printing/monitoring - which are great convenience upgrades. But the printer itself is very reliable and the only maintenance I’ve needed to do is to replace a few clogged nozzles.
For anyone just getting into 3D printing I would definitely recommend an inexpensive i3-style printer vs spending two to three times as much on a Prusa.
The Sovol SV06 has been selling like gangbusters for the last six months or so, and it's excellent. And it's sub-$250.
If you move a little further away from the i3 clones (and the SV06 absolutely is clone-y), that's where Elegoo--or Anycubic if you buy judiciously, or even Creality if you get it on sale--still make the argument quite difficult.
Prusa loves open source and maker mentality. Just look at PrusaSlicer and Printables.
There is so much noise on HN about repairability. Well here is some open hardware And it’s ”the Chinese printers have so much more features!”
I wish them well, but the value of their devices to date just does not equal the price. (The Prusa XL may change this and I'm really excited to play with one.
Someone has to take the hit with development. And that costs money.
>but the value of their devices to date just does not equal the price
Has the value in terms of price to features ever really been competitive? I got the MK3 soon after it was released and even then you could get an i3 clone for much cheaper that produced similar results. The Chinese clones didn’t have 3D printed parts either.
But now is the time Prusa is not price competitive?
Prusa's hat has been "it just works!". That's been the conceptual moat. That is the part that isn't distinctive anymore.
They're inexpensive. But they're not cheap. That's a problem for selling $1100 bedslingers.
Prusa is pretty open about this. They purchased ps so they could get government contracts in the US. It wasn't about improving retail costs for the average consumer.
https://blog.prusa3d.com/the-state-of-open-source-in-3d-prin... sure sounds like they no longer intend to be an "open source hardware company".
For example:
> Parts that can be considered consumables (e.g., thermistors, heater blocks, fans, printing plates, etc.) can be manufactured and sold commercially after the verification by the licensor based on the presentation of samples.
That is very much against the concept of open source.
They are still very good machines, but I would have a hard time recommending anyone get an i3 style printer when the advantages of CoreXY are so obvious, and particularly because the price gap between the X1C is not very big.
The MMU3 seems like a marginal improvement, you still have purge towers & large buffer boxes. Hopefully the reliability out of the box has improved.
I wonder if it's too little too late for Prusa. A Voron, Ratrig, Bambu Lab printer seems like it has all these features & is CoreXY. The multi material options seem better on these options too (Enraged Rabbit Carrot Feeder, Bambu AMS).
In the case of the Voron or Ratrig, you'll load Klipper instead of the tried & tested (and outdated) Marlin.
In 2023, I am not sure I'd buy a MK4 at $1100 when you can get a Bambu for $100 more.
I have a Prusa MINI+, which for $450 gets you a great printer. The print volume on the MK3 and now MK4 is just not that much better - 180x180x180 for the MINI, 250x210x220 for the MK4.
If I wanted to upgrade and wanted to stick with Prusa, MK3/MK4 wouldn't come into the picture, I'd go straight to the Prusa XL.
My Mini also likes to ram the nozzle into the build plate once in a while without any of it's safeties triggering, heating element stuck on and the Z stepper fully engaged, so I can't let it run unsupervised either, and the filament sensor is pretty hit and miss as well. I may have had bad luck with my unit (I ordered right at release), but I'm definitely looking for something more reliable and, frankly, less dangerous.
The Prusa Mk4 does look like a solid hands-off machine and hopefully they didn't cut corners there like with the Mini, and hopefully customer support is also better for the more expensive ones. I don't have any use for the XL's feature set (I only print relatively small parts and not that many), but I didn't want to get a Mk3s as it's been pretty dated for a long time now. I'll wait a bit until other people have had a chance to run into any major flaws though.
I don't have a filament sensor (I also print mainly small parts, so rare to hit the end of a spool), and haven't had any problems with heating elements, z steppers or nozzle crashes. I did experience the extruder clicking due to shrinking PTFE in the hot end, but I've ordered the E3D Revo mini hot end which will prevent that problem ever happening again.
Bambu--I'm less sanguine about them, to be fair.
The Prusa XL looks tremendous and I'm very interested, but a $1100 bedslinger had better literally make you breakfast to warrant it over a $250 SV06 or Neptune 3 Pro, and the MK4 does not.
For me, Bambu is too proprietary, Voron is too self-built, Ender is too unpredictable.
By current printer is self built and it works sometimes. My next printer is a Prusa.
As for Ratrig, that might be a healthy competition, though I've never looked into the quality of parts there. I know I've sat an Ender next to my Prusa and found the price vs quality to match surprisingly well, so Prusa's not the only game, but for something I can control, while still having a company to lean on when I want to, Prusa's got a good thing going.
I want to upgrade from my Prusa Mini and can't justify the cost for the XL, so the Mk4 seems like a decent choice. I'm sure people building and modding their own printers and flashing firmwares might have other favorites, but that's simply not what I buy 3d printers for.
Can you expand on this?
Newer printers (including the Prusa XL) use a CoreXY design, where the extruder is controlled in the X and Y axes by belts, which results in less mass that has to move, and allows the printer to print much, much faster. In the case of the Bambu Lab printers, it can be two to three times faster for a similar print quality.
My Sovol SV06 can make a really nice-quality 3DBenchy in 37 minutes after doing my input shaping samples. That's not as fast as an X1 Carbon, but it cost a quarter as much, and I tend to think that when it comes to 3D printers that bandwidth is more valuable than latency.
