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Comment by nullstyle | Hacker News Reader

Prusa sat on its haunches for a decade, happy to leave progress on the table as long as their salaries got paid. Bambu actually got non-technical people into the hobby and has always had more bang per buck.

Buy a bambu; use Orcaslicer

Edit: didn't mean to say "held the industry back"; I would categorize my opinion more along the lines of "were happy to get fat on past offerings" or the like.

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Prusa is generally like Apple in that regard, in that they wait for the new technology to be tried and true before committing their design(s) to it. CoreXY is the most prominent example.

Prusa was actually the "non-technical" printer company for quite a while though. They would sell to schools and libraries, and still do, and offer(ed) assembled kits.

I don't own a Prusa, I've assembled Vorons and have a highly-modified Ender 3 S1, but if I was in the market to get a user-friendly printer, or recommend one, I'd get a Prusa.

My thing with bambu was always that they polished whatever the industry (and hobbyists) had invented and closed it all off, then also innovating on top of that but never giving back unless they _had_ to. Polish and mechanical design are great but corexy kinematics, input-shaping are imo what made the X1 stand out as the fast+good-qual printer when it launched. A lot of what they added on top was then to build a moat.

This may be a controversial take, but imo it would be Bambu to set the industry back by a decade if they "win" and lock up the market. That's clearly their strategy afaict.

Does anyone remember Bambu patenting existing open inventions as their own? I can't seem to find good links anymore (?!) but there's some details here https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5134/8/6/141

If no one else is willing to give a polished experience, they have no one to blame but themselves. My father doesn't want to be a 3d printer expert or filament researcher; he wants to print things in 3d as a hobby. Looking back at the reprap, ultimaker, and prusa — the big boys of the maker-oriented printers that i remember — none of them made any progress on making the hobby more accessible to someone like my dad. Bambu deserves some recognition for that.

I never had any problem with prusa default filament settings and printing is easy with prusalink or usb stick.

Prusa is also pursuing patents (they say it's because of Bambu but lol), and they are not releasing their firmware sources for recent printers.

Bambu did not close the tech they used to make their printers. Others (including Prusa) are making CoreXY and they 100% also benefit from the RnD that Bambu did (either hardware, or the slicer (without which Orca would not exist in its current form)).

Bambu just made better products for cheaper and Josef got mad. But I'm certain that Prusa could compete had they focused on making price-competitive polished printers, and not focus on $5k monster printers for enterprise.

How did Prusa hold the industry back? Were they suing other printer manufacturers who innovated?

"Not innovating myself" isn't the same as "holding other's innovations back".

I didn’t say Prusa held the industry back; I said they sat on their haunches. Even the basic differences in stepper motors between what bambu chose and what prusa or ultimaker chose demonstrates my point.

Edit: whoops! guess i did say they held the industry back... my bad /facepalm.

I did quick search and bambu p2s seems to be 30% faster than prusa mk4s and few hundred cheaper. Prusa is more accurate, more open and has better spare parts supply. Bambu doesn't have wifi connection unless I use their cloud?

I'm gonna keep using mk4s.

I’ve always got more consistent and accurate prints out of my x1c versus the prusa mk3 i tolerated. Even just the enclosure makes the bambu experience more much more consistent in my experience

The enclosure is the real added value, hardware-wise; and the H2D has even better environmental control (active heating and cooling of chamber).

While the open-source part of me loves the more open nature of Prusa, the commercial-minded part loves the immediate convenience of the Bambu. But the environmental control is something which Prusa doesn't really do well yet. Heated chamber, as well as filament humidity control is something Bambu has done which Prusa has not, and when it comes to printing with "engineering" filaments like PA6CF, PA6GF and other higher-end lubricating plastics for bearings etc, along with support filaments like PVA which are incredibly hygroscopic, the Bambu is the only contender if you want high-quality prints that don't warp.

IMO this is where Prusa gave up the race and need to catch up. Give me equivalent or better environmental control, and I'll be happy to consider it.

The accessibility to non-experts, and the fact that it just works out of the box without fiddling around optimising settings, is why I have a Bambu family at work and zero Prusas.

Worth noting those are essentially different "generations" of printers, as well as different kinematic systems, CoreXY vs Cartesian.

The Bambu Lab P2S is a CoreXY printer, and that's why it's physically faster than the Prusa MK4S which is a bed slinger.

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