[kn100]

Full disclosure: I've never owned a Bambu because I've never loved the idea of a "closed" ecosystem 3D printer, however I have used them, and am very familiar with the 3d printing space beyond Bambu.

For anyone considering alternatives: You should know that almost all other 3D printers expect you to know a little more about how they actually work than Bambus. Bambus are as close as you can get to a "just works" type experience, but modern alternatives from others are nowhere near as hard as they used to be.

The closest "easy" alternative is probably Prusa, but you'll pay significantly more for a Prusa machine than you would a Bambu. They're an excellent company, and the complete opposite of Bambu when it comes to Openness. If money is no object, Prusa is highly recommended.

Beyond Prusa, there's a lot of other options. https://auroratechchannel.com/#section2 This list is a good one.

I personally run an old Elegoo Neptune 4 pro - but my needs are quite low. If I were buying today, a Snapmaker U1 or the Creality K2 Plus is probably where I'd end up going.

[cassianoleal]

Prusa are pretty much plug and play these days, especially the Core One line-up.

You're right that they're expensive but you get free human support 24x7, you get an open platform, lots of contributions to open source (even Bambu Studio is a fork of Prusa Slicer), and they pretty much go on forever.

My Core One+ started its life as an original MK3 and went through each iteration of upgrades, and it works like new. I'm now waiting for an INDX upgrade for it.

IMO the main drawback of consumer Prusa offerings is the lack of good chamber heating for more advanced materials. I can print PC on my Core One+ in the summer with the chamber at 45℃ (good enough for most uses, but 60 would be better), but in the winter it becomes a lot harder.

The Core One L is supposedly better in that regard but I've seen reports that it's still not ideal.

Other than that, I feel the extra cash pays itself back in the long run.

[DoctorOetker]

Is there any guidance on improving the Core One chamber? I would like to add some thermal insulation around the chamber, but I'm not sure if the firmware will properly detect unexpected thermal insulation in problematic scenario's, if it blindly assumes its a stock Core One... the more you modify a printer, the more it operates in terra incognita.

Could too much thermal insulation cause the bed temperature to lower (to avoid overheating chamber temp) to the point the print no longer adheres? etc.

If you could recommend some articles on the subject I would highly appreciate it.

[eemil]

> Could too much thermal insulation cause the bed temperature to lower (to avoid overheating chamber temp) to the point the print no longer adheres? etc.

I've insulated my Core One specifically to reduce noise, vibration, and improve high-temp printing and learned that:

1. When printing at high temperatures, you don't have to worry about overheating. Chamber fans are plenty capable of cooling the printer down.

2. There are so many nooks, crannies, thermal bridges, and gaps that modifying the printer to add insulation is a fool's errand. You will spend a lot of effort for little gain. If I were to buy another Core One, the only thing I would do again is damping pads in a couple areas to reduce resonance caused by the flat steel panels.

3. That being said, insulating the core one externally by covering it with a "jacket" of insulation or placing it in an enclosed(ish) space is very easy and effective. In an enclosed space, you need to make sure the chamber fans exhaust out, so they can retain control of the environment. You don't want it to be a fully closed system.

For point 3, these days I literally throw a beach towel on my Core One when printing high-temp filaments. It covers the top, front, and sides. This is enough insulation for 55C printing (the maximum allowed by hardware/firmware) and is easy to remove when I don't need it. Of course there are plenty of more suitable materials you could use, from textiles to foamboard insulation. But the concept is the same.

[throwaway219450]

> Could too much thermal insulation cause the bed temperature to lower (to avoid overheating chamber temp) to the point the print no longer adheres? etc.

That would depend how much "safety" is built into the control system.

The simplest solution I've seen is taping up the edges of the enclosure where you find gaps, to prevent heat escaping.

If it's only PID-ing the bed, the ambient temperature shouldn't matter. Less work to do for the bed heater. On the nozzle, it's similar. A 40 C increase in ambient temperature isn't much compared to the 150 C+ that the control system is maintaining. Since the active parts of the printer must be capable of running at the target chamber temperature, there should be no risk unless you exceed it. The question is really, is the printer designed to operate continuously with a chamber of X C?

However... the risk would be that if it's too well insulated there isn't a good way for the system to cool quickly if it needs to, or if it somehow messes with what the control system is tuned for. On the older printers you could re-calibrate the PID loops to your specific hardware and environment. The newer 32-bit firmware seems to not require user tuning at all. Similarly with full enclosures, you might worry about the power supply or other electronics which aren't meant to be run at high ambient (maybe fine though).

You could also look at a separate solution like enclosing the printer in well-insulated chamber, and aiming to keep that outer space above ambient. That would be a good option if you're expecting a big thermal gradient to your workspace, like an unheated garage in winter.

But lots of questions really. Do you want to run at a high chamber temp? Are you running in a cold environment and having problems? Trying to save power? These are different scenarios.

[m4rtink]

Yep - indeed one important issue people often forget with enclosures is that any non trivial components that end up inside the heated enclosure need to be able to safely continue working at the increased air temperature inside + any heat they or other parts of the printer generate that affects them.

If you steppers are already hot at 22 degrees of room temperature, they might end up damaged if air is at 45 degrees + are in use and generate their own heat.

[cassianoleal]

Mine is more or less stock. I've been searching for an existing mod but haven't really found one. A good start is probably to plug all the little leakage points around the corners and unused rivet/bolt holes.

The main issue is how close the walls are to the bed, which makes a lot of insulation projects dead in the water. If a radiator reflector foil [0] can be made to fit, it might help quite a bit as well.