I've wasted enough hours on fancy features/materials/settings that don't work. Couldn't care less about the feature of being able to print a part a few minutes/hours faster tbh.
I could care less if you printer goes 50% faster if it fails even 5% more.
I have owned a lot of printers over the years, and the only printers I, or any of my colleagues come back to are Prusa printers. They are incredibly reliable. The few times we have had issues with a part, we have been able to print a replacement. I am constantly excited by fancy new printers that all promise to be the next big thing, and stupidly keep buying them.
I will take Prusa's amazing customer support, a product I know I will be able to upgrade when they release the next iteration, and the company that has the best free software as well (the Bambu is just a forked version of Prusa's slicer).
The Mk4 covers most of the distance, but at a price point matching the X1C, and it's only most. Speeding it up is nice, but... pressure advance depends on detailed characteristics of the filament, such as viscosity, which varies from brand to brand and color to color.
The X1 has a lidar, which from experience actually does work as advertised. The Mk4 has... what? Prusament, maybe? I would not be surprised to find you can only get the advertised speed if you use Prusa's precalibrated filament.
Or you can print the calibration lines and do it manually. That does work; it's a ten second eyeballing procedure, simple enough for the X1 to do full auto. But you're really supposed to do that for every startup -- characteristics change as the reel ages, which doesn't even happen evenly across the entire reel -- and nobody does that.
That's not to say that the X1 itself is - just that lidar is imho a gimick.
For PLA it doesn't make a big difference. But when you're printing polycarbonate or PETG, the quality difference is dramatic. Perhaps you have a defective unit?
Thing is, the X1C isn't really for printing PLA. If you only want to do that, you'd get a V400 or a Voron. When I print PC Blend, though, it's... the difference is glaring. This isn't something that needs a lot of testing; with the lidar off, the corners look like semicircles.
Also monotonic top/bottom layers don't fill the full surface, because they have corners on both ends. About like you'd expect, and the difference isn't visible from the outside; external perimeters are always printed slowly anyway.
The X1 also prints ABS perfectly. I should remember to make a Nevermore filter one of these days, so I can take advantage...
I have had mine (w/ four total AMS units) for two months now and have over 500hrs of printing so far w/ minimal failed prints. I often print in sport and/or ludicrous too. I own eight other 3D printers of various major brands (including Prusa) and it’s by far and away the best I’ve ever owned. Easily comparable to printers 2-3x more expensive imho.
> It is insanely loud, and it seems unreliable and buggy.
Even with the door open to the room mine is in, I never hear it. Sure, if you’re within 5ft of it, it is a bit loud, but not terribly so, especially if you reduce fan speeds (they have conservative defaults). If you are someone who wants to sleep next to your printer farm, maybe not a good fit, but for any normal person the noise isn’t a concern imho.
> I just canceled my X1-Carbon order.
Your loss! I’m doing the reverse, thinking about buying another one.
This reminds me of an attitude I see in some of these hobby communities. The idea that someone who is happy with a different product is somehow wrong or losing. People are highly invested and identified with their choices. Why not just be ok with choices other people make, even if we disagree with them?
No matter the context, polarization will always happen, and is sometimes fueled on purpose to turn opinionated users into religiously hooked fans.
...and BTW, Amiga crushes the ST any day:^)
Actually, it wasn’t really that I thought they were wrong/losing, it was more a response to the virtue signaling on GP. Nobody cares they canceled their order because they read some words from random people on the internet. Honestly, nobody should care I’m happy with my purchase either! :)
But at what point, I asked myself, how long does a 3d printer company need to be around before I'll buy from them.
My answer is 3 years for myself. Others might have a different opinion. Further, if they dogfooded their own printers, I would have a change of opinion.
I don't think it takes 3 years. But the Mk4 has 1M hours in Prusa's print farm for Prusa to iterate on.
the other thing is that as a general rule, I don't buy the first model of <thing> when it comes out. I'll wait until v2 or v3 of thing.
With that said, I'm certainly looking forward to what the Bambu labs carbon x1 v3 looks like.
I appreciate this. I have seen though, particularly in the used car parts market, where parts are often unobtanium. Would the X1 Carbon be better with 4040 aluminum extrusion or their custom sheet metal bent parts?
The Mk4 still has the large metal frame. I wish they would move that to 4040 or some other available, easy to source material.
Maybe, maybe not, but is that something you ever have needed to replace? I've had 3D printers for around 10ish years now and even with multiple moves with careless movers I've never once had an issue where I needed to replace a frame component. Extruders, Gears, PTFE Tubes, Hotends, belts, wires, motherboards, PSUs, fans, etc yes, but frame? nope. I even had a Creality CR-6 SE which endured a rollover camper accident which was a total loss for RV and pull vehicle and the printer survived without a hitch and still prints great (happy to share a photo in private to illustrate how bad that accident really was, reach out if interested).
The only two parts listed above in the things I've replaced which I don't have spare parts for are the motherboard and the PSU with X1 Carbon. I'm confident that I could get a replacement PSU if they went out of business, but probably not on the motherboard currently. They have sold enough at this point though that I'm guessing someone would step up and create an alternative part.
But this comes down to basic dogfooding. Prusa dogfoods their stuff. Bambu AFAICT doesn't. Are any of the parts on the Bambu 3D printed or is everything metal and injection molded with plastic? Serious failures are going to happen at the 1/2/3 year mark.
