[rblatz]

As someone that went from a janky Ender to a Bambu X1C, I think I can explain the differences. Is your hobby 3d printing? If so a machine that allows you more freedom to tinker and requires more hands on knowledge, but at a slightly lower price makes sense. If you use a 3d printer for your other hobbies, then something more appliance like that just works like the Bambu lines is probably a better fit.

I basically never 3d printed before, because every time I wanted to print I spent more time fiddling with the printer than I spent on my actual hobby. Now I spend almost no time thinking about the printer, and I use it almost daily.

I think both Prusa and Bambu have great printers and target different demographics, Bambu was a better fit for me and my needs, and I think a lot of people fall into the same general class as me. If you want a 3d printing appliance go with a Bambu, if you want to spend time customizing and upgrading and tinkering with a 3d printer go with another brand like Prusa.

[Symbiote]

> if you want to spend time customizing and upgrading and tinkering with a 3d printer go with another brand like Prusa.

Prusa is the company making reliable, open and therefore repairable/upgradable printers. But reliable is first, and the majority of Prusa printers will not be modified from purchase.

[dekhn]

I did not find my Prusa (MK3 upgrade to mk3s and also a new mk3s) to be reliable. It had all sorts of failure modes and eventually I stopped using both of them. I did repair both of them a few times but the extruder design is just really inconvenient. I replaced it with a printer that cost far less - cheap enough that after a few years, if it started to behave poorly, I'd replace it with another cheap printer (after reading reviews to make sure its constraints were consistent with my workflow).

Prusa did some great stuff but the market copied the good stuff and evolved past them.

[sho_hn]

I bought an MK4 two years ago, it's been printing for 1500+ hours, and I haven't done any tinkering. It's just a workhorse.

Again, you said it yourself: You went from an Ender to a Bambu, and you seem to just assume that a Prusa requires "tinkering".

[lutusp]

> ... you seem to just assume that a Prusa requires "tinkering".

I would have said "allows tinkering." Many Prusa buyers expect to be able to improve things by tinkering. It's more a philosophy than a necessity.

There was a time when one's ability to modify a product was a "good thing". When the Apple II came out in 1977, I bought one, and within weeks of tinkering, its designers wouldn't have recognized it. Same idea.

By tinkering I made my Apple II drive a printer, useful for me, but a change the Apple people tried to keep from the non-tinkering public.

It might be genetic, but I've learned to hate closed platforms.

[sho_hn]

Thanks for making this point, which is very and strangely underrepresented on Hacker News.

I've been made fun of for decades for being a Linux user with slogans like "I want to use my PC, not work on my PC". Guess what, thanks to what I learned and the network it got me I have a nicer occupation than any of them and got to participate in a few projects that changed the world a little. You should seek out experiences that build you, not disparage them.

What makes Prusa so great is that you don't have to "make the 3D printer your hobby", but you definitely can. I can think of few products that balance this so well.

I've just started writing these in the hopes of reaching that 15 yo with potential, not an army of MacBook-wielding TypeScript slingers.

[rblatz]

This was in response to a post about how to setup and calibrate and deal with Prusa Core One issues. The Bambu literally just runs a self calibration on first run, making the need for this sort of process unnecessary.

Maybe it’s not a big deal to do this on first setup, but clearly someone thought it was worth writing a blog post to explain to people.

[Symbiote]

The article is by a tinkerer. It's not representative of normal use.

The Prusa obviously has a self-calibration, I believe they introduced the idea a few years ago.

[sho_hn]

Nothing in this blog post is something that has to be done. The normal Core One user experience is to unbox and print a few minutes later.