Other than that, proper active chamber heating is really where we should be heading. When I have the time I might attempt to replace the left panel with one.

[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Radiator-Reflective-Thermal-Heating...

[Jabdoa2]

You can insulate the chamber. That works fine. There is a vent on top which is open in case the printer needs lower temps. For everything else it will turn on the chamber fan. The parameters are tunable in the menu (or via G-Code).

[cassianoleal]

Any tips on insulating the chamber?

[21asdffdsa12]

Plexiglas + styroafoam?

[f1shy]

We could search in the source, but I’m 99.999% sure it is a PID, because of course has to work in different environments. So I do not think it should be a problem.

[CarVac]

I put a blanket on in the winter. In the summer it's not really necessary, the chamber can hit 70c which triggers a cool-down.

[BoredPositron]

I am still a bit iffy about the whole sending out fleets of 100s of printers to influencers during the pandemic while also increasing the price for their entry lineup.

[2muchcoffeeman]

Wow, that’s a lot of money on upgrades. I also got the MK3 and upgraded it once.

Full upgrade to the core one will be AUD$2k

I can keep my current printer alive for a long time. But it’s hard to justify the cost.

[sleight42]

How do you upgrade a Mk3 to a Core One?

[hellweaver666]

You upgrade the Mk3 to a Mk3s, upgrade the Mk3S to the Mk4, upgrade the Mk4 to the Mk4s and the Mk4s to the Core One.

Prusa sell upgrade kits for each generation of printer.

If you were to do it all in one go it would require replacing the same components multiple times and would be insanely expensive and time consuming but if you upgrade as the product evolves its not a big deal (I recently upgraded my Mk4 to a Mk4s and I'll probably jump to the Core One in the coming year if I have some free time).

[sleight42]

Ah nuts. And here I have a 3s+ and then I "upgraded" to an X1C.

[awakeasleep]

Prusa is still the most 'open source-ish' choice, but they're no longer a polar opposite to Bambu, in 2023 they started making efforts to stop commercialization of their designs, stopped sharing source/design material for their PCBs, etc.

Then in 2025 they changed their 'open community license' to say users may not:

“Sell complete machines or remixes based on these files, unless you have a separate agreement…” and “The Restriction: You cannot commercially exploit the design files…”

https://blog.prusa3d.com/core-one-cad-files-release-under-th...

Maybe this is more a comment on how open source has had to change in the face of commercial exploitation of the vulnerabilities traditional open source licenses create for the businesses doing the R&D.

[Aurornis]

I've been a Prusa defender for a long time, including when they added the break-off tab to enable custom firmware which caused a lot of upset.

They're doing what it takes to be a business. I was glad when they moved to more injection molded parts instead of trying to 3D print their own parts. It was a cool idea at the start but the time for that was long past.

My only slight objection is that you can tell they're trying to have it both ways: They want all of the good will and reputation of being open source, but they're also trying hard to put as many limits on this as they can. Like all projects trying to walk the line between open and closed source, I think they're at their best when they're honest about what they're doing. The moves they made with their open license are completely reasonable and I support them, but that blog post was a bit of a letdown when they tried to make it about fighting patent trolls for the community or something. When you reach Prusa scale you have to be honest that you're no longer one and the same with the community. You are the medium-ish size business that people rely on. Taking away the right for others to sell the products is a reasonable business move, but please be honest about it rather than trying to tell us it's for our own good.

[supern0va]

Josef clearly cares about being as open as possible, but has bumped up against the fact that companies like Bambu can just take their designs and extend them with things they don't share, and sell a product with more features and a lower price.

Unfortunately, it seems like the fully open source business model doesn't work well when you can be undercut by extremely cheap labor from another country and a company that doesn't share or reciprocate your values.

It sucks. Also, fuck Bambu.

[21asdffdsa12]

That other country is the company- and it can subsidize the frontend which you call a company with money earned by other monopoly frontends.

Think of china less as a country and more as one huge Chaebol.

[kiba]

Share what? Nothing what Bambu is doing is remotely secret. There are no mystery sauce to figure out. Prusa genuinely got outflanked by Bambu when it comes to designing a printer.

But yes, fuck bambu.

[SchemaLoad]

They forked the slicer, and then put the networking part in a plugin that gets downloaded after you open it purely so they don't have to share the source for it as the rest of the slicer is GPL.

[godzillabrennus]

I still remember running Red Hat Linux when it was free and open source, before Red Hat Enterprise Linux, before Fedora, before CentOS, before RockyOS...

It's tough to build a business around a product that takes a lot of capital to build, and you offer for free to your competitors...

[numpad0]

They were so deeply undercut by Chinese clone vendors that buying Prusa made little sense to consumers. They couldn't survive without banning them. The situation was similar to IBM PC, but Prusa Research was no IBM.

[aleph_minus_one]

> They were so deeply undercut by Chinese clone vendors that buying Prusa made little sense to consumers.

There exist a lot of other buying criteria than price.

[RobotToaster]

Their printers are no longer open source hardware, according to the definition endorsed by a certain Josef Pruša https://freedomdefined.org/OSHW#Endorsements

[scottbez1]

It’s rough but I understand it.

You can be entirely in favor of the open source ethos, even as a commercial entity, but then certain actors can take advantage of that ethos and just directly commercialize your R&D investment and take all the proceeds of your investment, whether or not they comply with attribution or share-alike requirements.

It’s tough seeing an open source project you’ve poured tons of care and effort into (and WANT people to share and remix and build cool things) get more or less “extracted” for profit without contributing back (code or money).

