After some more poking around, I’m finding out that the cloud features of this thing are pretty integral to the experience. This thing looks nice, but the enshittification scaffolding is too much. I knew the price was too good.
ORIGINAL COMMENT:
Wow, I've been out of the 3D printing world for a bit. I have a Monoprice Maker Ultimate (Wanhao D6, rebadged) that has a slightly larger build area, but otherwise it's bare bones on the firmware. I reflashed it with Klipper, and have an Octopi attached to it, but that still requires all sorts of futzing about to get it tuned right.
With multi filaments, all the tuning wizardry, and the quick-change nozzle, I might consider this.
The big thing that gives me pause is the closed nature of the platform. My current printer might be "just commodity parts" or whatever, but that can be huge plus! This feels very much like deciding whether to join the Apple Ecosystem™ or to stick with a beige box so I can run whatever OS I want. And that isn't an easy choice to make these days.
BambooLab... well it is a nice machine, and they have definitely advanced the the field with input shaping. But this machine is pretty much a Prusa Mini with linear rails, and I'd bet there is open-source in their firmware and slicer, but there's no way to find out because their business model is to give nothing back to the ecosystem they have leveraged. That leaves a bad taste for me, but I'm sure many people will be quite happy to ignore such esoteric concerns and happily lock themselves in.
Until BambooLab have a bad financial quarter. Then the optional cloud integration will become mandatory with a subscription, and the spool detection system will start reject non-BambooLab filament.
Doctorow has struck a chord with his distillation of enshittification, and you are right on the money raising it here.
(Meanwhile Prusa has just released input shaping for the Mini.)
Their new printer features seem to match pretty closely with Prusa updates. Looks like the innovation is heavily based on reverse engineering here.
Their slicer is a fork of PrusaSlicer, and even has a pretty well supported community fork OrcaSlicer which is what I use. The problem is to interface with the printer over wifi, you need to use their closed source module. Now could they somehow push a firmware update over that? Definitely.
Anyways I've got a Prusa XL preordered. Just waiting on them to let me change my preorder to the 5 toolhead version. Multi-tool looks way more exciting than Bambu's filament changer that creates a ton of waste.
Do you have any opinion on the Creality K1? Not a technical one, but about their participation in the open community? Another comment in this thread brought it up, and it seems like a great machine.
Knowing absolutely nothing, I first picked the Sovol SV06 because is was a strong recommendation from Reddit for the price I was willing to pay.....turns out its nothing more than a toy. In fact all these bed slingers are. All this modding and manual work is not something a normal person wants to do. It like we are still stuck in the 1970s computer kit building era and everyone in the community is in denial.
Out of pure desperation and considering my hard deadline of DEFCON, I bit the bullet and bought a used Bambu Labs X1c. This machine is in a class of its own for 3D printing newbies. I just load the filament, slice my model in their easy to use software and click print. That printer saved me big time. I consider it the absolute bare minimum for 3D Printing for people that dont really care about 3D Printing.
I hope that the X1c or something like it eventually reaches a price point where it is accessible to the mass market and becomes the bare minimum standard of quality and ease of use. Anything less will keep 3D printing as a niche hobby. Kinda like how we went through decades of really awful inkjet and laser printers to now get printers that are cheap, accessible to anybody by being plug and play and straightforward and fairly ok in reliability: basically an extremely mature market.
One more note about open source: There is no "open source" desktop laser/inkjet printer and people get on with their lives regardless. The 3D printing community embracing open source is an artifact of it still being stuck in the "computer kit building" era.
Can you add any color about why you chose Prusa, and how you view them within the broader market? Are they the Honda CRV of the 3D printer world?
I have a few Bambu lab printers (perks of being a grad student) and their offline mode is pretty good - there are printers in my lab that are pretty much never connected to internet and print 24/7.
Sure, offline mode doesn't have all the features they mention on their website, but even without it, Bambu lab printers are better than their competition by a HUGE margin. I've had all kinds of printers before, including Prusa. Nothing comes close to Bambu lab ones in terms of no non sense printing and cost.
Sure, their components aren't open source, but official spares are cheap enough. And they promised to keep them cheap enough. Sure, they can change their word, and guess what? The printer would have made it's money's worth (for personal or commerical use) by the time that happens. You can throw away the printer by that point and you'd have net positive gain.
Bambu lab is going to do what DJI did to drones. Period. Every kid is gonna have a 3D printer, every influencer is going to make a 3D printer is cool post, and lots of Christmas gifts are going to be Bambu 3D printers. Bambu lab is former DJI folks - no wonder their product strategy and in some way design language is so close to DJI.
