> If you don't care about business practices and general privacy concerns, Bambu.
While I agree, I think it's heavily underselling Bambulab printers in terms of UX and print quality, they are the absolute best in the market and by a mile.
While I agree, I think it's heavily underselling Bambulab printers in terms of UX and print quality, they are the absolute best in the market and by a mile.
Prusa drives the slicer development ecosystem (Bambu Studio is a fork), so new production-ready advances typically come from them first, which is lovely to support.
The Bambu products are fine. They print well. But the "it's on another level" stuff is mostly paid influencer narratives (a rampant thing in 3D printer YouTube, etc.) that don't really hold up to any professional scrutiny.
With advent of EasyPrint etc. arguably Prusa may have also one-upped them on ease of use? Though this isn't first-hand knowledge as I haven't tried it personally.
The out of the box experience between a Bambu printer and a modern Prusa is not noticably different. You'll be onto your first print in 10 minutes with either.
Prusa's product history simply goes back longer to when 3D printers were more hobbyist kit. But they've grown up just the same.
It's a bit like saying a 2025 Lexus is superior to a 2025 Maybach because Mercedes' first car in 1886 was a rickety afair.
I'd love for Prusa to do an updated Mini. I'd have a hard time justifying the price point on the original today, given the competition, but it's genuinely a great bit of kit.
Mind you, I used to promote Prusa the same way I do for bambulabs now for almost a decade. But once again, Prusa did too little too late. Their Core One response was not quite enough.
I just don't have enough waking hours to tinker with everything hobbyists around expect me to tinker.
Only if you compare Prusa printing at 50 mm/s with Bambu at 500 mm/s.
>and better overhang performance
What? No. Proof: https://youtu.be/HcSOz-Lsxgg?feature=shared&t=293
>Prusa drives the slicer development ecosystem (Bambu Studio is a fork)
Prusa slicer is also a fork ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So this video's claim, if I got it right while skimming in a subway, is that when Prusa redesigned the part cooling fan shroud to improve overhang performance they also went ahead and improved the slicer, and the benchmark results that have them generally win overhang comparisons around that time may be attributed more to the software fix than the new HW parts.
That's very interesting information, thanks for sharing.
It's also exactly the kind of thing where a Bambu fan would normally go "oh, so they just made the better integrated product that works better in the end without the customer having to care why".
But I totally agree they should document this transparently since Prusa Slicer can also be used with off-brand printers to good success.
> Prusa slicer is also a fork ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sure, which it very prominently displays on the splash screeen to this day instead of hiding it, giving credit where credit is due.
The difference is that it was forked off from Slic3r much longer ago, Slic3r isn't really actively developed anymore, and Prusa has largely rewritten it since.
So it's a false equivalence. This sort of disingenuous comment is the reason a lot of people don't like the Bambu user/influencer brigrading.
The fact that the Bambu printers use linear slides means they have a huge accuracy advantage right out the chute. And the Bambu printers have a bunch of other quality of life improvements that really add up.
While you can certainly slag Bambu for their business practices, the other 3D printer companies are absolutely lagging on the engineering front. Companies like Prusa need to step up their game.
As for phoning home, we isolated the printer on its own network and it hasn't caused us any issues. Sure, some of the monitoring features won't work, but it seems to print just fine without network access.
I have an Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro. It was like $220. I have put approximately $30 into it for the Raspberry Pi I installed Octoprint on, and even that's a stretch since I already owned the Pi. It prints just fine. Sits for months. Fires up every time. First layers perfect every time.
The "printer being the hobby" is only true if you let it. Even cheap no name open source printers are really good these days, and in the high end there are plenty that are competitive with Bambu on print quality, out of the box experience, and features, often exceeding them.
I dunno, I guess I just don't think having to let a printer talk to some fucking cloud service in China so I can start an STL print from my phone is all that important of a feature.
Many people started with something like an Ender V3, then moved to Bambu... and that is absolutely life-altering in terms of 3D printing expectaitons. But a similar difference is present moving to a modern Ender, Elegoo, or Prusa. Just their marketing is far from as solid as Bambu.
Not that Bambu printers are bad; in fact I still like their AMS solution the best of any I've seen or tested.
It’s going to be hard to justify supporting open source hardware at these prices.
It's almost impossible to justify buying their printers today. The issues and concerns about Bambulab seem to be primarily driven by disappointment with how a new company that didn't open source their hardware was able to absolutely steamroll the entire market, rather than actual real issues you as a user will have.
The only way to beat Bambu Lab is to be better than them at the 3D printer game, but most companies can't do that, so people have become resentful while grasping for straws to find things to criticize. Snapmaker got the message and decided to come out with the Snapmaker U1, the rest can wallow in their "open source" superiority complex to silence critics.
My experience was the same. I can just run the thing without having to tweak, tune, calibrate it. It takes care of that itself. I also don't let it talk to my wifi though. I just use the microSD card.
But my purchase was a while ago. While it is possible the industry has caught up, the reputation Bambu built still leads the pack.
My prusa has be far more reliable so far. admittedly it’s newer than the a1 so it’s too early to be super conclusive on that, but so far it’s been quite a bit better
Of course, it’s quite a bit more money too
After that experience I got a Prusa, I'm only an occasional printer but I've put maybe 5 rolls of material through it over the course of a couple years and haven't had any stop+fix issues.