At the end of the day, none of it really matters unless you’ve got money and time to actually try to enforce your licenses, or have enough customer mindshare to effectively change the behavior of bad actors without needing legal action.

I’ll probably use licenses like Prusas in the future for similar reasons, even though I generally prefer to use less restrictive ones. Bad actors, or even just non-benevolent actors, can really sour the open source ethos, and it sucks but there’s no way to legally enforce “don’t be a jerk” without restricting a legal document in slightly unpalatable ways.

[Arch-TK]

Nothing in Prusa's OCL stops anyone from cloning and selling their printer.

It only stops the honest people from doing that (and possibly much more, like manufacturing and selling replacement parts or mods).

Creating 3D models from existing products is relatively fast and easy. The hard parts have always been the actual design process, materials selection, and setting up the supply and manufacturing chain.

Prusa took what was practically a non-issue (cloning of their modern printers which have multiple custom parts and are overall not easy to clone cheaply anyway) and used it to restrict the freedoms of end users and small businesses while crying about how they are the victims.

I lost a lot of respect for Prusa when they came out with the OCL.

A damn patent would have been both more effective and less restrictive for reasonable commercial purposes.

[imtringued]

Can you explain how releasing model files under a restrictive license vs not releasing model is a net restriction of the freedoms of end users and small businesses? The impression I'm getting is that if they locked away those files and never released them, you would have nothing to complain about.

This is like complaining about Valve letting game developers generate free Steam keys (=Valve doesn't get fees) that can be sold on other storefronts with the caveat that the developer must sell the keys for at least the same price he set on steam. Being allowed to sell those keys is a sign of goodwill, but the goodwill is conditional upon the source of goodwill not destroying itself. If you buy a game on the Humble Store, Valve won't get a single cent, most of the money goes to the developer, and yet Valve still has all of the ongoing infrastructure costs.

[scottbez1]

What you’ve said is true but also misses the point. Licenses have never been about stopping bad actions because a bit of text can’t prevent someone from buying materials and building things, just like a speed limit sign has never stopped someone from speeding (unless they crash into it).

They ARE however deterrents to bad actions from less-than-scrupulous entities, and enforcement mechanisms against fully-unscrupulous entities.

I suspect (but will admit I am just guessing here) that Prusa would prefer not to get to the enforcement stage because it is both costly and annoying, but having that in your back pocket is, sadly, necessary in a litigious society with some number of unscrupulous actors, and the deterrent effect alone is likely enough to achieve most of their goals.

[kiba]

The Chinese are very good at cloning, source code or not. Guess who they're cloning? Bambu.

The market leader gets cloned but somehow the market leader is still standing.

That market leader was previously Prusa. Prusa rested on their laurel and got outflanked.

[Arch-TK]

They really are not deterrents.

Even if the unscrupulous entities cared about the license, they would just get their (already paid for) CAD person to reverse engineer every single necessary model over the course of a week. If an amateur like me can reliably do that in his spare time, imagine what a professional could do during an 8 hour shift.

But it doesn't matter either way because no unscrupulous entity is going to be dumb enough to publicly announce that they used the models to produce their clone.

If I manufacture a clone of a Prusa, there is no way for anyone to prove that I used the original 3D models. If it were possible to prove that, it would also be possible to "prove" that I copied 3D CAD models that I've never seen, which could put me in legal trouble. Reverse engineering is not a crime, and reverse engineering (and all the costs associated with manufacturing and prototyping[0]) likely _can_ reproduce a near identical Prusa printer.

As an aside, if you've seen the average Prusa clone, it's often quite far from the original design. Almost nobody 1:1 cloned Prusas back when that was a thing, because the Prusa design didn't cut corners. Those clones would often use designs which were probably derived from the original, and were unpublished. Why didn't Prusa go after them for this? He should have had just as much luck given that those manufacturers were potentially in breach of the GPL.

In summary, the OCL cannot actually stop clones, because if it did, we'd have some serious problems with our legal systems, prohibiting perfectly legal reverse engineering (irrespective of if the cloners did the reverse engineering or not).

It _only_ stops people who are honest enough to state that their designs are derived from Prusa's models. People who weren't a threat to begin with, and who now are voluntarily subscribing to legal issues if they ever felt like selling a Prusa modification without Prusa's approval.

The real deterrents are:

* Design complexity

* Extreme amounts of competition (almost nobody would buy a prusa clone these days unless they _wanted_ to have an almost broken printer to force them to learn how to make it work reliably). We have cheap, good, first party 3D printer designs.

[0]: To clarify, when I say prototyping, this needs to happen irrespective of if you reverse engineer or not. Once you have the models, which will be true to life, you still have to "reverse engineer" the tools/dies/materials/etc, for which Prusa sensibly does _not_ offer the models.

[greenleafone7]

So you want European companies to keep being nice and "open", do all the research and invent new technologies and products for the chinese to copy and sell cheap clones of!

[kiba]

There's nothing secret in these 3d printers. The Chinese are very capable of reverse engineering these products and out innovating these companies.

[greenleafone7]

It's what the chinese have been saying for decades. More to make themselves feel better than anything else, yet Europe, Japan, or the US are constantly fighting with their infinite spies, and even though they are more than capable to 'outclass' everyone as you say, for whatever reason they never do. Even local Japanese strawberry farms are having issues with chinese spies for decades now (source: widely known, and personal experience).

They don't out-innovate anyone, they copy and use infinite slave labour to flood the market with cheap inferior products. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous.

- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8xj9jp57r2o

[kiba]

The Chinese can be oppressive, thieves, and innovative.

[mordae]

They could have simply asked EU to introduce protective tariffs. I don't think they even tried, though.

[stavros]

How would that have helped in their other markets?

[imtringued]

Basically every "AWS ate open core company lunch thread" is filled with people arguing that releasing your products under an open source license is immoral because the company didn't foresee that a hosting provider is going to swallow them in 8 years to the point where the project would have to be abandoned. However, the immorality doesn't lie in the death of the project, no. The immorality lies in the continued existence of the project under a slightly more restrictive license.

It's always a headscratcher when you try to eeke out a living and are told that you have to work for a company writing proprietary software to have the right to work on an open source project. Wouldn't it be better if you made your living off the open source project? Apparently not. If the project was proprietary from the start, there would be no complaints.

This hardliner stance basically means there is no continuum between proprietary software and open source software. That lack of continuum will mean that the vast majority of software will always be 100% proprietary.

[TheCoelacanth]

Isn't Voron/Soval more open?

[brovonov]

Voron isn't a company, nor are they after a profit, all designs are 100% opensource. Sovol runs on a profit and uses opensource designs to run their products.

[TheCoelacanth]

I'm aware but I don't see how that changes those devices being the most open 3D printers.

[f1shy]

I understand your point, but to compete against bambu, I think is necessary. I still find is the best option.

[newsclues]

It’s not problematic to restrict people from selling the thing you designed, made and sell without permission.

If I make an open source car, I don’t want someone else taking my design work, and then selling a cheaper version of my product, I want my consumers to build their own parts.

[sokoloff]

Then you shouldn’t make an open-source car.

Maybe you should make a source-available car, or a car with select portions of CAD available, or something else that fits your intended business model better than open-source.

[awakeasleep]

Sure, but you're comparing morality to the legal definitions in software licenses.

Different licenses are build around different philosophies, and the common open source definitions allow commercialization as long as the source & modifications you make are freely available to others. Prusa is breaking from that tradition.

[austinthetaco]

then its not open source. That's just shared cad files which mcmaster carr does.

[PunchyHamster]

would probably need some hybrid licensing. Like "if you buy a car you have license to print (or order a print) of up to X parts/years"

[alnwlsn]

If you decide to get a Bambu anyway, let me heartily recommend against an H2D.

It did "just work" for a while, but then the print cooling fan went bad. On my home Voron, this would be a 5 minute fix. On the H2D, it is this [0]. You basically have to take the entire toolhead apart, removing the mainboard inside it with no less than 11 very tiny and fragile custom ribbon cables that connect to it, plus 5 more connections on a second board that goes on top of it. Most minor fixes are like this. Another time, I had to remove a stuck piece of filament, which involved taking apart the whole front of the toolhead and dealing with even smaller and more fragile flex PCBs.

[0] https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/h2/maintenance/replace-cooling-...

[LeifCarrotson]

> On my home Voron,

You're not the target market for Bambu customers.

This is like complaining that on your dirt track racer it's a trivial process to swap the rear end spur and change final drive ratios. Someone who has their dealership do the oil changes on their leased BMW does not care.

Maybe they should care a little, because the long-term repairability of their BMW or Bambu is going to put a real dent in their resale value. But they're not the ones dealing with tweezers and ZIF connectors and flex PCBs, so it's mostly just not their problem.

3D printers used to be exclusively the domain of people who enjoyed doing all this work themselves, who loved a well-designed machine that was a joy to work with like a Voron. That's no longer the case, Bambu is offering unrepairable black boxes that "just work" for enough time that some people can afford not to think care how it's made.

[alnwlsn]

>Someone who has their dealership do the oil changes on their leased BMW does not care.

We wouldn't really care either, but alas, there is no 3D printer dealership service center (unless you count 1 month round trip to ship it back).

I'd argue that my workplace who bought the H2D is exactly Bambu's target market. Most of us have personal printers we tinker with, but for work projects we need something that is mostly hit print and wait. We aren't really running a print farm, but we do a lot of iterations and make prototypes constantly. This is what the H2D was purchased for (specifically, the heated enclosure to better print ASA parts). Being hard to repair isn't really a problem, it's that it broke at all. And after it does break, changing a fan or clearing a jam should not be overhaul grade maintenance.

We also have a couple of P1Ss that are very solid, the one H2D has all the problems.

[8note]

who actually is the target market though?

im not using a melted bead printer if care in any way about the quality of the result. resin printers are readily availble

the bmw owner is buying a better machine, or just paying somebody to do the printing for them

[deepsun]

Sounds like RC quadcopters society -- everyone knows DJI, but they make fan guards a part of the frame. Guards and props are the most fragile parts, a consumable really. Something an enthusiast often carry spares for, to quickly swap on the field for any other RC quad, but with DJI you need what, send the whole frame to factory?

[dzhiurgis]

I have DJI drone, broke prop maybe once, replaced in few minutes. Prop guards work as intended.

I did once got it into iron sand which seized the motors. Luckily their insurance covered full replacement.

There are much worse things about them like subpar performance or shitty way to access the card slot in Avata, but otherwise they solid.

[deepsun]

I mean prop guards -- what do you do when a prop guard breaks?

[dzhiurgis]

IDK what sort of guards you speak off but I don’t think it’s possible to do so on my avata. I did smash it pretty hard few times.

[7thpower]

I like my H2D, but it definitely hit a brick wall. I replaced it, and had the same issue with one of the nozzles not printing consistently.