I’ve been burned so many times by other products that I think my wariness is more than justified.
And I’m not alone, which is why this is “classic”.
(But the pricing is really good. I think I’ll wait and see a bit more)
But here we have a piece of hardware that was essentially open source where you owned the hardware and could repair it easily, and turns out, no one ever really gave a shit. Not really. You never wanted that. You wanted the Chinese clone that took the ideas, lowered the price and added cloud shit.
I hope to god influencers don’t take up 3D printing. Fuck sakes. 3D printing is a cool way to bring your ideas to life. Not for influencers to waste plastic on shitty trinkets.
[1] it was much worse a few months ago, but an incident where a cloud outage resulted in a lot of damaged printers (when jobs were erroneously resent after they completed without a re-leveling) seems to have motivated fixing many of the remaining gaps with local operation.
It just doesn't seem worth the lock-in risk to me. I will continue to buy printers from Prusa, even though they have zero interest in managing the supply chain. (Still have to import them from Europe, even though they bought a US-based retailer? Weird stuff. But I like them so I will give them a large benefit of the doubt.)
You actually have two different options aside from cloud - completely offline with SD-Card (which is what you get in ... almost all the other 3d printers?) and partially offline (I.e. via LAN) where you upload the g-code locally without passing it to the cloud.
Look, I'm not trying to be a shill for BambuLab, but it just feels like people are making their opinion based on what they read at a glance without actually getting into details or even being able to confirm it themselves.
Personally I believe they just enable less technical folks to actually make use of their printers and not be totally confused at variety different methods and learning about all the Linux stuff just to be able to get something basic as making it possible to see the print without standing next to it. I totally understand why The Cloud is perceived as an evil, but I think there is false dichotomy here where it's either everything or nothing. Looking at Bambu's team actions I truly believe they are at least _trying_ to provide to different kind of audiences (i.e. their LAN feature)
I completely understand why people hate Bambu Lab, but I wish they'd understand why other people like them. If you want a new hobby, there are lots of excellent FDM printers on the market. If you just want to print good parts, you'd be a fool to buy anything other than a Bambu. There's just nothing else that will reliably produce dimensionally accurate parts out of the box and for thousands of hours afterwards, with absolutely no tinkering or troubleshooting.
If I have to schlep an SD card back-and-forth from my laptop to my printer, that’s a crap experience.
And for them to block local network uploading—and force you to make an account for that feature—sorry, that is a classic dark pattern.
It has a cool video camera built in. But oops!, it can only send a video to our servers, not to you.
When companies employ dark patterns like these, it is a signal that I no longer ignore.
EDIT:
I forgot:
> but I wish they'd understand why other people like them.
Yeah I get it. Given how many people I’ve seen using these printers rave about them, I do understand how leaps in speed and quality make it worth it. I’m not in as great a need for that personally. But I get it.
Useful in what respect?
The next six to twelve months are going to be rough for some companies but we're going to have some incredibly powerful, cost effective, and user friendly machines when it's done.
I love Prusa but they were caught sleeping at the wheel, they stopped innovating until bambu labs woke them up.
Just a side note, but Apple is actually the "beige box" here, because you can only get it in one color and one design. You can build a DIY PC in lots of different form factors and colors.
Top of class hardware tech, great design, almost too good to be true pricing, software is a bit weird and has some "weirdness".
- Multicolor is not something you actually use often and is horribly slow. Slow like in a 2 hours print becomes 12 hours print if it's colored. And it wastes a lot of plastic (and doing so does a lot of noise, too).
- The printer can't print things like ASA. Limited to PLA/PETG/TPU.
- While the design of the hotend and swappable nozzle looks nice at a first glance, the printer is a closed design and is not clear how well you can service it when needed. I've a Prusa MK4 and owned different Prusa Minis in the past, to print for a shop 24h, and if you want to print for production and not just for a few weeks hobby, you need to be able to fix those printers. Also Bambulab has a bad track in providing parts, when needed.
So yes, competitors like Prusa should do something to improve their printers and adjust the price point a bit (at this point the Mini is too costly, and its hot-end needs to be redesigned, and certain XL/MK4 improvements back-ported to the Mini, like the load cell and the all metal nozzle design). But after the first days of printing colored things, a Prusa Mini is likely a much better printer for somebody that really wants to do something nice with a 3D printer, and not just a few colored miniatures.
Also Bambulab behavior in using open source software written by others, at least in the past was very questionable. Anyway: they are doing something good to the market by pushing other vendors to do better.
Let's get the straw man out of the way: "multicolor" is not the only use for printing with multiple filaments.
