+1. Bambu is the difference between 'my hobby is 3d printers' vs 'my hobby is 3d printing'. The damn thing sits in the garage idle for months and then it just prints a whole spool of stuff perfectly without even a drop of oil (which it asked for in between plates, I'll grant it that).
> Bambu is the difference between 'my hobby is 3d printers' vs 'my hobby is 3d printing'.
My experience was the same. I can just run the thing without having to tweak, tune, calibrate it. It takes care of that itself. I also don't let it talk to my wifi though. I just use the microSD card.
But my purchase was a while ago. While it is possible the industry has caught up, the reputation Bambu built still leads the pack.
A Prusa is equally reliable.
Bambu's marketing (handing them out like candy to every YouTuber) has propagated a lie that there's "Easy and locked down Bambu" and "Yucky hard to use custom printers".
I have an Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro. It was like $220. I have put approximately $30 into it for the Raspberry Pi I installed Octoprint on, and even that's a stretch since I already owned the Pi. It prints just fine. Sits for months. Fires up every time. First layers perfect every time.
The "printer being the hobby" is only true if you let it. Even cheap no name open source printers are really good these days, and in the high end there are plenty that are competitive with Bambu on print quality, out of the box experience, and features, often exceeding them.
I dunno, I guess I just don't think having to let a printer talk to some fucking cloud service in China so I can start an STL print from my phone is all that important of a feature.
Yeah, I did the printer as a hobby thing when I built my first reprap. It was fun, and I learned a ton, but the state of the art in 2014 just wasn't there for low-end machines to be reliable. I replaced it with a prusa in 2019,and I have had zero issues at all with it. The only print failures I've had were either due to part design or bad filament (pla stored in a humid garage). I've been super impressed with the quality of the machine, and have printed some fairly challenging parts. Plus, the whole machine is open and hackable. I didn't really even consider other printers, since I wanted to support prusa and what they have done for the community. Although I have used a friend's ender 3, and I was pretty impressed with the quality for the price.
I think the biggest change has been auto bed leveling, and software to make the first layer good almost all the time, across a wide range of filaments.
Many people started with something like an Ender V3, then moved to Bambu... and that is absolutely life-altering in terms of 3D printing expectaitons. But a similar difference is present moving to a modern Ender, Elegoo, or Prusa. Just their marketing is far from as solid as Bambu.
Not that Bambu printers are bad; in fact I still like their AMS solution the best of any I've seen or tested.
Sadly, Prusa is not equally reliable.
The fact that the Bambu printers use linear slides means they have a huge accuracy advantage right out the chute. And the Bambu printers have a bunch of other quality of life improvements that really add up.
While you can certainly slag Bambu for their business practices, the other 3D printer companies are absolutely lagging on the engineering front. Companies like Prusa need to step up their game.
As for phoning home, we isolated the printer on its own network and it hasn't caused us any issues. Sure, some of the monitoring features won't work, but it seems to print just fine without network access.
So you claim Prusa isn't just as reliable because they're allegedly less accurate?
Get your claims straight. My Prusa Mini has been super reliable. Is it less accurate? Maybe, but that's not the claim you're replying to.
Go on, why are you shilling?
Increased accuracy decreases chances of failed prints (especially when you are trying to up the speed)
My Prusa has been very reliable over the years. However, it’s not as cheap as the Bambu.
It’s going to be hard to justify supporting open source hardware at these prices.
I had used a Prusa MK3 in the past and had a good experience with it. When I went looking at printers again Prusa was what I assumed I'd get but after looking at Bambulab, their A1 is about 1/4th of the price while being better than the Prusa MK4.
It's almost impossible to justify buying their printers today. The issues and concerns about Bambulab seem to be primarily driven by disappointment with how a new company that didn't open source their hardware was able to absolutely steamroll the entire market, rather than actual real issues you as a user will have.
It's the crab bucket mentality. Before Bambu Lab 99% of the 3D printer offerings were absolute garbage to the point of not being far from being a scam. You get a CoreXY printer with an enclosure and AMS for a really good price and if you buy their filament in bulk, it is not much more expensive than e.g. Sunlu where buying at least 3 spools per order is mandatory to begin with.
The only way to beat Bambu Lab is to be better than them at the 3D printer game, but most companies can't do that, so people have become resentful while grasping for straws to find things to criticize. Snapmaker got the message and decided to come out with the Snapmaker U1, the rest can wallow in their "open source" superiority complex to silence critics.
What kind of problems do people expect to have with lesser models? I have a second hand kit build that I didn't assemble and was cheap years ago and just threw in my car seat one day to bring home, and the worst that happened was the poorly run temp sensor wires drooped and snagged on a print and pulled out. I don't even know what could go wrong or need any "tweaking" other than a drive belt someday failing. I just don't understand how any 3d printer these days could be problematic, the hardware is not really that complicated or under that much stress.
The P1S was my first 3D FDM printer, mostly because what I saw in the scene, in Makerspaces, and on YouTube before was mostly people tinkering with their other machines ('use this hotend', 'this is my grandma's secret recipie for bed adhesion issues', 're-fasten this particular nut to exactly 1.32 newton, but only if that part has been printed from ABS, instead if PETG, use 1.29 newton' ...) ... and I didn't want to work the machine, I wanted to work with the machine.
Bambu were the first that gave me the feeling 3D FDM printing has become more appliance-like, less 'spend endless hours maintaining the machine'. Sure, the Bambu also needs maintenance. But it is not the main procedure with the machine.
I don't have a lot of time on my qidi pro4, but that's been my experience with that printer.
My Prusa Mk3 also does this?
The A1 is a tiny fraction of the cost of the MK3 while having a ton of extra features.
My A1 has lots of annoying issues. It did print great out of the box, but requires a fair bit of maintenance to keep that up.
My prusa has be far more reliable so far. admittedly it’s newer than the a1 so it’s too early to be super conclusive on that, but so far it’s been quite a bit better
Of course, it’s quite a bit more money too
My old work ran 6 FFF machines, the only one that seemed to have 100% uptime was the Prusa. Mind you this was several years ago, before Bambu hit it big. But we had several machines with autoswap beds etc, fancy stuff.
After that experience I got a Prusa, I'm only an occasional printer but I've put maybe 5 rolls of material through it over the course of a couple years and haven't had any stop+fix issues.