This was after around 700 hours, which isn’t terrible, but working with their support is exhausting. I don’t think I’m going to touch it again until winter, unfortunately.

[f1shy]

I don’t know if bambu is easier than Prusa. Bought myself a Prusa core one, having absolutely no idea whatsoever what is 3D printing, plugged in, the included filament in, just as the 10 pages manual says, click click, and I made my first print (no internet connection, no wifi, no registration, no app).

Then I installed the app (open source in github) and started using the “cloud” services. I consider myself pretty stupid with such things, and it was absolutely the easiest thing I’ve done in 10 years.

The price is very high though. But at least you OWN the damn thing.

[samatman]

Dusting off my HN credentials to plug Qidi.

If you can afford to pay more for less printer, get a Prusa Core One. I almost did, but at the time the cost would have included four months of waiting, and that was just too much.

But the Qidi Plus 4 has been just a beast for me. It had some growing pains, and the Internet is forever, so if you read up on it you'll see some scary-looking problems involving the heating element which have been completely fixed for more than a year. From everything I've been able to determine, the QC issues with the Plus 4 are over, and the newer printers like the Q2 and Max 4 have never had them.

I think the intersection of "reads HN" and "needs that tiny delta of convenience between Bambu and Qidi" is empty, basically. Qidi are good open source citizens, and you get a lot of bang for your buck, especially handling high-temp filaments. It's _possible_ to print nylon and ABS on Bambu hardware, but realistically you want something a little better.

Also they're cheaper than Bambu. Thought that was worth mentioning as well.

I'd seriously consider the Snapmaker U1 also, but not the K2 Plus. For one thing, Creality has had to be bullied several times to meet GPL obligations, and I don't like to reward that kind of behavior. For another, the Qidi Max4 is bigger, prints hotter, is more precise, and costs less. Pareto improvement on the K2 Plus.

I'm holding out on the Snapmaker because a) my Qidi Plus 4 is a great piece of hardware and at only 700 hours it's got a lot of life left in it, and b) The Prusa + Bondtech INDX is right around the corner. That's probably going to be my next printer. I find the waste and extreme slowness of AMS-style multimaterial too distasteful to invest in, and I think that entire paradigm will end up in the dustbin as tool-changing consumer FDM matures.

[BadBadJellyBean]

I'm mostly happy with my Qidi Plus 4. It's pretty much plug and play. They are sometimes a bit rough around the edges, but mostly good. I'd say don't buy the newest model at launch because they tend to beta test at the customer.

[Panda4]

I have an Elegoo Centauri Carbon which is cheaper than Bambu Lab's and it has been plug and play so far. I have no experience with 3D Printing and I've been printing on it without any problems so far.

[toyg]

I got the V2 and same - no fuss, especially if I stick to Elegoo filament. Multicolour worked out of the box, to the point where it's difficult to think it was a Big Thing until recently.

[ErneX]

Got the same printer, although I haven’t used it much it’s been pretty great for the price.

[roeles]

Any experiences printing ASA with it?

[m4rtink]

Given how I'm not sure there are 2D printers that really "just work" and don't throw opaque hard to track down errors at random - I actually like open 3D printers that do break, but you can be sure any issue is fixable & you will learn something new in the process. :)

[dzhiurgis]

I know it's popular to shit on 2D printers, but other than very often being very slow and running out of ink (or rubber rollers hardening after 20 years of use) - I actually didn't have any issues with them? But then I actually didn't really use them for 20 years either.

[m4rtink]

My main issues:

* one day remote printing no longer works, you need to set it up again or even get into prolonged debugging session

* remote printing works one ane device but not other

* one color toner cartridge on a color laser printer is empty or near empty, printer refuses to print without all manners of overrides on the local control panel, making it unusable for non-technical users

Well, the last point is basically sabotage by the manufacturer to make you buy more stuff, as it can print B/W perfectly fine or with slighly less quality until that one cartridge is replaced. But I guess that kinda proves my original point. :)

[rmunn]

I stopped buying cartridge-based inkjets years ago. I'm happy with my Canon G3020, which uses ink tanks (built into the printer, not a third-party addon that the manufacturer will claim voids the warranty).

And it's impressive how long those ink tanks last: I printed out 400 pages of full color and the ink tanks went from 80% full to about 50% full. (There's a clear plastic window in front of the ink tanks, with a "refill when ink reaches this level" line on it — a raised line of plastic, not something inked or painted onto it that could rub off — so you can glance at the printer and see what level the ink is at). The ink bottles cost me about $12 each if I remember right, and each one will fill the ink tank from the "refill here" line to more than 100%: I had to stop filling, then wait until I had printed a few hundred more pages, then refill the rest. Rough back-of-the-envelope math says maybe 1200 pages from a full ink tank. The C, M, and Y bottles will cost $36 total (the K bottle will last a lot longer so I'm not counting it in this math), which means 3 cents a page for full-color, ink covering nearly the whole page, prints. Considering the cheapest print shop I've found would charge me 20 cents per page (and I've seen 50-cents-a-page quotes for full-color printing), the $200 printer will have already paid for itself by the time you run through one ink tank (17 cents saved times 1200 pages is $204).

This is turning into an ad for Canon, but seriously, it's a great printer. The only thing I don't like about it is that it doesn't do automatic duplex printing (I have to pull the pages out, flip them over, and put them back in), and I knew that when I bought it (the model that did automatic duplex was $450, and I chose not to buy that one). Oh, and I am not affiliated with Canon in any way: considering how glowing a review this is, I should probably say that explicitly.

