And yes, I have had to fix both brands. The repairability of the Prusa is largely a myth, you still need to order replacement parts from Prusa, just as with other brands.
I wish Prusa would catch up with their R&D.
Knobs and toggles to allow enthusiasts to dial in everything perfectly aren’t a bad thing. You don’t need make your product a featureless orb. That said, users shouldn’t need to tinker around with any of them to get up and running or for basic use.
This is where Bambu excels. More involved printers are simply not interesting for many people outside of the 3D printing sphere, even if they’d become enthusiasts after buying a printer. They need a “gateway drug” of a printer that’s dead simple to use and get good results out of to even consider buying one. After that they might go down the rabbithole and seek out more technical options, but jumping straight to tinkerville is just too far of a leap for most.
I have yet to have this happen, despite a lot of trying. The Bambu just works and the results are better. The Prusa requires constant recalibration and tuning, and still produces an inferior looking product. I'd love to be proven wrong here.
It's probably the case that somebody with a ton of experience can squeeze better results out of a Prusa ... but that kind of proves my point.
If you’re spending that much time fiddling with it, sounds like you either have much a much better eye for print quality than I do or you got a dud.
People are getting great quality out of the Bambus now - basically a slight tier below Resin, without any of the health issues that require PPE.
https://youtu.be/R8fuNDTQJCY?t=725
(Old video, state of the art has advanced since. Also, the issue with his other printer turned out to be a simple maintenance item (dirty pulley) the video maker skipped over in Bambu's basic troubleshooting guide.)
I’m currently working on an upgrade to 3.5, which should at least give me better speed.
While you're busy ordering parts for your Prusa and taking it apart, people just buy another A1 or P1P for basically nothing. While you're spending 5 hours trying to stabilise your printing plate and ensuring your nozzle isn't vomiting out super melted <weird filament you got>, the bambulabs go haha printing goes brrr thanks for feeding me shale oil it'll work great. If you're 3d printing enough that your printer breaks, you are 100% making enough money to just eat the costs of another printer.
I have 3 bicycles at the moment and use one as my main way of buying groceries.
My ideal bicycle ownership experience is: I change the brake fluid every few years, I spray the chain whenever I remember to, I change tires and brake pads when they wear out, and I never, ever have to do any other maintenance.
I don't care about the bicycle itself, I care about what the bicycle lets me do.
Spending 3 days tracking down the parts for a Prusa, taking it apart, fixing it, realising some settings have gone to shit, fixing it? I hope you have a lot of time to burn in your personal and business life :)
If I needed more "quality" (in the sense of less visible layer lines) than what comes out of a modern Bambu, Prusa (or some other modern FDM printers), I would use another manufacturing process instead of FDM printing. And no idea where you are in the world but I'm in Europe where I can get Prusa parts from different vendors very quickly and reliably and most of them (including Prusa themselves) have processes in place for B2B and public sector transactions which can be important for professional life as well.
Again: I'm not saying that Bambu printers are not very good in many ways. As I said in my parent comment: I have one. Doesn't change my other points.
You need to pick one generation to compare both.
Then maybe don’t phrase it like this. And also acknowledge that it’s a nonsense comparison. People that don’t know Prusa model numbers will just assume the OP is talking about comparable products.
“I really want to like Macs, but the new Lenovo I got for work is better and costs half as much as the 5 year old Mac I have in my basement. Why is the west so incompetent?”
2. I wouldn’t pay more than $200 for a MK3S+ because it’s now 4 generations out of date. Used markets are often overpriced for rapidly advancing technology because most sellers are basing their pricing on what they paid originally not what the item is worth today.
Many times it’s just not worth the hassle for people to sell for what they are actually going to get, so you see a ton of overpriced items just sitting there not selling.
But also I do care about ease of use. I imagine that someone who wants to run their printer for many thousands of hours or who is going to do a lot of tinkering might pay more for a used Prusa than I would.
If we’re talking new comparable printers out today. The Core One and the X1C. They have very similar print quality. The Prusa is $50 cheaper, and the Prusa has many additional benefits.