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.
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]
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
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.
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).
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?
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! :)
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:^)
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?
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).
My biggest issue is the speed of which my printers print. As printers are getting faster, I won't need as many.
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 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.
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Prusa loves open source and maker mentality. Just look at PrusaSlicer and Printables.
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.
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.