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.
My 3d printing journey seems to have ended with a Prusa Mini. Really solid and well engineered device, and it's delightful that Prusa acknowledge the open-source hardware and software they depended on to build their company.
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.)
I've got a Bambu printer and it's fine. I've completely blocked it from internet access (for good reason). It'd be pretty hard for them to update my printer for mandatory cloud integration. I don't think this printer even does spool detection unless I get their AMS unit.
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.
The first time I saw the word “enshittification” it just clicked. It really is a tidy word!
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.
Reality we’re being pretty shady and only acknowledged / released info after the community put up an uproar. The machine performance isn’t bad but I’d still recommend a p1p and just using local lan instead of the cloud.
I own two x1cc, and 2 p1p, tons of ender 3 + 5’s, Prusa xl ( it’s a beast but slower than bambu by a decent margin).
Been there, done that. That's why I stopped actively contributing open source many years ago. Not because I discovered my code without any mentioning in appliances from heavily subsidized Chinese company, but because nobody gave any s*t, even my own employer. "Stop whining, it's too_good_to_be_true cheap stuff!"
Prusa Slicer was forked from Slic3r. That's kind of the point of free software; fork it, change the colors, stick your name on it. (Prusa has done a lot more than that, of course.)
Frankly, the less software that hardware companies write, the better. They already have their hands full with the firmware and probably don't need to be setting up CI infrastructure for Linux/Mac/Windows and all that stuff.
You are letting your past experience color your objective opinions here. As someone who refused to even want to get into 3D printing.... last month in preparation for DEFCON, I was forced into entering this world in order to make a special project for the con.
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.
The Sovol SV06 is what people get pointed to when a Prusa Mk4 is outside their budget. The Reddit community skews to enthusiasts who don't mind the maintenance and people with more time than cash (no shade - it's just a numbers game). The Mk4 is a remarkable bit of kit, and still firmly on the open source side of the fence. The Bambus do have an edge on the raw stats, but both my Prusa filament printers (a Mk4 and a mini) are set-and-forget appliances at this point. I've done nothing other than update firmware on the Mk4. As far as I'm concerned they've nailed the hardware, and it's (for now - Prusa have been making worrying noises here) open source. I wouldn't have any worries recommending the Mk4 for a newbie who's got the cash for it.
> One more note about open source: There is no "open source" desktop laser/inkjet printer and people get on with their lives regardless.
Closed source laser drivers are the precise reason why free software exists. RMS not just getting on with his life in the face of closed source tomfoolery is why we have the GPL at all.
> The 3D printing community embracing open source is an artifact of it still being stuck in the "computer kit building" era.
If your budget doesn't get you out of the "kit of parts" range, sure. Compare like with like, though: a new SV06 costs £200. A new X1C costs £1300. The SV06 isn't cheap because it's open source, open source is what lets it exist at all.
>Closed source laser drivers are the precise reason why free software exists. RMS not just getting on with his life in the face of closed source tomfoolery is why we have the GPL at all.
Typical FOSS person never reads my point clearly: Can you name one printer on the market that is open source? ie. All the parts are able to be purchased and built? (You know since that is the kind of 3D printer I was criticizing...)
>If your budget doesn't get you out of the "kit of parts" range, sure. Compare like with like, though: a new SV06 costs £200. A new X1C costs £1300. The SV06 isn't cheap because it's open source, open source is what lets it exist at all.
Thats all well and good but again it does not change the fact that it is not something you can rely on to just get the job done. That was my point.
Going back to my comment you didn't read fully:
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.
> Typical FOSS person never reads my point clearly
No, what has happened here is that I have understood and rejected the framing of your point. Open source 2d plotters are trivial to find, as are open source printing presses of all sorts. By narrowing your framing to the one part of the market that is demonstrably broken and anti-consumer to try to score a cheap point, you're actually proving mine.
The reason you don't see open source inkjets and laserjets is because the technologies are patented, which is exactly the problem the open source 3d printing aims to defend against. Not because nobody wants to do it, or because it's a bad idea: it's because HP will sue you into the ground if you try. And that's the situation Bambu are actively trying to create for themselves.
> Thats all well and good but again it does not change the fact that it is not something you can rely on to just get the job done. That was my point.
So what? Buy crap, get crap. Again, the problem here is not the existence of a product that does not satisfy your personal needs. Why pick on your personal experience with the SV06 to tar the entire open source 3d printing sphere with the same brush? Why bring up the SV06 at all? Why bring up open source printing at all?
> 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.
It hasn't. That proves precisely nothing either way about open source vs closed source.
