[0xedd]

None I know did. If you do your research, all the hype around Bambu is paid. Influencers pushed it. Tech deep dives show it is sub standard. Posted on HN.

Prusa is king. High quality. Open source. EU made and engineered. Slicer is a market leader (Bambu's a fork of it).

[bluescrn]

Prusa may still be king if you're using printers commercially, running them hard 24/7 in a print farm, wanting to be sure your investment has a decent lifespan with readily-available spare parts and upgrade options.

But it's a premium brand now. For lighter use by hobbyists, Bambu is the clear winner on price/performance. The 'less open' downside is not a factor to most people, and the printers generally work so well out-of-the-box that repairability isn't as much of a concern as it was on printers of the past.

Personally I went from a Prusa MK3s to a Bambu P1P (after looking long+hard at Prusa options), and so far, no regrets. (Although I've kept the old Prusa as a 2nd printer and upgraded it to a MK3.5, but mostly just because I do enjoy a bit of tinkering with them)

[luma]

If your goal is to buy the cheapest machine you can find in the world, chances are good everything you buy is going to come from China. That Prusa Mk3 you bought ages ago can be upgraded to the latest model, which means you have the option of turning that device into a lifetime machine, something ONLY Prusa offers.

Yes, the initial purchase price is higher, the lifetime price might not be.

[bluescrn]

Last time I looked, the MK3->MK4 upgrade kit is basically the same price as a complete MK4 kit (very little can be reused. New electronics, motors, extruder)

The upgrade kits are definitely a good thing, going from MK3 to MK3S to MK3.5S was a worthwhile upgrade path and has prolonged the useful life of the printer. But they have their limits.

(And with 3D printing going more mainstream, there's a large segment of the market that has no interest in building printers from kits or stripping down printer to install upgrades - even though some of us find that quite enjoyable)

[crote]

Prusa used to be king.

Their QC and customer support has gradually been getting worse. Their printers are rarely competitive feature-wise. Several printer lines are quietly being retired - with bugs remaining open for years and new features only occasionally being backported from other printers. The open-source part is mostly abandoned due to cheaper third-party clones abusing it.

Don't get me wrong, I really like my Prusa printer, but in 2025 I'd have a really hard time justifying buying another one. The "Prusa premium" just doesn't seem to be worth it anymore.

[JKCalhoun]

I'm a hobbyist and price, in the end, sold me on Bambu Labs.

(And I stayed once I saw the quality. Likely Prusa can match or exceed it, but not with what I was willing to lose from my wallet.)

[ebruchez]

Not criticizing your decision, but I went the opposite way, deciding that I was ok spending a certain extra amount initially in order to encourage a non-Chinese manufacturer. But I understand not everyone has this luxury.

I bought the Core One kit to understand better how the machine works, which reduced the price delta somewhat.

It remains to be seen over the long term which way is actually better financially, as Prusas have historically had long lives, while there is only limited data on the Bambu Lab side yet.

So far, I am quite happy with my decision. But competition is on. I am excited about the upcoming INDX system for the Core One: if it delivers on its promise, it will be fantastic!

[JKCalhoun]

In hindsight, I would have been happy to spend more if I knew the quality of what I was purchasing would be high.

My Ender that I had purchased years earlier sat in the closet gathering dust because of how much of a pain it was trying to dial in the bed to level, etc. I took a second chance at 3D printing on the Bambu, but might not have if it were costly.

If someone now tells me a Prusa (or whatever) is as good as and simple as the Bambu, I would not hesitate to spend even double.

[bmelton]

This _cannot_ be true

I'm new to 3D printing, so grains of salt abound, but since I started in on the hobby this Christmas, I've purchased four 3D printers. 3 budget-but-highly-regarded kings to start, but they all gave me tons of trouble. The Elegoo Centauri Carbon I got for Christmas that sparked this mess is a budget knockoff of the Bambu X1C, but in the first 30 days of ownership, I experienced 2 hardware failures that (thanks to having to ship parts from Mainland China) have resulted in 16 days of downtime.

To deal with the downtime, I bought a stopgap Qidi Q2, but it had tons of problems -- problems which, according to the reviewers, have all been solved for. Ambiguous error messages. Poor English. Choices between "OK" and "Confirm", neither of which advanced the system. Mainboard errors. Extruder failures. Boot failures. Firmware upgrade failures. I experienced all of these within the first 3 hours of ownership, and filed for a return.

I was working on a project that needed a printer, and now despite having bought a bunch of printers, I didn't have any printers that could print. Looking around locally at what I could buy that day amounted to either a Bambu P2S or a Sovol SV08. I struggled here, because I would _much_ rather be the Sovol owner than the Bambu owner, but I needed a printer, not a project, and so I decided I'd try out the Bambu until I got done with what I needed it for, and then I'd return it.

But it turns out it was amazing. The others (admittedly, budget units) were loud and cantankerous, but the Bambu was only uncivilized for a few minutes of each print, and the rest of the time you barely noticed it running. The ecosystem is obviously great. Being able to monitor jobs or initiate prints from my phone is admittedly a novelty, but it's a nice one, and one that speaks to a consistency of integration. But the important part is that it just worked. There were printable upgrades available, I didn't need to print modular pieces to fix design flaws like the other units. I didn't need to move it further away to deal with the noise. I didn't need to investigate arcane error messages because none ever arose.