I really don't know that answer for bambu. I do know the answer for Prusa.
I also know because Prusa open sources their designs, E3D had a platform to sell their REVO nozzles.
What do you use 9 3D printers for?
My biggest issue is the speed of which my printers print. As printers are getting faster, I won't need as many.
I’m probably going to start pairing that back, in fairness, and sell off 3 or 4 Creality printers in the near future. The reason they were useful is they were decently reliable and “good enough” and the multiples of the same were to run jobs in parallel. With the massive speed up from the Bambu Lab X1 and the better likelihood of a consistent print experience, I don’t need to have as many parallel prototyping runs. The other remaining printers have characteristics that make them worth keeping (huge print beds, different tech as in SLA resin, or simply sentimental value).
People act like having the power supply die, bed probe not being reliable, not having x axis tensioner are all normal. Just print out a bunch of parts from some randoms to fix.
Also Prusas software are forks too so weird thing to call out bambu for.
Bambu slicer is a fork of Prusa's slicer. Prusa's slicer is a fork of Slic3r. Although perfectly fine it is notable that both Prusa and Bambu make 3d printers while the Slic3r project was just making a slicer.
They've been developing and supporting those forks in house for years, giving back to the community. I don't know about Bambu, but typically other Chinese companies don't really do that.
In my experience this is true of basically all very niche brand subreddits. People go to those subreddits to complain and/or get help. It isn't a representative sample. The people who are completely happy with their Bambu Labs machines have little incentive to spend time on a 14k user subreddit when they can go instead participant in a 1.7m user subreddit like /r/3DPrinting.
If you are printing with enclosure doors closed printer noise is acceptable - I wouldn't sleep in the same room, but I can work (including taking video calls) with printer running 2.5-3m from me. Carbon filter seems to be working nicely too - my air quality monitor isn't picking much VOOCs or fine particulate.
tl;dr; I've had fewer problems with X1 than with any other printer I owned, including laser and inkjet ones.
I really have no idea what you’re talking about with regard to it being loud, and I’ve had pretty much zero failed prints (at least not attributable to the printer).
The Prusa i3 family may feel a little outdated, but what it lacks in cool marketing features it makes up for in amazing reliability. The thing works every single time I try to print something. The CPU not being able to address 4GB of RAM doesn't really limit what you can print, though the community sure loves to talk about it.
I am very tempted to buy the upgrade kit, but honestly, I'm not sure it's worth it. My filament doesn't jam, I don't use filaments the infrared detector can't see, I'm not in a hurry (so don't need input shaping), and my Z is dialed in. The MK3 is a great printer even in a world where the MK4 exists! I'm waiting for the Prusa XL to start shipping so I can print larger models.
Prusa printers are generally rock solid and their quality control is great.
For 1k, I really think we should be looking at a CoreXY machine (or, at least, something that doesn't have a bed that moves, whatever the kinematics). That's a major speed limitation, and it also causes vibrations even in lower speeds as you are moving the bed and your entire model. That's the only thing I cannot easily change in my printer, anything else, from the bed to extruders is easy to modify.
Sure the MK4 has a larger build volume. But so do many other printers.
The breakout extruder board is a nice thing but it is available for other printers too.
I like the loadcell concept for bed leveling but I wonder how much better it is versus a simple bltouch.
I really wonder who is the target demographic for this printer and why they wouldn't get other Prusa offerings instead.
> I love their commitment to open hardware
Prusa is relatively open with their hardware so it's indeed a massive bonus versus some proprietary Bambu Labs printer. However, they are the same company pushing for pre-sliced files which is a terrible idea. Not only they can be malicious, but they will also be specific to a given printer, which would benefit Prusa if most gcode is created for Prusa printers.
Agreed, though should be noted this happens across the industry. Whoever is the current fore-runner tends to push for it. MakerBot did the same thing back when they led the pack. Thing is, the only end Prusa can get from this is encouraging use of their printers. A shady method for sure, but MakerBot wanted to push for an entirely proprietary chain, from the model file to the printer, and because they had just gone proprietary, they could make that happen. Prusa has no legal or technical weight to make that happen (and hopefully they have no intention of going that direction). So long as they keep pushing open hardware and firmware, their push for presliced is (to me) not a deal breaker. It's wrong, and they should be called out for it, but it's not gonna lead to malicious legal action.
I agree that sharing Gcode should end as well, I understand how they thought that might be a good idea given how daunting prusaslicer is for non-techies but that wasn't a good solution.
Although Corexy is clearly a more rigid form factor I wonder if the input shaping advancements will make that bed slinging i3 seem much faster than we are expecting.
- IMO multi material printing has always been a buggy gimmick (mostly multi material setups are very prone to failure).
- Them advertising that the printer can print "advanced" materials like PC is a gimmick too, the main issue with FDM printers is layer adhesion and no matter what material you are using its going to suck compared to injection molding.
- bashing bed slingers is wrong too, they have their advantages compared to CoreXY setups (mostly simpler mechanics)
IMO FDM printers have 2 main issues:
1. Unreliable due to lots of moving parts. A solid design with quality components mostly mitigates this.
2. Layer adhesion sucks limiting possible applications. Some very innovative non-planar printing could be a solution but it does not exist yet. Or could be solved by printing metal, but these devices are far from home use.
