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Comment by drewdevault | Hacker News Reader

Author here. For the price tag of a Prusa Mk4 you can get a Bambu X1 Carbon 3D which is, metric for metric, a better printer -- larger volume, 16 color prints, faster printing, better resolution, pretty much all stats. Go for Creality and you can get the K1 Max at $300 less than the Mk4 (currently on sale, so more like $400 less) which is even better, again, in every spec and comes with an ecosystem that Creality has invested in to a much greater extent than Prusa.

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You should know you can't just compare specs and stats and say the K1 Max is better. Print quality and reliability isn't something that shows up on a spec sheet, and Creality struggles here. Bambu is certainly a credible competitor though.

Honestly, as someone who's been in the 3d printing space for over a decade... Bambu Labs isn't a competitor to Prusa. There is no Prusa printer that is as fast, as reliable, produces the quality prints, as any printer from Bambu. I've used both extensively, the X1C since Kickstarter days, the Prusas for... just about ever. The only edge, the only objective property that Prusa holds over Bambu Labs is customization; Prusa gives away all the details you need to majorly modify their printers. Beyond that there just is no reason to buy a Prusa. Print quality on any of my Bambu printers was equal or better out of the box (minus one that had a warped bed, that was replaced for free) than any of my Prusa printers, even ones with extensive tuning. It's just a better product. Better design, better manufactur, better price, better quality output, better software (though I've migrated to Orcaslicer). Prusa has spent the last decade being the top of the pack, holding market share and stagnating. Now they've been dislodged, and I can't see any compelling reason for them to come back.

My experience did not match your. My X1C combo hadn't really work out of the box. I was able to get maybe 2 prints so far.

That said, I am just an sample of one and the only reason why I bought it because my business need seems more pressing than waiting for Prusa to deliver the MMU3 kits.

I have maybe a few hundred prints on Bambu Labs printers, and I've had fewer than 20 failures, pretty much all from bad design choices on my part. They have been quick, reliable workhorses that just spit out the parts I need.

I did have an issue with one of them having a warped bed, which caused bad adhesion on several prints, but I contacted support, they walked me through some debugging, then just sent me a new one. It seems that early on they had a manufacturer that was putting out warped beds that weren't caught in QC, but they've dropped the manufacturer. Maybe you got one of these warped beds as well? You can diagnose that with a straightedge, a ruler, and a flashlight.

Nope. All my issue with X1C is the AMS stuff.

I will be replacing it eventually once there's a viable open source product or make enough money to fund open hardware projects.

Oh interesting, my AMS has worked flawlessly. This is interesting because I've tried many multimaterial solutions, and other than a Voron with multiple hot ends, none of them worked well at all until the Bambu AMS. It was really wasteful at first, but that was the only negative thing I could say about it. Maybe Bambu Labs has more QC problems than I thought. My experiences were all so simply and directly positive (across 4 of their printers now), I kind of expected that to just be the norm.

Remember that I am just a sample of one. Experience will differ.

It's hard to say what's the norm without more data.

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