>No, what has happened here is that I have understood and rejected the framing of your point. Open source 2d plotters are trivial to find, as are open source printing presses of all sorts. By narrowing your framing to the one part of the market that is demonstrably broken and anti-consumer to try to score a cheap point, you're actually proving mine.
You are treating 3D printing as some sort of industry where the tool itself is the product. This is why you are bringing up 2D plotters and printing presses. I am treating it where the output is the product. This is what the mass market expects. This is entirely why desktop printers are mass market (you can find one lying around in most homes with a PC) and 3D printers are not. My original comment which you didn't actually read alluded to 3D printing being stuck in the "computer kit building era". PCs would never have become mass market if they were stuck in the kit building era.
>The reason you don't see open source inkjets and laserjets is because the technologies are patented, which is exactly the problem the open source 3d printing aims to defend against. Not because nobody wants to do it, or because it's a bad idea: it's because HP will sue you into the ground if you try. And that's the situation Bambu are actively trying to create for themselves.
The reason we don't see open source inkjets is that any printer produced would still not be a big enough of a market to appeal to the mass market consumer and there obviously isn't enough interest in the niche market to justify the cost. You would need to build up an ecosystem when the existing closed offerings are so mature that there isn't any benefit to be gained other than maybe "freedom" or control over the software. That has always been a niche position. Furthermore, there are obviously enough competitors in the market to not run into HP's patent issues so the reality is that there isn't enough of a motivation (ie. market size) to put in the effort or else someone (even Chinese companies that normally skirt patents) would have attempted it.
>So what? Buy crap, get crap. Again, the problem here is not the existence of a product that does not satisfy your personal needs. Why pick on your personal experience with the SV06 to tar the entire open source 3d printing sphere with the same brush? Why bring up the SV06 at all? Why bring up open source printing at all?
So now 300$ is crap huh? Lets just call it what I originally called it: a toy. That was being nice and honest to the open source bed slingers. You are the one being mean to them. My point was that it is not a tool normal people can rely on. My original comment that you didn't read said that it is a toy. What I mean by that is that its a hobby where you have to assemble it, constantly fiddle with it(software and hardware wise) to get any sort of consistent print and have to repeatedly retry or alter your object to suit the printer.
>It hasn't. That proves precisely nothing either way about open source vs closed source.
Well I know that it hasn't, that why I hope it does as it will make 3D printing mass market and just a regular occurrence in every household and these open source models will end up in the trash bin of history just like the PC kit machines of the 1970s.
Come on man, these open source 3D printers have been around for 10+ years. They were niche back then and they are still niche. Thats not going to change and shame on all the people bashing a company that at least introduced something that the "rest of us" can use without have giving up the rest of our lives thinking about it.
Laser and inkjet printers are not exactly a healthy market, and one customers are not accepting anymore because of all the user hostility. That's not a convincing argument pro the proprietary future of 3D printers.
I didn't say it was a healthy market (which is subjective anyway). I said it was a mature market. ie. The tech is established and all the brands are pretty much interchangeable for the most part.
>You are letting your past experience color your objective opinions here
Surely an objective opinion should be informed by past experience at the very minimum? I'm not even sure if you can have an objective opinion without some comparator.
Pretty much everyone I know in IT-related fields despise laser/inkjet printer companies and their slimy tactics. I refuse to touch anything HP at all any more, solely due to their printer drivers. I've gotten to steer a number of companies away from outfitting with HP products simply due to distaste of their sleazy drivers.
Suggesting 3D printers should be more like ink/laser is 1000% the wrong direction. 3D printers exist _because_ of open source, it isn't some "artifact" holding them back
And yet millions of people buy regular printers, use them for what they need to print and then move on with their lives. Its a mature market where all the players are more or less interchangeable and you can go to the store, get a box, plug it in, put in paper, and a cartridge and click print.
Could you elaborate on the SV06's shortcomings? I bought one after selling my Ender 3 (the shittiest machine ever made) and it has everything you want from a home 3D printer. Auto-calibration, no manual bed leveling, an excellent extruder, powder-coated PEI sheet (can print PETG straight on the bed without damaging it) and it's really sturdy. Oh, and it works out of the box (after some quick assembly). It's basically a Prusa without the signature orange and exorbitant pricing. (nothing against Prusa, I love their products, they're just really expensive for the average tinkerer.)
I’m currently researching what printer to buy and I was put off by the fact that the SV06 doesn’t have filament runout detection, so I’m personally considering the Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro instead which seems to have the features I would like in the same price range.