Resin printers solve both issues, but bring their own (mostly that resins are very toxic stuff that you dont want in your home.)
So no, this printer is in no way revolutionary (neither is the Prusa). Until both of these issues are solved home 3D printers will be mostly used to print benchies and accessories for tabletop games.
Tangent: why was moving the bed the solution over having X and Y on independent axes? I’ve always wondered. Cost and initial reliability?
It's also a simpler set of kinematics for the system to deal with. Most 3D printers have pretty dumb microprocessors (value engineering!) at their core. CoreXY printers use two steppers to execute any movement, and that requires more calculations. Delta printers use three steppers to execute any movement, even.
More modern printers run Klipper, which offloads the kinematic calculations to a single-board computer, and that addresses a lot of the problems you run into. Klipper also helps with bedslinger kinematics too, though, as it has the headroom to do some forward-looking optimization. The current state of printers is pretty cool.
Agreed, with the asterisk that this applies more to multi-feeders (Prusa's MMU, Bambu's AMS) rather than IDEX. Which is where Prusa's going with the XL, and I'm excited about it.
> - Them advertising that the printer can print "advanced" materials like PC is a gimmick too, the main issue with FDM printers is layer adhesion and no matter what material you are using its going to suck compared to injection molding.
Flag on the play: sweeping generalization, ten yard penalty, repeat second down.
PC printing is really handy for intrinsically bespoke things like tools in the wood shop. I don't need an injection-molded run of them--but nobody's selling things I can buy that address problems in the way I want to.
> - bashing bed slingers is wrong too, they have their advantages compared to CoreXY setups (mostly simpler mechanics)
This is an effectively solved problem with modern motion system controls. CoreXY on Marlin might be a mess, but CoreXY on Klipper is clean. Aside from cost of development and manufacture, I don't understand developing new bedslingers except for cost...and the MK4 costs $1100.
Can you name some examples? As a hobbyist woodworker I've used my 3D printer to print router templates where PLA was fine enough for the task.
> Aside from cost of development and manufacture, I don't understand developing new bedslingers
Another reason is that bedslingers are good enough for most users. If you dont try to print 30cm high columns with 300mm/s a simple bedslinger will do. I've printed my best minis with a slightly modded Ender 3 and I have a pretty high end CoreXY printer. I could tune the CoreXY one too to be on par with quality but for such stuff bedslinger vs CoreXY doesnt matter
I'm currently using PC to build friction-fit dust collection gear. PLA and PETG are great in a lot of cases but if you want to use bayonets to ensure a solid connective fit (whether they're themselves plastic or something like socket-cap screws), PLA and PETG both wear much too quickly.
China's current support of Russia is an obvious issue, as well as their threats towards Taiwan and their destruction of democracy in Hong Kong.
Problems with IP infringement abound, and in this case it's particularly disappointing as Prusa is committed to open source.
I hope Prusa continue to innovate, but I also hope people reject Bambu Lab. Doing so is one of the few direct actions we can take against the Chinese principles that directly oppose Western values.
It's not that they have ties to the CCP. It's the fact the CCP can order Bambu to give up their data without a warrant showing criminal activity.
https://thehill.com/opinion/cybersecurity/532583-for-chinese...
By bambu labs own website, they have locations in China, which means those sites are governed by Chinese law.
https://hbr.org/2014/03/why-china-cant-innovate
Bambu Lab... how big they are isn't clear. Their LinkedIn claims they are between 201 and 500 employees. If HBR is correct, they very likely have CCP cells within their organization.
including the stuff made in india, malaysia, thailand, japan, singapore, indonesia, germany, usa, canada, and mexico.
i say if you want to fight for democracy, pick up a rifle and join the marines, or go work for lockheed or raytheon. our military could always use more smart people.
There's a huge difference between supporting a product fully developed, designed and marketed from China, with Chinese companies taking all of the margins -- versus a product with various sub-components with razor thin margins supplied from China.
China is desperate to climb up from low-value, low-margin contract manufacturing to higher end work. Their rising wage levels and demographic shift demands it.
The rest of the world needs to put its foot down and say "No, you can keep taking low end contracts if you want, but if you want to move up the chain you have to grow up and act like a mature industrialized country. If you're not going to let foreign companies operate and compete on fair terms in your country, don't expect us to let your companies compete freely in our countries."
Manufacturing is already slowly moving out of China due to rising labor costs and automation. If we stop buying stuff fully owned, designed and marketed from China, the pressure will keep increasing for China to get its act together.
I mean, otherwise we might as well giving up on designing and marketing anything in the west. China will have a crazy advantage if they get to play by completely different and unfair rules, ignoring our IP laws, getting subsidized shipping on everything (since they're a "developing" country), getting to ignore quality control because returns are hopeless, getting to flood Amazon with low-quality products with fake reviews, while working from the place where all this stuff is manufactured anyway.
you're not going to stop china's economic rise without military intervention. the world is a big place with lots of markets. join the military and be on the front lines of the coming cold war where you can do some real good.
https://www.marines.com/become-a-marine/process-to-join.html
The power supplies are built by Delta Electronics, the bearings and rods are (usually) Chinese supplied, the fans flip between China and misc SE Asia suppliers (Noctua) , the steppers are from China (LDO)... the list probably goes on.
You could make an FDM printer with exclusively American (or otherwise) parts, but the price tag is going to be astronomical.
