I saw this mess coming from miles ahead (and it will repeat itself), so when it was time to replace our Ender 3v2, I got a Prusa printer. Yes, it was much more expensive than Bambu, but at some point we have to put our money where our mouth is. We cannot talk all the time about open source, consumer friendliness, the right to repair, etc. and then reward companies that don't give a shit about it. So our money went to Prusa.
It's a great printer too!
I get voting with your wallet but not many people want to spend 4x more for a worse product.
Yeah as much as I like Prusa, I really hope they figure out how to cut down their prices because, let's be real, most of the people buying a 3D printer don't give a cent about how "open" it is, and if Prusa continues this trend I'm afraid it'll become obsolete. Having competitors with genuinely good products (like Bambu, despite them not being a good company) is healthy, but not helpful if Prusa doesn't do anything to catch up to their competitor.s
European/US products are always going to be substantially more expensive because they pay employees better, have better labor laws, have more strict regulations to deal with (GDPR, etc.), cannot freeload on other people's work while violating open source licenses, don't get state funding to murder Western competitors, etc.
If you buy Bambu, you are supporting AGPL violations. If you buy Prusa, you are supporting development of open source firmware, open source slicers, and a company that is friendly to self repairs and makes it possible print replacement parts for your printer.
I understand that not everyone can afford a Prusa printer. But most people on HN have a lot of disposable income. If you choose to support the greedy, anti-consumer, anti-open source company anyway, don't complain the next time a open source project cannot be sustained even though they are used by large companies, don't complain production is moving away from the west, and don't complain when you get locked into cloud services. You supported these practices.
I am not saying that you are complaining about this, but a lot of people are, but when push comes to shove they don't put their money where their mouth is.
Snapmaker (also Chinese) seem to be doing things better at the moment, but only time will tell how the serviceability is.
For me personally, the only viable choices today would be a Prusa Core One (possibly with INDX for multi-material, I don't care about MMU/AMS, those are just for multi-colour and with a lot of waste) or a Voron 2.4. My Prusa Mk3.9s bedslinger is still going strong though, and I don't expect to replace it any time soon.
Second hand market for prusa printers is decent as well.
The Mk3.9 probably isn't a price competitive upgrade though, today I would in your position probably look at selling the Mk3s for 100-200 EUR and buying a Core One instead. But if the Mk3s works for what you are doing, then don't bother. (The Mk3.5 might make some sense if you only want a bit higher speed and network connectivity.)
Personally I don't see myself replacing the Mk3.9s for a long time, though an enclosed printer would be nice and let me print warp-prone materials like PC and ASA.
There’s plenty of other printers that can do the same or better and/or cheaper if you want “building and managing the printer” to be half the hobby, which is a totally fair thing and can be lots of fun if you’re into tinkering, but for a printer that just prints things as a tool there’s absolutely nothing close to Prusa and they’re worth every cent.
I run an Elegoo Centauri Carbon ar home, and the building and managing process was unscrewing couple transport bolts and clicking "self calibrate" button. From what I've seen, Creality is the same way now too.
Yes, the old Ender 3 I used to have demanded attention every other print. But it's not the norm now.
I'm sure Prusa makes a better product, and it probably starts to make economic sense if you run a print farm. But for home use, a 300€ box that happily melts plastic into whatever shape I need is a sweet deal. It even has a 50€ multi material extension box now, however that's on months long backorder.
I precisely wanted to avoid another hobby, of which I have too many already. 3D printing as a hobby doesn't appeal to me, I just wanted something that solved the problem and was relatively cheap. The A1 is this for me, it's as close as a fire and forget appliance as I could find.
Not saying there aren't better alternatives, just that it simply works for me.
I don't know the last time you used Linux, but I've used it as my main OS for almost 20 years and have never really felt like I was "fighting" it. My system has always done exactly what I told it to do.
I also used Mac OS and macOS on and off for probably 20 years as well, and it freaking sucks in many ways. _That's_ where I feel like I'm fighting the system. And I grew up with it.
The Year of the Linux Desktop arrived a while ago and nobody noticed :)
Yes you pay a lot more, but I guess that's some sense voting with your wallet... I'm personally going to buy a Prusa after I stabilize where I live.
(Also, what did Snapmaker do? I thought they were relatively innocuous?)
Orca really needs a plugin system so that we don't get so many forks. I want full spectrum, wave overhangs, Snapmaker customizations for their printers, Sovol customizations for theirs. I also want the latest Orca nightly. So that's 5 different forks of Orca a good plugin system could replace.
As an aspiring business owner, I am looking to transition to a more open printer as the OCL isn't something I want to rely on.
There's a ton of printers that are strictly offline. Some are older and some are newer, but there's a ton of them either way. That "offline" part is simple to accomplish.
Can you talk more about what else are you looking to achieve so the field can be pared down a bit?