Filament runout sensors can be easily DIY'd (endstop switch with a roller in a 3d-printed casing). You'd have to recompile the firmware though so I see how that could be a pain. I wonder why Sovol didn't add one, they're dirt cheap, small and easy to integrate.
If you want to use a car analogy, Prusa is the Toyota of the 3D printing world. No-one is arguably what they offer isn’t high quality, it’s just it’s 5 years too late, and costs too much.
For a company that’s been leading the charge on hobbyist 3D printing, they completely missed the boat on the Voron style printers. If they had simply mass produced a voron style 250x250x250mm printer, right around the time they announced the XL, and actually delivered it, the world would be a different place, and you could talk about Bambu Labs and Prusa in the same sentence.
Prusa is getting destroyed at every price point in every measure of quality. You can get the same quality for cheaper, or better quality for the same price.
Prusa’s ideological purity in reprap style printers has held them back. No significant innovations in hardware, no economies of scale from mass production, using open source firmware but failing to take advantage of community innovations like input shaping. The only place they really had an edge in was the slicer, which turned out to be the most portable part of their ecosystem.
Bambu labs illustrates how glacially slow the 3D printing industry have been innovating. A Prusa MK4 isn’t that far detached from the I3 that came 10 years before it. If the list of improvements amounts to a couple of dot points, that’s a sorry state of affairs.
For me, it’s the modularity. No matter what breaks, you can get a replacement part fairly quick and cheap. It’s relatively easy to take apart and build it back yourself. You can even re-print your plastic components yourself.
I personally don’t have the “mileage” on my printer to have my own opinion, but others say it’s quite reliable and doesn’t break down often.
Ahh, classic hackernews upvoting the 'I hate cloud' comment to the top.
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 totally believe that these printers are technically amazing. That’s why I made the Apple vs. beige box analogy. Those M-series chips and their hardware quality are way better. But there is stronger lock-in.
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)
I think this is a valid analogy. Albeit, one that makes me all the more excited to buy a Bamboo. I’ve been a software engineer for a while now and personally I adore Apple’s approach to products. It just works. I don’t have to spend time fucking around with things I don’t want to. And most importantly, IT JUST WORKS.
I hate what a pain it is to just get straight lines to print on my 3D printer! It shouldn’t be this hard.
Granted, hopefully a swing towards Bamboo will put pressure on the other players in the market and they’ll up their game so that all the non-enthusiasts who just want to print can select from a variety of products.
That is all fine and good as long as I can use it (all the features, including firmware upgrades but except a marketplace) without a cloud login. I've been printing to my Prusa and KP3S via the LAN using Octoprint and Klipper for years now, and I welcome feature-based competition as long as I am not the product.
For what it's worth the best printer I've ever used (at least the most reliable) was a Markforged and that was very heavy lock in. Own brand filaments, cloud-only slicer, super expensive consumables. But that thing really did work every time and the slicer was functional enough that we never had issue with it.
It’s not the value that Bambuu brings that’s the problem. We bitch and moan about repairability, owning the device etc.
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.
'You wanted the Chinese clone that took the ideas, lowered the price and added cloud shit' - two things:
1. Bambu has a lot of innovative hardware pieces that aren't in say Prusa - I wouldn't call it Chinese clone that took the ideas. Bambu is not one of those Prusa clones, let's get that straight.
2. Yup, I appreciate lower price and features that make it easy to use. Yup I appreciate minimal setup time and faster/consistent prints. I am not a 3D printing enthusiast - I am a user, like millions of other 'normal' people in the world. Somehow folks on hackernews always discount this.
No one ever really gave a shit precisely because it was expensive and hard to use - Bambu is fixing both of those things. I've seen people who did 3D printing full time, who had Prusa farms and extensive knowledge of repairing them completely give up Prusas and switch to Bambu. Bambu seems to be a better product for a lot of audience.
I don't see anything wrong with influencers taking up 3D printing - they have the reach and I'd love to see 3D printers in the hands of more people. What makes you think influencers/people wouldn't use 3D printers to bring their ideas to life? That's precisely why I want 3D printers to be more accessible (both in terms of usability and cost).
What can’t be found in an open source project? AI first layer inspection and lidar?
I’m not an enthusiast either, I wanted to produce my own CAD designs. And I understand not wanting to tinker with the printer. I also don’t care about that shit. But I also appreciated that I could just order parts from where ever or even print my own upgrades. I also agree that any decent printer before the Bambuu was expensive. Bambuu really punches above it’s price point.
