[Filligree]

I have a Mk3S and a Bambu X1C. The Bambu is much, much better.

The Mk4 covers most of the distance, but at a price point matching the X1C, and it's only most. Speeding it up is nice, but... pressure advance depends on detailed characteristics of the filament, such as viscosity, which varies from brand to brand and color to color.

The X1 has a lidar, which from experience actually does work as advertised. The Mk4 has... what? Prusament, maybe? I would not be surprised to find you can only get the advertised speed if you use Prusa's precalibrated filament.

Or you can print the calibration lines and do it manually. That does work; it's a ten second eyeballing procedure, simple enough for the X1 to do full auto. But you're really supposed to do that for every startup -- characteristics change as the reel ages, which doesn't even happen evenly across the entire reel -- and nobody does that.

[sottol]

As far as I've seend the X1s lidar is mostly useless, it's doing fine-calibration at most based on the current filament profile and seems to be inconsistent.

That's not to say that the X1 itself is - just that lidar is imho a gimick.

[Filligree]

I've done a great deal of printing, both with the lidar enabled and disabled.

For PLA it doesn't make a big difference. But when you're printing polycarbonate or PETG, the quality difference is dramatic. Perhaps you have a defective unit?

[magixx]

I also assumed the lidar is a complete placebo having owned the P1P and seeing how well it prints with PLA plus looking at available lidar sensors and their accuracy but maybe it does work? Would love to get a teardown on what components it uses but couldn't find anything online some months ago.

[Filligree]

You don't need it if you print slowly, and you don't need it for reliable old PLA. If I squint, I think I can see a difference, but it's marginal.

Thing is, the X1C isn't really for printing PLA. If you only want to do that, you'd get a V400 or a Voron. When I print PC Blend, though, it's... the difference is glaring. This isn't something that needs a lot of testing; with the lidar off, the corners look like semicircles.

Also monotonic top/bottom layers don't fill the full surface, because they have corners on both ends. About like you'd expect, and the difference isn't visible from the outside; external perimeters are always printed slowly anyway.

[sottol]

Vorons are pretty terrible at PLA, not enough cooling and enclosure. They're great Abs printers though and PC blend.

[Filligree]

Good to know. The one Voron I've seen in real life didn't have an enclosure; I take it that isn't standard?

The X1 also prints ABS perfectly. I should remember to make a Nevermore filter one of these days, so I can take advantage...

[deelowe]

Why are you comparing lidar and pressure advance? They arent related. Also, I thought the Bambu printers had pa in their firmware as well?

[jdietrich]

Both the X1 Carbon and the Prusa Mk4 support pressure advance, but the X1 Carbon can automatically calibrate pressure advance using the LIDAR sensor. It prints a bunch of lines at various rates of speed and acceleration, then measures the actual printed line width to calculate a PA value. With the Prusa, you need to manually calibrate PA for each filament.