With Prusa, the majority of the profit is made in Czechia. The research, design, assembly and some of the manufacture is done there. I support China much less than with a purchase from a Chinese company.
Note Delta Electronics is a Taiwanese company with manufacturing in several countries including China. Noctua is an Austrian-Taiwanese company with manufacturing in Taiwan and China. LDO is Chinese, but this makes my point — how do you know those are the steppers Prusa uses? It's not written on their site.
I would like to see clear labelling on products showing their origin, perhaps including the origin of any component until the cost is <5% of the total, or something like that. Include the PSU, but don't bother about the capacitors or power cord.
It's an open secret that all stepper motors in all premium 3D Printer kits are LDO. Prusa, Voron, RatRig, it's all LDO. LDO also does white-label branding, so the motors say "Prusa Research" on them even though they are otherwise indistinguishable. This is not the first time Prusa does white-label branding - the "SuperPINDA" is actually developed and sold to anyone who wants it by Pepperl+Fuchs (a German company).
Also Delta Electronics is a Taiwanese company[1]
Edit: Also, its 799 for the kit you can't buy now compared to 699 for the P1P that you can buy today and literally prints out of the box.
Prusa's slicer is just a fork of Slic3r so I'd say that's fair play. Prusa just aggressively brands opensource stuff.
I mean, they fork it, develop it further, and give it back to the community. That's entirely within the spirit of open source!
"Aggressively branding open-source stuff" would be like Chinese Alibaba sellers ripping off open hardware or Amazon redistributing PostgreSQL as an AWS SaaS offering.
> Free and open-source
> PrusaSlicer is based on Slic3r by Alessandro Ranellucci. Thanks to the strong community and a team of developers in Prusa Research we can continually add new features. Follow the development on our GitHub.
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/56096557/107885845...
It's nice to pay for actually open development.
Here's the best I can come up with: A well-insulated enclosure with a filter ... on the balcony, with internal heating and PID temp control. Maybe some thing for humidity control as well. Thoughts? Any good off-the-shelf enclosure products that would fit an Ender S1 Pro or a Prusa MK3/4?
That's why I figured: Why not put the entire enclosure on the balcony, and then heat-humidity control the inside of it? Sure, more complex system and higher power draw, ... but maybe there's whole kits for this? Like, for keeping a 3D printer in a windy shed?
You can use something thicker than cardboard like the plastic version of cardboard... google: 'Corrugated Plastic Polycarbonate Acrylic Sheets'.
I was also thinking that you can even extend a pole out your balcony and attach the tube to that. This way, the air makes it far enough out that it won't even blow back.
In the next life I'll get a house and build it around the 3D printer.
https://www.amazon.com/sliding-door-vent-kit/s?k=sliding+doo...
> In the next life I'll get a house and build it around the 3D printer.
Or just 3d print a new wife? (joking)
I know, I'm not an easy customer.
> Or just 3d print a new wife? (joking)
I've seen too many terrible Benchys in reviews to fall for this one!
How flammable is the insulation on your balcony? If you DIY it, then the danger of burning down your house might be bigger than the health risks of occasionally printing PLA in the living room.
Another option could be a used incubator, but an incubator big enough for a printer will probably cost more than the printer...
I tried it with SLA printer and it just filled the room with resin stinks for days. It really depends...
> MK4 is fully compatible with the Original Prusa Enclosure.
Also, buying good quality filament is important. You want stuff that isn't made in China.
You could also buy a Bambu Labs P1P, which is fully enclosed, or build a Voron. There's also the Creality Sermoon V1, but with chinese printers you always have to replace / upgrade the parts, so they're really not that cheap in the long run.
And anyway, if you're printing PLA you shouldn't do it in a completely closed enclosure, the temperature would be too high (or so I've read). Even the Sermoon V1 has cutouts for a small vent at the back. Even the Vorons aren't fully enclosed, although there's the Box-Zero[1] addon that does fully enclose the printer.
So I recently moved mine from the middle my medium sized house to the far end from the bedroom, behind a door. And even with that I'm considering enclosing it in a cabinet, to reduce the noise on that side of the house too. Yet the model I have is not particularly loud.
With a closed door between my bedroom and the printer at night, it's no problem.
I think it's questionable how much those tiny filters help anyway. If you print a lot, you would have to constantly swap filters, if you don't print a lot, it doesn't really make that much of a difference.
When I want to print ABS, I go to a Makerspace and use their Ultimaker.
But i recently got a resin printer and that thing lives in the bathroom now beside the washing machine. It has build in ventilation through a coal filter but the stench is just awful.
In a pinch Bathrooms are not the worst place for printers because they have ventilation and are not in use most of the day.
Just don't store your filament in the same room since it might get wet from the showers steam.
Although this might have a very low WAF, so check with your better half if applicable :)
It's also worth noting that the smell varies considerably between different kinds of resin. having a dedicated space is optimal, but with the right materials it's farily manageable, especially if you're not planning to run it 24/7.
The printer is used to print the occasional tabletop model and stuff if it where in use all day I would try to get a better solution
For me, ventilation isn't required for PLA. The smell is minimal and not unpleasant, and I often print (in a cupboard) while working two metres away.
They Print 3 Times faster than the MKS3+ with same or better quality in some prints. 24/7 printing almost with zero issues in my print farm. BVery easy to send jobs to it from the Bambu slicer based on the Prusa slicer which is open source and enhanced to make complicated print jobs spread across multiple virtual print beds a beautiful thing!