But a lot of a printer isn’t something complicated and super fiddly that can’t be user repaired. And this style of printer started off as an open source project with maximum right to repair. But at this point, I’m convinced, that if an open source printer with absolute feature parity was released, it would fail. They would never compete on price. Ownership of your device never mattered.
All that's happened is that the audience has changed. Ownership of your device does and did matter - just not to the wider market that's now being served by the Bambu devices. The market couldn't have grown to this point without the open source printers, I'm convinced of that. And I strongly suspect that there will always be open source printers out there, and they probably will have feature parity, and they probably will be a bit more expensive, and people will say they have "failed" because they only hold a small percentage of the market, but you know what? The market will be ten times the size. Not everyone has to like the thing for the thing to be viable.
In a sense Prusa are already proving this: they're not really competing on price, and they can't build printers fast enough to satisfy demand.
> What can’t be found in an open source project? AI first layer inspection and lidar?
Not having to fuck around to assemble and use your printer.
I had the spare time and patience to maintain my printer during my university years - but now I really just want something that works out of the box, all the time, every time.
I love open-source hardware, but only in places where having to maintain it myself isn’t burdensome - and unfortunately, I’ve always treated my printer as more of a tool than as a hobby.
X1C works fine completely offline now[1], however it still has a stupid restriction where their slicer can't find the printer if its on a different subnet unless you generate the announcement packet yourself.
[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.
Yeah, the cloud nature of Bambu is kind of something looming over the community's head. They have RFID readers in the filament holder. The software's not open source. They already had an incident where jobs sent to the printer got held for several hours (so the printer turned on when they cleared the queue, which might have been unexpected).
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.)
RFID reader is not a thing when you don't use AMS (for multi color printing). RFID is used to identify the filament, otherwise you just have to set it manually on what did you load to which holder.
This problem has been solved on other printers. The dimension has been "jailbroken". Yoi can buy the rfid chips, reprogram them, people sell already done ones and even complete knock off filament cartridges.
It's just like ink jet printers, you say this will be a problem but it just won't, the community will solve it for you.
Thanks for that link. It’s cool that people are hacking on this thing. But my question should have ended with “from Bambu?”
This sentence from your link…
> Since we don't know how Bambulab will react on this guide and the general reverse engineering of the tags: Please don't share you tag's UID and the related keys for now.
…means the answer is “no”. That the RFID system is meant to drive sales of their own inkjet cartri—er, I meant filament spools.
People have hacked the Keurig 2 coffee pod system, people have reverse-engineered Lexmark’s toner control system. Neither of those initiatives made me a more likely to purchase from Keurig or from Lexmark.
That sentence means, we (the hackers) have no idea what BambuLab (the company that makes this printer) is going to do in the future, so please don't do things that would help them make it harder for us to hack these RFIDs in the future.
Yes, but what ink jet printer did you buy?
In this case, this printer prints 4x as fast with 2x the quality of all the competitors on the market. Would you then still not buy it based in this theoretical, hypothetical, future con?
My interpretation of that quoted sentence is the same as yours. That’s my point. The RFID system is a kind of vendor lock-in, and I don’t go for that.
If the RFID system was truly meant to improve the user experience, Bambu would offer it to other filament producers to make it a standard, and really make it useful to the user.
I gave up on consumer inkjet printers because they all seem to be wildly expensive on the consumables. I have a Brother laser now that is still using the same toner it came with 10 years ago. I do not have an account with brother.com.
I know this printer is bad-ass, technically. If that was something I needed to optimize for, I would probably hold my nose and get one. I might actually still do that!
But for now, my existing Monoprice printer still works, and it respects me as a user.
It's not. You are misinformed and clearly have not used one personally.
I have one you do not need the rfid to load filament.
There is a hole on the back of the printer, you put filament in it just like any other printer and then tell it what you have.
It doesn't even have a rfid reader back there.
That's in the case you don't want to use the AMS. If you do want to use the AMS it's similar. Open AMS, put filament in, push it into hole, select what filament it is on the touchscreen. If the filament happens to have an rfid tag, you don't need to do the last step. That's all.
I have 4 bambu labs rfid enabled spools loaded now, 4 spools from matter hackers without rfid in my second AMS right now, works great.
OK I guess I’m not making myself clear. I am not under the impression that the RFID is required for the printer to accept filament. I understand that it’s a nice-to-have feature that makes it seamless to swap things out without punching a bunch of buttons.
You know what would make it even better? If those RFID tags were available to filament makers. This would improve the user experience.
