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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

For a cheap (about 500 EUR) enclosed 3D printer, what would HN recommend? I know two persons with the Bambu P2S and they seem happy with it. One of them is printing stuff daily since forever. He also showed me incredible prints using filaments with carbon inside and the result is jaw dropping (but it costs something like 6x the price of regular filaments).

Is one brand better than the other? Are they all pretty much the same by now?

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Aside from the occasional problems like printers waking up at night to print gibberish [0] and attempts at locking down their ecosystem [1], Bambu Lab makes the most consistent, reliable printers for casual use you will find.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/3d-printers-print-br... [1] https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/bambu-lab-controversy-de...

OK thanks to you all... Oh well I guess you can't have it all but for casual use I take it from the comments here it's still the way to go.

I bought a Bambu A1 Mini to replace an Ender 3, thinking it would just be for occasional printing. I wanted something smaller and better looking. The opposite happened: the process got so much easier that I now regret not getting something bigger, maybe even with AMS.

So while I can't compare the whole market, I can definitely say the jump in ease of use was huge.

Prusa printers are great too, especially if you care about supporting a company that invested heavily in open source. I found them harder to justify on price, but I also understand why people choose them for that reason.

There have also been pretty public disputes around Bambu's use of open-source work from the Prusa/Slic3r ecosystem, so that is part of the decision too.

I was chatting with my sister about this. She has a P2S and highly recommends it.

I did a bit of research and I agree with her. The other one that stood out was the snap maker U1 (it has a nice elegant solution for multi-colored prints, and promises to be open etc going forward).

I'm personally going with the P2S with AMS for the simplicity of the bambu ecosystem (though I'm conflicted about it).

Still after using the creality ender 3 for a long time I'm excited to see how much easier things can be. :)

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