At this point i see ZERO reason to consider a MK4. Bambu hit this out of the ball park and into the neighbouring city as far as I am concerned.
However, I see all this and think, man... Prusa, you were 2 years too late on the XL and the MK4. And it's going to hurt the Prusa marketshare immensely.
Prusas are user serviceable with lots of spare parts available. Bambus are far from that and if there's a problem with the design (e.g. ghosting) you're out of luck for as long as it takes them to fix it.
I don't have a Prusa (I have a VzBot). Just saying there's far from zero reasons.
Lighter, stronger, faster extruder
Easier to swap/maintain hotend
Faster and more automated bed leveling
Better stepper motors
Unlike Ender etc., Prusa is the true “just works” FDM printer
That acknowledged, my (lightly modded) Ender3s, a Flashforge Creator clone, and an SKTank kit-built printer all also “just work” and, other than capability differences, use the same machine settings in slicer/same gcode thanks to Klipper macros (to the point that I’ll often start a print on them in the basement without ever going down there and checking that the first layer looks okay). I’d say I’m well above 97% for prints work without any fuss.
Until recently (most notably until the Bamboo Labs Carbon X1) you had to spend time setting up your printer to get a good first layer. This would involve changing the distance between the nozzle that lays out the melted plastic and the bed on which the model is printed. Because this distance varies not just between different units of the same printer, but also has to change based on what material (PLA, PETG, etc) you're printing with, it needed some knowledge to set correctly.
While that process did get much simpler (with most of it being automated), it still involved some tweaking on the part of the user. That's a problem for people who are new 3D printing. It meant that you couldn't start printing immediately after unboxing your printer. It also meant that you had to spend considerable time (a few hours at least in my case) figuring out what a "good first layer" means, and then tweaking your printer to print the first layer well.
With this update, you can now start printing immediately after unboxing your printer (after some minor assembly), which is a huge thing for people who are new to 3D printing.
When I got my first printer a few years ago, I remember having to spend a couple of hours initially learning how to do this calibration, and I didn't get great results until a few more weeks of learning and tweaking.
Note that this is from the perspective of a hobbyist. People using 3D printers on a commercial scale might find the other improvements to be a big thing for their use case.
But the key thing is that the Bambu (and other upcoming Core XY printers) are aimed at the non-modding market and seem to be a much better deal overall, so I'm not sure what Prusa is going for here other than leveraging brand traction...
I built a Prusa kit, and enjoyed building it, and enjoy printing with it. I consider it a bit of a hobby product, and wouldn't recommend it to someone who isn't interested in learning anything about 3d printing. It works great, but you have to take an interest in it.
For the person who just wants a consumer product, I suspect the Bambu might be the best option.
That said, if I put a price on my time I think the X1C would be 1/10th the cost :D
There’s also constant improvements to the algorithms; what can be printed in the first place. To name one, it used to be that anything above a 25 degree overhang would cause problems…
These days 60 degrees isn’t too bad, and there are experimental algorithms that can handle 90. Support algorithms have also improved dramatically lately, so we’re pretty close to the point where any and all geometries will just work.
Reliability is a huge, huge deal. Back in 2009 we were dealing with constant nozzle jams, delamination from the print bed, print errors, drifting, ooze, extruder slip, and all sorts of other problems. You had to keep a constant eye on the printer, and manually tweak the G-code generation parameters to get good results. It's come a long way and still going.
Several of the features in the MK4 are for quality (but also help speed). For example, VFA steppers are purely for quality improvement.
It is clear now that people who preordered the Prusa XL had availability sacrificed for the MK4. It just sucks if you've been waiting more than 18 months for that, only for the MK4 to get day-one availability before your long-awaited preorder.
Also, people who manufacture the printers are paid peanuts and are managed super strictly.
Also, XL was announced because they were "feeling like they were not releasing for too long". Not because they felt inspired. Then they literally slept on it for a year.
Don't expect anything special from them.
Source: know people inside and from the relevant social circle.
I'm not super happy about the wait myself, but the XL is a considerably more complex beast, and I'd rather see them getting it right than sacrificing quality to meeting some self imposed deadline.
I've lost count of the number of times I've been promised this.
The AMS has been wonderful for me: no longer manually swapping out filaments, and cool tricks like automatically laying down a layer of easily-removed support filament between model and support structure.
If anybody here is big into DIY 3D printer hacking, do you see any big blockers with using a 1-D Prusa system to host a record cutting head?
I print mostly functional parts (home repairs & improvement, prototypes), and while I could have printed a fix for the broken part, the prospect of taking the whole thing apart (as well as for an upgrade to an S+) doesn't appeal to me.
EDIT: I read some of the other comments in this thread and did some more research. Found some Reddit posts as well. I think I'll definitely go with the Bambu Lab printer.
No matter what, make sure it’s in a room with an air filter and active ventilation. Safety matters.
There’s a lot of really cool open source printer designs too, and having an abs/asa capable machine really makes a lot more cool prjects possible.
I got the x1cc and I’ve been really happy so far. My biggest problem was accidentally printing pla as asa and I still managed to make ok but weird prints
Does anyone have a good recommendation to go “from zero to hero”?
Sure, I'd be happy to help you get started with 3D printing! I'll break it down into a few steps, from learning the basics of 3D modeling to printing your first custom part.