But the best part for me was that it's not an Epson. I previously owned an Epson ink tank printer, and it was great... until the ink sponge filled up. Did you know that ink jet printers, at least the ink-tank variety, have a sponge inside them? When you do a "clean clogged print heads" routine, the printer moves the print head over to the position of the sponge, and pushes ink through the print heads until it's moved enough liquid to hopefully push the clog out. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But the sponge can only absorb so much ink before it fills up. And on an Epson, the sponge is not a user-serviceable part. They want you to send it to one of their official repair shops to get it replaced, costing I don't know how much because I refused to do it. I found an unofficial way to wipe the printer's internal counter that kept track of how much ink was in the sponge... and when the printer died about a year later (for unrelated reasons), I went shopping for another brand. I'll never buy an Epson printer again. Canon, on the other hand, will sell you a "maintenance cartridge" (a large sponge mounted in a plastic tray of the right shape to slot into the printer) for about $10 plus shipping. When the sponge gets full you can just swap in a new one. Dead simple.

Enough gushing from me. The point that I spent way too long getting to is, ink-jet printers don't have to use cartridges. Ink-tank printers used to only be available in the Asia/Pacific market, but they're available in the US now. A couple years ago I helped my parents (in the US) buy a Canon G3020 and set it up for them. So far their experience has been positive, too.

[arjie]

I have a P1S. Putting it together and running it was about IKEA level of difficulty. Very easy. If money weren’t a problem, which Prusa printer comes closest (assuming we’d want something like the Bambu AMS2)?

[luma]

Core1, add an INDX if you want multi tool (far more flexible and less waste than the AMS).

[arjie]

Thank you. Good tip. Okay, looks like what I'll want is a Core1+INDX+INBXX(w/dryer) to capture the P1S+AMS2 flow.

[serf]

>They're an excellent company, and the complete opposite of Bambu when it comes to Openness.

not really -- but there ARE total open printers out there. voron and ratrig come to mind.

prusa decided to change a lot of ethics once they became 'big'.[0]

[0]: https://blog.prusa3d.com/the-state-of-open-source-in-3d-prin...

[sinker]

Isn't this just a Bambu marketing point? I have a Prusa MK4S and a Centauri Carbon - they both print without any fuss and can be operated without any deep technical understanding.

[AngryData]

Im not sure what problems people are even envisioning having. I got a diy Anet8 that was badly assembled by somebody else years ago that they gave to me for free. I tightened up some fittings and strapped down some loose wires and it still just works. If newer and supposedly better printers were more difficult I would consider them junk, in operation they aren't that complicated of machines. The most complicated thing I gotta do is usually change the print temp up or down 5 degrees for different company filaments.

[ge96]

I'm still rocking my Ender 3 Pro, I printed a part 13 hrs straight and it came out fine

not saying it can't be better eg. faster, multi-color/material but yeah works for me right now with Cura

[codazoda]

I do the same.

Ender 3 V2 that I paid <$250 for about 5 years ago. It paid for itself on the first print job where I repaired some Samsung stove knobs where replacements were $400 a set.

I'm now considering an upgrade and I'll likely just go with the Ender 3 V3 Plus (bigger bed, auto leveling, still an offline printer) and < $450 for cost.

It's been a fantastic printer for me.

I use Cura, stick with standard settings, use Sun PLA+ for all my prints, and the only thing I really need to do is level the bed sometimes.

[marcus_holmes]

I upgraded from the 3 to the 5, and had some great experiences with it. My Ender 3 was such a Printer of Theseus; I think I'd replaced everything except the extruded aluminium frame by the time I upgraded.

But that's part of the hobby, surely? Like, just having a printer and having it print things first time, and never taking it apart or replacing chunks of it to see if that would work better, seems kinda dull to me ;)

Oh, and fuck Bambu. Never touching their shit.

[ge96]

Surprisingly for me I have only replaced the magnetic mat and the hot end - mat was magnetized the wrong way so I had to cut it with a razor but yeah

I'm bad though, I have the nozzle run into the bed as there is noticeable sag/difference at the middle of the bed, but it's good enough for me there is some elephants foot going on but not crazy

[marcus_holmes]

yeah I had that, and got the auto-levelling kit to fix it, which worked. Luckily the Ender 5 didn't have that problem (it had others!) so I now have an auto-levelling kit sitting in the bits box. I'm sure I'll end up using it for something :)

[subscribed]

Maybe it's a hobby for some, for me it's just a tool.

It's like bikes - someone rebuilds theirs in their garage, I take mine to the dealership for the service. For me, mine just works. I don't have endless hours for tinkering with everything I'm using.

[InsideOutSanta]

Creality has printers that are straight-up clones of the Bambu printers and are just as easy to use, but they've historically been somewhat okay at working in the open source ecosystem, unlike Bambu.

Prusa is, of course, the gold standard, and their more recent printers are super easy to use, too.

[dzhiurgis]

Yeah I'm in the market for printer and this just reinforces I should just buy Bambu because literally everything else will be nightmare to use.

But FWIW I'll be transiting China in few months time so will be interesting to see what they sell there.

[y-curious]

I have an Anycubic Kobra 3 V2 and it “just works”. It’s a Bambu clone but with much less safeguards (for now) and is also 1/3 the price

[jrmg]

There are a bunch of these I’m my local makerspace and they generally work great, and are often easily used by members on the more ‘craft’ side of things who’d never hang out here. Was surprised not to see them mentioned more in the discussions around this.

