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Comment by tcoop25 | Hacker News Reader

I just canceled my X1-Carbon order. Just spend some time on the Bambu Labs subreddit and you will see a lot of frustrated owners. It is insanely loud, and it seems unreliable and buggy.

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).

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> Just spend some time on the Bambu Labs subreddit and you will see a lot of frustrated owners.

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.

> Your loss!

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?

> The idea that someone who is happy with a different product is somehow wrong or losing.

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! :)

Yeah, I'm not trying to peg the attitude on you either. I've just seen that in 3d printing (and many other topics) threads, and you reminded me.

Yeah, mea culpa for falling into the trap of ambiguity there. Agree it’s too prevalent and should’ve done better to distance myself from that toxicity.

Always been that way. Ask any Atari ST user about Amiga and vice versa.

What's that little box for? A foot warmer?

You mean the Atari ST right?

Lamborghini v Ferrari, Beatles v Rolling Stones, Chanel v Dior, Dems v GOP, Apple v Samsung, C++ v Java, ...

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:^)

Bit of a tangent, but I like both Beatles and Rolling Stones a lot. I consider them pretty different and which one I prefer changes with my mood.

The problem is going to be what happens when the <thing> needs to be serviced, whether it be a car, boat, lamp, or 3d printer. I'm glad that your experience is good -- as the way it should be with most consumer equipment.

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.

Just curious, while I’ve ordered various 3D printed parts, I’ve not bought a 3D printer.

What do you use 9 3D printers for?

> 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).

I own 4 printers and looking at adding a 5th. I got my first 3d printer in 2015 because I needed to make things for my quadcopter. That morphed to making things for everyone in my quadcopter racing club. Then it became souvenirs and collectibles for conferences I attend.

My biggest issue is the speed of which my printers print. As printers are getting faster, I won't need as many.

How easy is it to repair?

I own replacement parts for every expendable and/or non-warrantied part. I’ve test replaced a bunch to prove it works (engineer mindset, you don’t have a backup unless you know it works).

> (engineer mindset, you don’t have a backup unless you know it works)

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.

> Would the X1 Carbon be better with 4040 aluminum extrusion or their custom sheet metal bent parts?

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.

Parts for it are available from the manufacturer for decent prices. I've looked at some of the repair guides and they seem decently detailed.

I guess to some point, my qualms with Bambu are that they haven't been around long enough...

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 have a Mk3S and a Bambu X1C. The Bambu is much, much better.

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.

As far as I've seend the X1s lidar is mostly useless, it's doing fine-calibration at most based on the current filament profile and seems to be inconsistent.

That's not to say that the X1 itself is - just that lidar is imho a gimick.

I've done a great deal of printing, both with the lidar enabled and disabled.

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?

I also assumed the lidar is a complete placebo having owned the P1P and seeing how well it prints with PLA plus looking at available lidar sensors and their accuracy but maybe it does work? Would love to get a teardown on what components it uses but couldn't find anything online some months ago.

You don't need it if you print slowly, and you don't need it for reliable old PLA. If I squint, I think I can see a difference, but it's marginal.

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.

Vorons are pretty terrible at PLA, not enough cooling and enclosure. They're great Abs printers though and PC blend.

Good to know. The one Voron I've seen in real life didn't have an enclosure; I take it that isn't standard?

The X1 also prints ABS perfectly. I should remember to make a Nevermore filter one of these days, so I can take advantage...

Why are you comparing lidar and pressure advance? They arent related. Also, I thought the Bambu printers had pa in their firmware as well?

Both the X1 Carbon and the Prusa Mk4 support pressure advance, but the X1 Carbon can automatically calibrate pressure advance using the LIDAR sensor. It prints a bunch of lines at various rates of speed and acceleration, then measures the actual printed line width to calculate a PA value. With the Prusa, you need to manually calibrate PA for each filament.

I own and operate two Bambu X1C with AMS for my prototyping business. They're excellent printers. Since I received them, I have practically stopped using all other printers. They are gamechangers, printing twice or three times as fast, in dramatically higher quality, in engineering materials. Second hand experience from the forum is not giving you the full picture.

> Just spend some time on the Bambu Labs subreddit and you will see a lot of frustrated owners.

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 have two MK3S and I have to say I love them. They're simple, they work well, and I can repair basically any part on it using their documentation. The new model adds mostly refinements for people who want to do production printing.

I have both an MK3S and an X1C and the MK3S has basically been unplugged since the X1C came. I love the Prusa and I would not hesitate to recommend it, but the X1C is a generational improvement in 3d printing.

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).

Here's the thing, though: It's almost definitely a case of silent majority. The printer is pretty phenomenal and I've had excellent support from Bambu so far in New Zealand, no less.

My sample size of 1: I've been using my X1 for over 3 months and in that time printed about 60-70kg of various filaments: PLA, ASA, PETG. Printer worked out of the box, required no adjustment either at start or after. The only tinkering, if you even can call it that, I've done so far was adjusting nozzle temp by 5C for one specific brand of PETG and capping print speed for silk pla (if you print it too fast it's no longer "silky"). Everything else just prints on default profiles.

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.

Yeah. I looked at the X1 Carbon longingly and knew that with so many software features developed in such a short time, it was going to be a bug fest. That's just how software engineering is.

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.

You’ll find people frustrated with Prusa too. There was a whole discord dedicated to trying to fix all issues.

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.

What power supply would you suggest Prusa use instead of what they are using? Is Bambu using something better?

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.

AFAIK the newer Delta power supplies (black case) are fine. The older mystery meat power supplies (silver case) don't have a good reputation, but they're easy enough to replace with a Meanwell or the newer Delta unit.

> Also Prusas software are forks too so weird thing to call out bambu for.

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.

Maybe I’m lucky, as are the hundreds other Prusa MK3S owners I see on the various forums, but the problems you mention seem to be rare.

I also cancelled my X1C and am now part-way through a VzBot kit :) Didn't want something I couldn't repair/upgrade, even though the VzBot is for me quite a complicated build!

That was a mistake. I own both an i3 MK3 and an X1C. The Prusa printer has been sitting unused for months now. Bambu Lab really got many things right.

I can only suggest to go with the Snapmaker. Only made good experience with it and it can also do laser engravings and CNC milling (simple stuff).

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