Learn the basics of 3D modeling:
To start, it's important to get familiar with 3D modeling software. Two popular free options are Tinkercad and Blender.
Tinkercad (Beginner-friendly): Tinkercad is a browser-based, user-friendly CAD software that helps you create 3D models easily. It's perfect for beginners. Tinkercad tutorial: https://www.tinkercad.com/learn/designs
Blender (Advanced): Blender is an open-source 3D modeling software with a steeper learning curve but offers more advanced features. Blender tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa1F2ddGya_-UvuAqHAks...
Understand 3D printing basics: Learn about 3D printing technologies, materials, and the process. This will help you make better decisions when designing your parts.
3D Printing basics: https://www.3dhubs.com/guides/3d-printing/
Choose a 3D printer:
When you're ready to buy a 3D printer, consider factors like build volume, material compatibility, and price. A few popular entry-level 3D printers include:
Creality Ender 3: https://www.creality.com/goods-detail/ender-3-3d-printer Prusa i3 MK3S: https://www.prusa3d.com/original-prusa-i3-mk3s
Learn to prepare models for printing:
Once you've designed your 3D model, you'll need to prepare it for printing using slicer software. This software converts your model into instructions for the 3D printer. Popular slicer software includes:
Ultimaker Cura: https://ultimaker.com/software/ultimaker-cura PrusaSlicer: https://www.prusa3d.com/prusaslicer/
Print your first project:
Start with something simple to familiarize yourself with the 3D printing process. Then, move on to more complex projects like your custom Magic Trackpad support.
Join online communities:
Participate in online forums and communities to get advice, feedback, and inspiration. A few popular 3D printing communities include:
r/3Dprinting subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/ Thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/
Follow these steps, practice regularly, and you'll be well on your way to becoming a 3D printing hero. Good luck!
/r/3DPrinting has a comprehensive guide to getting started with 3D Printing: https://www.reddit.com/r/3DPrinting/wiki/gettingstarted/
The designing and iterating of physical components is a learned skill, just like designing and iterating on software becomes easier with experiences. Best way to learn is to just get started, and have tons of fun!
Below is pretty much how I did it:
Step 1:
Buy an Ender 3. It's cheap and there are tons of upgrades out there. Start printing stuff from Printables/Thingiverse in order to understand how slicing and printing works. Learn the jargon by researching issues you run into (don't just ask on forums, search for yourself).
Step 2:
Find some upgrades for the printer through Youtube, Reddit and the likes. Buy (or print) them and upgrade your printer. Run into issues, fix them and start understanding how the entire thing works.
Step 3:
Print this [0] model and watch this [1] video on how it was designed. It shows really well what constraints you're working with when designing for 3D printing and how to work around them. Then, start designing your own prints in whatever CAD software you want to learn. I started with Fusion 360, but anything is fine, probably.
- Start your journey with PLA, and small prints. PLA is the easiest/least fussy material to print because it doesn't tend to string, or warp/shrink/lift off the bed like PETG/ABS. Nothing's worse than having a large print fail (usually boils down to slicer settings, hence the need to get familiar with your printer via smaller prints first).
- PrusaSlicer is, IMO, one of the best slicer options out there... works for virtually all printers and it's free/open source: https://github.com/prusa3d/PrusaSlicer/releases
- TPU filament is AMAZING to have for functional 3d prints... but you need a direct drive extruder to be able to print it reliably. If you can afford it, shoot for an Ender with a direct drive extruder e.g. the S1 or S1 Pro.
- Other stuff: Use Mainsail on a Raspberry Pi or similar for remote control/monitoring from any browser or phone (alternative: Creality Sonic Pad), Klipper firmware for GOING FAST (pressure advance setting), print mods/upgrades for your own printer (e.g. webcam mount, tool holders, parts cooling fan ducts, etc)
Haven't tried fusion 360 yet. Would stress again that I'm a noob.
I get the FLOSS preference, but this is an area which sadly lags far behind. If you're really keen to learn CAD, maybe give F360 or OnShape a go? I suspect you'll see a huge difference...
Having tried most of the options there are, I’d recommend downloading Fusion 360 and following a few of the many online tutorials. While the free version is a little restricted, it’s a high-quality parametric 3D CAD package, and to my mind is superior to everything else at a hobbyist price point. It’s also faaaaaaar more approachable (IMO) and/or fully-featured than other free options such as OpenSCAD or FreeCAD.
A few weeks of following tutorials and trying to make your own simple models should see you to a level where you can judge whether it’s the right hobby for you, and therefore whether it’s worth investing in a printer.
I have a Ender 3 V2 with self-leveling bed (without self-leveling it's not that great) and I use it a lot, enough to justify buying a better $1k+ printer but it's not clear what I get from spending that much money on it.
Is it printing speed, better materials, or something else entirely?
If you're just interested in the hobby, the Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro is, for my money, a fantastic entrypoint that you can get for under $250. (I own the larger version, the Plus, which has a bigger bed and turns the fans off when not printing; it's sub-$350.)
There's also the Sovol SV06 (and its larger Plus variant) in the same ballpark, though they're having some significant QC problems these days. It's also in the $200-$250 range. I have one of these too and it's pretty nice, but I have a first-run one before the QC problems started to rear up.