I have no first-hand idea of they’re ’morally’ better than Bambu - I haven’t looked into it - but I think the folks in charge of buying them considered that.

[cyberrock]

The "middle ground" is fairly split amongst different manufacturers like Creality, Anycubic, Elegoo, and even Anker now so it's hard for a popular one to emerge.

Having experienced both Prusa's prices (not just the machines, but also parts like nozzles and thermistors -- there's no way Prusa's thermistors should be twice as expensive as Bambu's) and Bambu's shenanigans, if I ever need a new printer, I'm very inclined to start my search with those smaller brands too.

[mbgerring]

Last time I checked you don’t have to pay that much more for a Prusa than a similar spec Bambu printer.

And in any case, Bambu’s well-publicized abuse of open source has driven me off of ever using their printers. I know that only nerds care about this, so I hope Prusa keeps pushing to build a straightforwardly better product.

[nico]

I’ve gotten some really good prints with a Qidi Q1 Pro. Have read good reviews about some of the other/newer versions by the same brand as well. They are very cheap for the features they have, and excellent quality

[cassianoleal]

I have a Plus 4. It's usable but takes a lot of work to become decent, and needs a lot of maintenance.

[samatman]

Is it older than March 2025?

The first year was rough, from what I've read. Mine arrived March 2025, it has taken no work to print excellently, and at about 700 hours I have lubricated it every 200 hours, and I just tightened the belts about 50 hours ago. That's it. If it's less than $100 a roll I've probably printed it. I have no complaints.

[cassianoleal]

I bought it in June 2025.

From what I've gathered across Discord servers (QIDI official, QIDI unifficial and Team 7 mostly), there is a decent percentage of machines that more or less just work, as has been your experience. For the less lucky ones, it's a lifetime of tinkering. I'm on the latter cohort, unfortunately.

Not to mention that out of the box you need to lock the printer in a cabinet as its printing. It used to give me headaches to be close to it for more than a couple minutes.

[s0rce]

My P1P at my work is having wifi issues. I'm considering just getting a Core 1, mostly because it has an ethernet port.

[8note]

what can bamboo actually do to lock this down?

are they making their own actuators that communicate with some encryption?

if i buy a bamboo and i dont like it, can i not just cut out all the electroincs and put whatever the new dev board of the day is and flash standard 3d printing firmware on it and send it through a calibration run?

[somelamer567]

Chinese printers, like Chinese drones, Chinese PV equipment, and Chinese electric cars are inexpensive but that's because the Chinese Communist Party loves to pick winners.

They subsidise the living heck out of designated national champions, dump oceans of cheap product onto the international market, kill off international competitors, and then seize control of markets. It is neither legal, nor morally defensible.

Want a printer that happens to not be made in China? Good luck. Pay more, or knuckle under, and accept Chinese control of your technology, and increasingly, what you are allowed to say and think.

[subscribed]

But that's not exactly the Chinese fault.

Actually try building something somewhere else - here's the process Smarter Every Day went through for a VERY simple item, nowhere the scope or complexity of the 3d printer: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY

[wolvoleo]

I don't think Prusa and Bambu compare well. Prusa printers aren't as cleanly designed as Bambu and they are more than twice the price. I consider them really poor value for money. And Bambu printers aren't clones. The AMS is something they came up with.

Also, Prusa copy from Bambu too. Like their own material switcher (much less sophisticated than the AMS) and the new Core printer is really more a Bambu copy than the other way around, honestly. In fact other brands are copying Bambu too.

I really like them, they are fair to me as a consumer. Spare parts are cheap, there's no consumable restrictions or subscriptions for their cloud service.

And they're really as plug and play as you can get right now. I don't really need that, I've owned printers since the first generation so I know how to deal with issues. But really they happen rarely. The worst I get is stuck filament in the AMS and I found I can prevent that by removing the bit of filament with gear bite marks after it's been through. It absorbs more water then and gets brittle.

Also I've learned from earlier printers not to mix materials in the same nozzle so I switch them too.

[Arch-TK]

No idea about the filament swirchers, but calling core XY designs bambu clones is really funny.

The core XY design that all manufacturers are now centering around has been around long before Bambu existed as a company.

[cyberrock]

Core XY didn't exist in consumer printers outside of Vorons that took hours to build. If all a new company did was take an obvious concept and make it accessible, then that just reflects poorly on the previous market leaders.

[Arch-TK]

Vorons are not consumer printers. They are enthusiast DIY projects.

That aside, sure, maybe Bambu were the first to make an affordable core XY machine. But, outside of China, we still don't have an affordable core XY machine by this definition.

So Bambu were the first Chinese company to take advantage of cheap Chinese manufacturing to stop making crappy Prusa i3 clones, crappy other things, or v slot Bowden crap (Ender 3, etc.).

They were the first to "clone"[0] some existing core XY designs and make a polished and affordable product.

Cool.

I am not saying its a bad thing, but do we need to applaud it when China repeatedly undercuts the rest of the world by not playing on the same playing field?

[0]: I say clone only because many of the "clones" Prusa complained about so much were only visually similar to the uninitiated and were otherwise quite distinct (and also much lower quality). The Bambu core XY designs look a lot like other more expensive core XY designs of the time. But really core XY isn't hard, the hard part is all the fine details, which every "clone" maker has to deal with inevitably.

[wolvoleo]

The technical design maybe but they all look like bambu P1/X1 in terms of design.

[Arch-TK]

Again, the predecessors also looked like bambu printers, I don't know what to tell you. There are not that many ways to design an enclosed core XY machine.