I own an X1C. I print with breakaway support filament all the time. It's a total game changer. And since only two filament changes are required for each layer that has a support interface, the time it adds to a print is negligible.
There are plenty of uses for multi-filament printing that don't involve changing filaments every single layer of the print.
And for me, it's a huge time saver to not have to manually change filaments between prints, or changing over to a new role of the sake filament mid print. There are lots of reasons the AMS is a huge time saver that don't involve multi material printing.
The cheapest Prusa mini (self-assembled) is $459. You can buy a Bambu Lab P1P at $599 with a ton of more features than Prusa mini and much faster prints without any loss in quality/consistency.
Bambu labs consistently provided parts for reasonable price in my experience. And I've been using their X1 and P1 printers for a while now.
However don't get my wrong, I believe that the A1, especially without the multicolor gear, is a reasonable purchase, with some risk ahead because there is yet to see if it is a reliable printer. If you buy the multicolor gear you paid for more than the Mini, and I believe soon you'll no be using it anymore in most cases, and just be left with a printer that in practice can't be used so extensively as the Mini.
https://blog.prusa3d.com/original-prusa-printers-now-printin...
Sorry but do you have any sources for that? I'm just looking at their website[0] and I see all the common parts available - what exactly is missing with parts they provide?
[0] https://eu.store.bambulab.com/collections/accessories-for-x1...
on the X1C multi-color is less bad if you fill the bed with copies since the switch time gets amortized across many parts. So your print takes 13 hours but now you get six copies. Although with a smaller bed on the A1 mini that will help less.
It looks absolutely brilliant just for its single color print speed, which is like three times faster than a much more expensive Prusa.
Everything else is a bonus.
Why would it not print ASA? In my experience (I mostly print ASA, with PLA almost always used for prototyping), printing ASA is about as easy as PLA. 10-30 degrees hotter, less fan and possibly slightly slower speeds but otherwise just fine.
This printer seems to be rated to 300℃ which should give you a margin of over 60+℃ for ASA.
As someone who owns an X1C, it's abundantly clear that many of the comments are armchair quarterbacking from folks who don't own a Bambu and have never tried one.
Cheap Chinese clone? That's like calling SpaceX a cheap knockoff of Orbital ATK.
Camera can only stream to Bambu's servers? Factually incorrect, you can stream locally via RTSP.
I come here for insightful debate about a company and product that have plenty of interesting aspects, both good and bad, to discuss, not for the pedantic, ideological sniping that this discussion is full of. It really saddens me to see this on HN of all places.
I'm reminded when the whole Elon Twitter saga started, all the techies all threatened to go to mastodon and well they did but a lot of "normie" twitter didn't follow them (or couldn't follow them because mastodon was not user friendly). Shannon Morse of Hak5 made a great point about this. She suddenly realized that a lot of tech drama just went away and so she didn't really leave Twitter but didn't fully move to Mastodon either.
Applying that logic to this field, maybe if some company like Bambu Labs (or maybe Bambu themselves) expand the market by bringing in normies, the "hardcore" people will huff and puff but eventually become a niche voice and just go away.
tldw; Printer has great build quality for the price. Print quality and speed obviously below the bigger Bambu machines, but excellent for a "bed slinger". Print volume quite small and requires diagonal placing for bigger parts. Pretty much PLA-only, but TPU also possible if fed directly into extruder. The multi-filament solution has serious drawbacks: filament change extremely slow and generates lots of "poop" plastic, which is simply discarded to the side of the printer. All in all: great printer for beginners, but the multi-filament is more of a gimmick.
I have owned a dozen or so printers over the last decade going back to PrintrBot. As with a lot of users, the BambuLabs X1 was hands down the best out the box experience of any printer I own. It continues to be my go to printer while my other Prusa's + Creality's sit idle. As long as the cloud service never becomes a paid subscription I could care less that I am locked into their ecosystem. The additionally functionality that provides is a plus for me not a minus.
The fact they have crammed a bunch of the same features of the X1/P1 into a smaller printer that is sub $500 is pretty amazing.
There are one zillion other companies making super hackable 3D printers or whatever if you want that.
* the toolhead/nozzle quick-change is pretty fantastic and quite ingenius, you change nozzle and heatsink thereby guaranteeing good heat dissipation but the thermistor and heater stay put,
* the MMU seems to be able to handle many more types of spools due to center-mounting as opposed to edge-rolling and they reduced retraction distance substantially.
The noise cancellation seems a bit gimicky just like the LIDAR on the X1C.