The Prusa stuff is absolutely better made than the Sovol stuff--though the Elegoo stuff is remarkably high-quality, especially for the price--but frankly it is emphatically not four times better. The delta shrinks further if (and in this crowd, maybe when) you install the Klipper firmware to replace the stock Marlin stuff; Prusa's custom Marlin builds are better than the competition, but Klipper beats it all hollow, and the performance benefits of Klipper on the SV06 and the Neptune 3 Pro/Plus are huge when it comes to faster acceleration and thus faster printing.
- OOTB ready-to-print is a big one. There's a bit of a learning curve to calibrating everything on the MK3S+. It took me a few days to get mine dialed in and I'm not one of those people that's looking for perfect prints, I just needed it to mostly work. - Touch-screen + wifi + remote printing saves on setup: no SD card needed. I added an OctoPi to mine to achieve similar but that takes some tinkering and the OctoPi performance is spotty. - They're claiming a 70% decrease in print times
An Ender 3 will produce good prints if it's well tuned, but there are a lot of quirks to the design (mostly as a result of cost-cutting) that can cause problems out of the box and will cause problems over time. Prusa printers are far from perfect, but they're trusted by a lot of print farm operators to run 24/7 with very little attention.
Modern CoreXY printers like the Bambu Lab or Voron machines are crazy fast compared to an Ender 3, without any real compromise in print quality or reliability. That isn't necessarily a big deal for hobbyists, but it's very useful when you're iterating on a design. For users who care about print speed, the issue is generally latency rather than throughput.
Here is the full kit https://www.prusa3d.com/product/original-prusa-i3-mk3-s-to-m...
May as well buy the full printer and sell the old one :(
Every other 3D printer I have used: Calibration, Settings, Filament, Buggy, Spaghetti, Error.
Doubt this will be much of an improvement, there is little to improve upon with the MK3S+.
I have a MK3S+ with MMU2S, bear clone upgrade, a head upgrade, Octoprint with 2 cameras, a temperature regulation chamber, and filament dryers.
I’d love to just click print on a thingiverse page and have my printer start going.
https://forum.prusa3d.com/forum/prusaslicer/guide-config-pru...
As others have mentioned, the closet is using something like PrusaSlicer and using 'Upload and start print'. You do the slicing manually, then you just press a button and it uploads the gcode and starts printing.
Especially with slicers still introducing all sorts of improvements which might need tuning of their own to adapt to older designs.
As far as I can tell, that doesn't work yet, and the Prusa website [1] says:
> Full control of your printer will be added in future releases
Edit: It looks like remote printing was released in a Firmware update in Nov 2022 [2] and the documentation website wasn't updated yet.
[1]: https://help.prusa3d.com/article/prusa-connect-local-mini_13...
[2]: https://github.com/prusa3d/Prusa-Firmware-Buddy/releases
I still use Prusas for my robotics work because I can print multiple parts in a work day and iterate quickly. Either you are ordering parts and have to wait days for them to arrive, or your budget is very different from mine.
I did work at Google X and have a few MJF parts still from their in house machine. They are nice, but they are in a totally different league. My MJF benchy sits next to my Prusa MK3s at home.
Eh, that's not really the case any more. If you spend a sensible amount of money on a properly built machine, it's pretty close to fire-and-forget. Features like automatic bed levelling, PEI build plates, runout sensors, reliable direct-drive extruders and spaghetti detection have removed most of the annoyances in FDM printing.
I was a long-time FDM sceptic, but the technology has reached a level of maturity where it fills a useful niche. FDM machines are an increasingly common sight in machine shops, tool rooms and MRO facilities; in an environment that's staffed by people who are familiar with CAD/CAM, they can produce a useful subset of parts with an almost trivial level of cost and effort.
Unless your employer is extremely generous, you probably don't have an MJF or SLS machine that's just sitting idle in case you need a widget in a hurry. FDM thrives in the niche traditionally occupied by hand tools and that sloppy old Bridgeport - workholding one-offs, kludgy parts to keep a machine running until the field tech arrives, parts you only need in order to make other parts. An FDM printer is the mechanical embodiment of the phrase "close enough for government work".
I've had two Prusa mk3s for a few years now and they've been excellent. No problems at all, and now Prusa is my default recommendation. I'd run batch jobs on them for days for "customers" without concern.
https://blog.prusa3d.com/announcing-original-prusa-mk4_76585...
If you don’t care to become a part-time 3D printer tech, and value your time more than a few hundred dollars vs. dozens of hours spent trying to get it right, buy Prusa and get printing.
I have another Ender 3 that I upgraded. It has a Bigtreetech SKR Mini with a full color touch screen, a bed leveling sensor, and a Micro Swiss direct drive extruder. It just works as well, and probably doesn't benefit a ton from the fancy extruder or touch screen since I tend to use a web UI.
I also have a Prusa MK3S+. It performs equally well to the Enders.
For what I paid for the Prusa, I could have a 5+ Enders with upgraded 32bit controllers running Klipper. Or a lot of rolls of filament.
Come to think of it, I haven't even used the Prusa in over a month because one of its steppers or that stepper motor driver is failing, skipping steps or just going rogue. I haven't bothered looking into it yet because the Enders are easily keeping up with whatever I need printed.
I honestly think that when you buy a Prusa, you're buying the brand, and supporting a company who's founder helped shaped the industry we all benefit from. At least that's what I tell myself to justify the huge (by comparison) price difference.