[Baeocystin]

I have about 15,000 hours on my Bambu x1c, and it's been fantastic. Their customer service has been great, too; the couple of times that I've had service issues, the tech genuinely worked with me to solve the problem. They were a lot nicer about it than the times I had to contact prusa about my older i3. FWIW.

[moffkalast]

I think the Bambu social contract is pretty clear:

- they benefit from open source software work

- we benefit from their dirt cheap top performing machines

As long as they remain the lowest priced and the best, they can do whatever they want if you ask me. They provide insane social value through accessibility. Before them, it was Creality with the Ender 3.

My problem with Pruša as an European is that it turns us into the equivalent of being a Chinese citizen who can't afford the Temu product they make at work. Their machines are priced more or less only for US export, and not really something most people here can reasonably buy. They even refuse to use injection moulding out of some self righteous principle, which drives the price per unit up further all the while selling less durable machines cause they're half RepRap. I take it sort of as a personal insult and I will never buy one even though I can afford it, I see it as bad value. Like buying a gold plated watch or something.

[m4rtink]

>As long as they remain the lowest priced and the best, they can do whatever they want if you ask me. They provide insane social value through accessibility.

This is how you end up with overpriced "3D print cartridges", unfixable printers that fail at warranty + 1 day and control software that goes "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't print that."

[swiftcoder]

> As long as they remain the lowest priced and the best, they can do whatever they want if you ask me

Are they actually still the best on price/performance? There are now dozens of Bambu clones at lower prices, I'm wondering how much worse those are (for example, a printer like the Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2)?

[moffkalast]

Lower prices? I'm seeing the Carbon 2 priced 12% more than a P1S and 60% more than an A1. The base A1 goes for like 270€. I'm not sure if that's possible to undercut without losses if you sum up just the price of the hardware.

[swiftcoder]

> I'm seeing the Carbon 2 priced 12% more than a P1S

Indeed, but if you add the AMS options to both, the P1S suddenly becomes a lot more expensive.

> The base A1 goes for like 270€

The A1 is in a different weight class, not being enclosed.

[dividedbyzero]

I just finished building a Core One+. It has a number of printed parts, but it also does have a bunch of injection molded ones, and they've just replaced another printed one with injection molding. Most of it is metal though, with the printed parts mostly used as relatively simple brackets to hold stuff in place that doesn't need great precision, and replacing those probably wouldn't save much on cost. I think these days they do the printed parts thing mostly to dogfood their print farm solution and I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation had only one or two printed parts for bragging rights. I wasn't a big fan of that either, the Mini I got in 2000 had a few critical parts printed and that did impact performance somewhat, but the Core One+ is fine in that regard.

From a hobbyist perspective, I find it's a much better designed machine than a friend's Bambu that recently broke down and turned out pretty much unfixable. Performance is at least on par, but the entire Prusa can be taken apart with basic hex and torx keys, it's highly serviceable and repairable, lots of fairly standard parts, not very highly integrated. I consider that a feature, but that will cause higher sourcing and assembly costs. It's built like a tank, lots of attention to detail, I expect it to last for a long time with minimal servicing.

That also means it's not targeting the same niche as Bambu's printers. That's not a personal insult, that's just a consequence of how things are right now. No European company is going to undercut a ultra high scale Chinese market dominiation vehicle, that's just not happening. Prusa is doing lots of R&D on much lower sales, they don't have the kind of access to Chinese industry that Bambu has, obviously the Bambu will be cheaper even if Prusa tried to compete in the same segment. But once the market domination thing is far enough along I expect Bambu will disallow non-chipped filament, lock everything into their cloud and jack up their prices. That's how these schemes usually end if they work out, but if they did that now, companies like Prusa would see record sales, so they don't do that just yet.

I'm pretty happy we still have some trace amounts of viable B2C tech industry in Europe. Companies like Prusa provide insane social value too by keeping skills and production in the EU. That's something we sorely need more of (not that companies are to blame, but we still do). Not sure how things will play out, and I'm not too optimistic, but perhaps with everyone else going all-in on dark patterns and pumping out disposable low cost crap, there is an emerging niche for reasonably open high-quality products that serve the owner first and don't data mine them for every last private detail.

[moffkalast]

Sure I'm certain that is the endgame for Bambu, but I'm also sure that people won't stand for it as long as there's any kind of competition (of which there's currently loads) and will move to the next best thing. They've come out of nowhere and captured the current gen, for the next one we'll probably see someone new.

I don't really buy the longevity angle for something that's moving so fast in terms of tech, my old Ender 3 lasted long enough to make itself obsolete in practically all aspects with practically zero maintenance. I had to junk a perfectly working machine because it became something not worth putting filament into. With such improvements each gen I'd rather have a cheaper machine that runs for a few years. Maybe we've already peaked but I seriously doubt it. I wouldn't be surprised if we see non planar antialiasing as stock at twice the speed and half the loudness, making what we use today once again become a waste of filament. Disposable low cost crap makes a whole lot more sense imo.

Remember the first gen Makerbots? Horrid overbuilt machines with glass beds, mandatory raft, quality barely worth a mention. They cost 5k and were obsolete in like two years tops. That's roughly how I see Pruša's approach as well.

If we actually valued local skills in the EU we'd have subsidies that make them competitive, ergo we do not. Personally I don't really see any for-profit surviving past going into the dark pattern hole eventually, there's too many incentives. Best just take what's best and least locked down today and run with it, assume it will vanish tomorrow. Forget long term support. Luckily there's always someone else willing to burn VC money in the initial market flood phase lmao.