Bambu were the first that gave me the feeling 3D FDM printing has become more appliance-like, less 'spend endless hours maintaining the machine'. Sure, the Bambu also needs maintenance. But it is not the main procedure with the machine.
Most serious 3D printed guns have at least a metal barrel. Often, 3D printed guns are just a lower receiver, that is the part you hold in your hand, the parts that actually fire the bullets (barrel, pin, slide, etc...) are bought off the shelf from real gun manufacturers.
This is a workaround for some laws that considers gun parts to not be a gun. For example, outside of a gun, a barrel is just a metal pipe and can be traded freely. The part that makes a gun a gun is the lower receiver, and you can 3D print that in plastic and still get good performance. In fact, Glock makes this part in plastic and these are some of the most popular and proven guns in the world.
Everybody else who needs a gun for lawful purposes (i.e. self defense) is simply going to purchase one from a reputable manufacturer.
Perhaps the grip.
I had a buddy in high school who did competitive shooting, he did the same thing by carving these parts from wood, now it can be done for a fraction if the cost. Check out Olympic shooting pictures for an idea of the parts I'm talking about.
US is a rare country that treats only serialized parts as "guns" and don't regulate actual gun parts. This allow Americans to trivially "build guns at home", but easd of actually building guns is extremely exaggerated.
Also, there's little in 3D printers that actually makes it easy to build gun parts. It's all cosmetics. Real illegal ghost guns are always made with plumbing supplies.
Next door,3d items literally being built. No fight. No fuss.
I went onto Reddit to get their recommendations. To someone completely new who hasn't followed any real developments occurring in the industry, it was confusing but it seemed like the Sovol SV06 was a good "starting point".
Well I didn't realize how far behind the industry still was. I thought surely at this point all printers much just be load file -> load filament -> click print. Just like regular printers no?
Nope, doing dumb things like using some third party slicer tool, transferring a file to a microsd card manually and then babying the printer for its super slow error prone prints feels like its still a toy not a professional device.
Imagine having to do that level of nonsense for your laser printer? Yeah maybe back in the days of "Office Space" but not today!
I was in a time crunch so out of desperation I took a gamble and dropped a wad of cash on a Bambu X1C. It is what I consider a professional product for normies in my eyes. Most everything else are just toys.
I was ready to say Bambu, Bambu and nothing but Bambu but then I read the user's last few sentences. Seems like he is not really looking for a end to end professional product and so hes got infinite options but for anyone else, its gotta be Bambu!
GUI and UX are not the same. Prusa has pretty good print quality too but not as good a GUI as the Bambu.
UX would include the ability to easily tear down a hot end, replace a nozzle, tighten any belts, and anything else that would affect your ability to print high quality prints.
For prusa, since that's the printer I have experience with the most. Replacing the nozzle and clearing filament jams are pretty easy. But tearing down the hot end to remove debris wrapped around the extruder gear was not.
But then for most stuff I use a .6mm high flow nozzle.
Prusa is widely known to launch their next-generation tool changer at Formnext in Nov, which is going to be a concept where you have a rack of nozzle+heatpipe+filament tube tools that the print head grabs and heats up inductively. And Bambu is more or less working on something similar they will probably launch some time next year.
This is totally changing the "nozzle swap" equation. It means purge-free and much faster multi-material printing without outright duplicating print heads like the XL does, and the ability to park and mix nozzle sizes as well.
It'll be cool to see which company pulls it off better. As someone who was never convinced by either Bambu's shoddy and wasteful AMS or Prusa's ridiculously humongous MMU+Buffer approach, this is the leap I've been waiting for for an upgrade.
Edit: Amazing move to downvote a comment that simply and neutrally adds new information to the thread.
Bambu Vortek seems to just be swapping nozzles so, while that should cut down on waste, it's going to be much slower (XL is already much faster than AMS based printers but comes at a substantial price increase).
INDX tool changes are expected to be around 8-12 seconds. Vortek would be probably be around 30+ seconds.
If Bambu are only swapping nozzles it also means they still need something AMS-like to swap the filament path, which somehow feels a bit clunky. I think having seperate filament paths is overall a cleaner and simpler design.
Someone's made an animation of how they think it'll look like: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YNSlx0GJ5Ig
With my Bambu for 18 months, problem just doesn't exist. I have spare parts because previous experience said I'd need it. But not yet.
The most egregious operational issue is the occasional hairball, even then, the printer often catches the issue and pauses the print to let me check on it - automatic hairball detection.
I don't like the Bambu company and I wouldn't buy one now thanks to their lock in practices. My Bambu won't get the "fuck you" firmware update.
But as to their hardware reliability for "just printing stuff" - it's pretty awesome. If other companies have caught up to this, then the 3D printing world is in a much better place.
It stands on soft rubber feet so the whole machine has a low natural frequency (similar to the drum of a washing machine). This has the advantage that the high frequency movements of the motors/axes never resonate with the casing.
In the beginning it does a lot of tests and seems to also shake the machine to analyse the frequency behaviour.
Your ears can immediately note that it is a nice feature for sure.
potential print size is basically the same print quality is the same as far as i can tell..
i use the elegoo more often.
Scraping a site isn’t illegal or immoral.
None of this impacts the customer negatively in any way.