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by TimMeade
898 days ago
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I think this is missing a little context. I believe Prusa and to some extent the older market leader Creality were sideswiped by a better product. A group of engineers got together and formed Bambu Labs. Their printer are all less than 2 years on market and they have become the new standard for the simple fact they just work. 3d Printing historically has been "early adopter". I'm long term tech. It took me a month of configuring and tinkering and changing to get me first ender 3 to work about 3 years ago. I got a Bambu Labs P1P and it just worked. Right out of the box day 1. Beautiful multi color prints. All for less than my Ender 3 S1PRO cost. I then got the new Creality K1 Max that they meant to compete with Bambu. Now 6 months later it's still not "just works". I have upgraded the Hot End and it has ruined 4 plates do to bad firmware. I am currently waiting on new mother board to fix the current issue. Waiting for 3 weeks as it comes from china. When it does work its very nice. But I have to say that's 50% of the time. In the meantime I ordered the new Bambu A1 with the AMS Lite. Again it just works. Some issues. But in general it just works. And it's 2/3 the cost of the K1 Max. Building a great product and doing it cheaper is why everyone is getting Bambu Labs and Not Prusa and a declined Creality market. IMHO. |
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Prusa had an established reputation for relatively low hassle, premium machines.
There legitimately isn't much in the Bambu machines that didn't already exist in some form in the high end hobbyist space. What Bambu did was take the best of what was out there and combine it into a single coherent, easy to use package. And, just as critically, they cost-engineered it for mass production.
Prusa has long resisted anything outside their own ecosystem. They invest crazy amounts of effort into reimplementing and reinventing things because NIH syndrome is deeply engrained into their company culture. They clung to using 8 bit controllers long past their expiration date. They spent years working and reworking their flagship $2000 XL which still isn't widely available and suffers fundamental design flaws that will result in it being slower and producing worse prints than its competitors when it is.
A lot of this is Prusa refusing to move past their hobbyist roots. Their printers are still made largely out of aluminum extrusion and printed parts -- this is a great way for a hobbyist to prototype one-off designs, but it's an abysmal way to mass produce a machine.
Bambu's great innovation is the fact that the machine is largely stamped sheet metal and injection molded parts. This results in a machine that is sturdier, higher quality, and cheaper than the way Prusa insists on doing things. It requires a significant investment in tooling upfront -- this was the great tell that Bambu wasn't some scrappy startup when they launched their Kickstarter; they were easily deep into six if not seven figures in tooling costs before the X1 was ever publicly announced.
Prusa was one of the few players in the industry who had the resources and could have done all of this. They actively chose not to. They were stagnant and seemed to think they could continue selling $1000 bed slingers forever. The market finally moved on.