The Makerworld integration goes a step further than most other 3D-printing-hub-websites by slicing the models and being to print immediately without having to fuss with a slicer. Should be a lot more beginner-friendly.
It does look like they're taking a page or two from the DJI playbook (not surprising, CEO and others being ex-employees). DJI went from solid drones just a tad above what hoobyists could build, like the early Phantoms, to improving video+link-reliabilty with later phantoms to crazy integration of everything in the newer Mavic and especially Minis that are way beyond hobbyist's possibilities.
I am somewhat doubtful that the exact strategy of tight integration of hardware components will work for 3D printers. After it probably won't matter if one printer is slightly smaller than another.
But they do seem to do more software/hardware integration which could be very welcome for beginners and those not in it for the tinkering, as well as their focus on reliability. Their AMS MMU systems seem to be a step above all others in terms of reliability and ease-of-use.
DJI and Insta360 for example require you to connect their cameras to the internet in order to "activate" them. What do you think will happen when those servers get turned off.
Same goes for 3d printer and regular printers. I wouldn't put it past HP to add a feature that would prevent you from printing if the printer hasn't been able to call home for the last x days.
Recently purchased an X1 Carbon with 2 AMSs and its incredible. It's a very high quality, enabling, wonderful piece if equipment.
I have used dozens of professional machines that cost hundreds of thousands, built, bought and run many lower cost machines also.
I can only count on one hand the number of times I've been this impressed by a 3d printer when it came out, and never by a printer even remotely in the X1s process range.
I think this A1 mini is a great entry level printer, if you only have $500 to spend on a printer, get this one. If you have $1500 get the X1.
What’s the general review of this company? Are these any good or are there more like Ender and other cheap Chinese printers?
Other than that Bambu had a pretty good reputation.
> The result was that the print job was successfully completed on the printer, but our cloud service believed it had not been done. When service resumed, the once-jammed job was resent, leading to the unexpected printing of an already finished job.
That's why you make message sends in a distributed system idempotent, unless you have a really excellent reason not to. Whatever generated the print job when the user pressed “print” should have generated a unique job id, and when the printer was resent the same job id it should just have replied “Done”.
https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/15sfisq/bambula...
That’s not the same as mandatory. I agree it’s kind of annoying and I don’t like how it’s Wi-Fi only either … but my X1Carbon is the first 3d printer after years of tinkering where I genuinely want another one instead of some other printer that’s very similar but does x, y, or z better because it’s kinda shit on the one I just got.
Do I have to use it? Or is it possible to run without it and just lose some feature I may not even need. You said mandatory so I’m assuming the answer is no.
Unfortunately if that’s the case, it’s an absolute no no for me.
The A1 Mini is a better deal than the Prusa Mini if you need to print with support materials (never mind color, that's just a gimmick) or if you want to make sure it will keep going as spools run out, although mechanically the AMS lite looks rather fragile and takes up a _lot_ of space.
In a year's time smaller manufacturers like Kingroon are quite likely to be able to copy a lot of the quality of life improvements (and I would love to see some of those noise reduction features and improved auto-tuning come to Klipper, which I'm running on both my printers).
Until then, though, Bambu is ahead--although I have a feeling my next printer will be a Voron because I really like the idea of not relying on a manufacturer for maintenance (but that's just me).
As much as I like the idea of the 3D printer market evolving towards appliances, I will always pick an appliance I can maintain myself - which is why I got a KP3S Pro last year: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/09/16/2000
it'll be a nice machine to buy on the aftermarket and put a real controller into in a few months/years, much like the rest of BambuLab's offerings.
BambooLab on the other hand seems to be almost the exact opposite (OrcaSlicer etc.).
Both trade-off less waste for substantially added cost and complexity.
[1] https://github.com/zruncho3d/DuelingZero
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WqDcpxC3-o, https://github.com/ankurv2k6/wp-daksh-toolchanger
[3] https://www.prusa3d.com/product/original-prusa-xl-2/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3sSR2QvUyA
* nozzle that mixes from multiple inputs * multiple hotends on the carriage * swappable hotends * single hotend - retracts and switchs to a different filament, few methods here, this is what the AMS and pallete are **
You can do it with multiple heads, the problem is ooze. You'll need to either be able to retract the non-used printhead so that it doesnt ooze onto your print, or be able to swap it mid print. Either way here you'll still need a method to prime it. Some materials may break down in the heat of the hotend too while they sit there unused just baking.
There's some methods that make the blocks smaller, like using the infill as the priming section.
Am I missing something? Doesn't the poop during change replace need to purge into a purge tower? Are there any additional purpose for the waste tower beside purging any remains of previous filament from hotend?