Now, I haven't owned a Prusa, so I'm not trying to compare them. I understand that Prusa hardware quality is amazing. I believe that. I'm also wildly interested in the community efforts to implement tool-changing with INDX and INBXX, and they're the kinds of projects that I want to tinker with. But if I'm to own a Prusa, or a Sovol, or a Voron, it'll have to be as my second printer (well technically third, because I still own the Elegoo because it's too cheap to bother trying to return) because most of the time I want to print things, not tinkering with the printer. But while the Prusa machines might be amazing, the Prusa XL is wildly expensive for 5 colors, and the Core One right now can't be bought with multi-color capabilities.

I'm not trying to argue against Prusa here, but the idea that only shills are into Bambu seems flatly wrong. I am ideologically opposed to how Bambu got to the market position they've reached, and for sure they've undoubtedly got a fair amount of shills in their employ but sadly, their products more than live up to the hype.

[whynotmaybe]

You are a "new" type of user for the 3d printing world.

In the last decade, most 3d printer users were hobbyists and liked to know the internals of the machine they were using.

That's why there are so many useless models of random gadgets on thingiverse. People didn't care about the output, more about the process.

With the arrival of bambu and the last Creality, the market has shifted to a plug and print model where more and more buy the printer as a tool to produce and output and they don't care about the internals or gcode.

They must be able to control their printers from their phone.

The people that started in 3d printing when they had to assemble the whole machine by hand are now sad to see their hobby replaced by something too easy, it feels like cheating.

"How come you don't know how to level the bed and measure the offset with a piece of paper? "

Just like senior dev are sad to see vibe coding replace "true development craft".

[gambiting]

>>You are a "new" type of user for the 3d printing world.

Why can't you be both. I loved my time with my Ender 5 Pro, I had it for 3 years and I will always freely admit that 90% of the fun was with the tinkering to make the machine work correctly. But you know, you get bored of it. I got an H2D just before christmas and it's incredible to have a machine that "just works". I can print things for myself and others and not worry whether it's going to work or not - it just will.

Same as I used to tinker with my cars when I was younger, now I want an appliance car - I want to get in, press start and drive across europe not worrying whether I'll have to fix it on the roadside or not. I would say it's just getting older, but I Don't think it is - I think everyone goes through stages of developing things they enjoy about their hobbies.

[kortex]

> The people that started in 3d printing when they had to assemble the whole machine by hand are now sad to see their hobby replaced by something too easy, it feels like cheating.

I have a 10 year old kit-built prusa I3 sitting next to me. Its brother is in the basement next to a kossel. It's been years since they have seen action, there is a litany of small bits of work they need.

I unboxed an A1 Mini and it's been like an epiphany. I've been printing almost nonstop. It's so much FUN. I just send from my phone and it just works. Everything has been nearly flawless until last night where half a batch of mini utility knife frames started to spaghetti, probably my fault for not fully cleaning the build plate in a bit.

Beats the hell out of glue stick or blue tape, fussing with slicer params, babysitting the first layers, etc etc. Fuck that, gimme the cheat.

[kube-system]

There are plenty of us “old” type of users who made and designed our own printers and parts and spent hours on calibration, who no longer want to unnecessarily waste time doing so.

I might be a software engineering but I’m not going to waste time writing a bootloader for my next PC when it is a solved problem.

[bmelton]

Sorry for the old-heads, but just because I'm new doesn't mean I don't appreciate the craft, or the pains endured by many others before me that enabled this painless experience.

But if nobody was fixing the problems everybody was experiencing except Bambu, then frankly, good for Bambu.

Boo to the gate-keepers. Vorons still exist and likely always will for those that want to dork around with printers, but for the rest of us, printers that work empower the field. In the past 5 weeks, I've started to learn and understand how 3D printers work, I've started to do some simple 3D modeling, and I've begun making models with OpenSCAD, which wasn't a thing that I knew existed before. Those parts are currently on Github.

I've organized a billion things. I've modeled a corner for my weird desk's keyboard tray so that it stops cutting my knees when I swivel my chair too quickly. I've delighted my wife by printing some conveniences. I have (admittedly infinitesimally) advanced the availability of 3D models in a way that I simply would not yet have if I were still messing around procuring the Voron parts list. Quality tooling advances the craft as it makes it more accessible.

But the main thing is that it doesn't actually help anybody for 3D printing to be more difficult, nor does wanting Bambu to be bad make them not good. They are good, and they're leaps and bounds better than most of the products in the field.

[theodric]

My first printer was a delta in 2015. I spent more time calibrating it than I did printing, and it was never very good. I then got an Anet A8 in 2017, but it was too flimsy. Cheap, tho!

Around 2021 I spent quite a lot upgrading and dialing in an Ender 3 V2 so it was repeatable, whisper-quiet, and dead reliable.

That's it. This doesn't end with me buying a Bambu. It's still all of those things. I'm very happy with my printing appliance, and also that its only data connection is via microSD sneakernet.

[2muchcoffeeman]

I built my Prusa from a kit and was interested in the internals, but I was always annoyed I spent more time working on the printer sometimes than learning CAD.

And the Prusa is a real workhorse. I’ve only had a couple problems in almost a decade.

A lot of the hobby is people printing out useless things. But the it doesn’t even work for people who are interested in learning CAD. There’s no surprised everyone is turning to Bambu. So will I when my Prusa breaks or there’s a sale too hard to pass up.