The cloud features are NOT integral to the experience. You absolutely can use the printer without touching the cloud but it makes the experience a lot nicer if you're not an advanced user who is used to buying their own camera, setting up their own VPN and configuring their own OctoPrint to get similar feature set.
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'm not against optional cloud features, but as far as I can see, the camera doesn't work in their LAN only mode. I'd say that's a big feature and makes the non-cloud operation of the printer an inferior mode, and that's something I'm definitely not on board with.
Bambu printers will accept G-code on a MicroSD card, like basically any 3D printer ever. The cloud stuff is optional, but very useful.
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.
A lot of responses to my comment keep mentioning the amazing technical details of this hardware. I believe it. I am not complaining about the hardware being subpar. That’s not my beef.
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.
I own BambuLab and make use of their LAN feature all the time. The camera stream works without account and cloud access (albeit, they recently added that!), so does uploading g-code through the LAN without any account. You _just_ install BambuStudio, connect to the printer with a code shown on it and assuming you're in the same network - it just works. No account or any cloud needed for that.
to make it go across subnets you just need to send the announcement packet yourself. It's a pretty easy hack, but it's kind of embarrassing for the manufacturer that their own software won't let you type in an IP address.
That's why they made this cloud enabled software, you should use that.
You hypothetically have to sneakernet it because you refuse to embrace new tech.
Ultimately 3d printers are like washing machines or vacuums. They're not a lifetime purchase. But it, use it for 4 years while it's up to date and has support, etc. Then when it doesn't, buy a new one.
It's like the people that worry about parts availability for 10 years from now when they buy a Camry. As long as you buy a Camry not a Jaguar, you will be able to buy parts.
I actually do not understand why BambuLab gets so much hate. It seems previously people complained about the privacy but I gave their privacy policy a read and it seems quite explicit about how they only use the data for improvements. As makers surely we can appreciate that data is required to make improvements from a B2C product, especially when dealing with hardware with so many refinement parameters
I don't love the closed nature of their platform but I love that they are forcing everyone else to step up their game. If Bambu is Apple, who's going to be Android and who's going the way of WebOS/Blackberry/Windows Phone?
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 make things for conferences with 3d printers. I started with Wanhao printers, then went to Aurora Jaguar's... and then Prusa Mk3s's... and now am looking at a mixed print farm of Prusa MK3s and Bambu Labs X1C's. I'm selling the rest of my Prusa printers in the coming months and replacing them with more Bambu's, their product are amazing and 3-4x faster than prusa printers.
I love Prusa but they were caught sleeping at the wheel, they stopped innovating until bambu labs woke them up.
> whether to join the Apple Ecosystem™ or to stick with a beige box so I can run whatever OS I want
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.
You perfectly captured how i feel about my firestick hd.its great, bht the enshitification scaffolding is too much. Charge me 20 dollars more and throw vanilla lineageos on there and you have my business all day, as it stands i want my money back.
This looks much better than it actually is for a couple of reasons:
- 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.
> Multicolor is not something you actually use often and is horribly slow
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.
copy on that! I often use the "print by object" feature, and it's super useful being able to print each object in a different color with no color changing
I don't get it - why is Prusa mini a much better printer for somebody who actually wants to print than Bambu ones?
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.
Because the extra features of the A1 are not much useful in practice. The main thing that is required to print well is auto bed leveling, that works well with the Mini as well. The Mini is very quiet so the noise canceling feature is not useful. Input Shaping is now available on both. So what remains is that the Mini is a printer that provably was able to print in what are basically miniature factories. I printed with 4 minis for a couple of years 24H, and everything that breaks you can either print it yourself, if it's a plastic part, or get it for a reasonable price. If the A1 can do it, is to be seen, and we for sure know that the vendor itself discourages printing anything but PLA/PETG/TPU. Printing ASA is very useful for everything you want to put something inside your car under the sun or alike. Also Prusa has a long history in supporting the printer for a long time, so we can expect that the next Mini will ship with an upgrade kit.
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.
FWIW, Prusa has released the first alpha version of a new firmware update for the Mini+ that adds input shaping and increases the speed of the machine substantially.
> Also Bambulab has a bad track in providing parts, when needed.
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?
I'm in many Reddit / Facebook groups about 3D printers and a lot of people complain constantly. So I've only this kind of evidence, other than a single friend that confirmed issues with getting parts.
> 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.
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.
True. But multicolor is often used for miniatures or alike. Who needs 4 magic creatures? If it's for an Etsy shop, then things are different and your point is a lot more valid.
I don't have a multi-filament printer, but I'm under the impression that two color printing is quite useful because you can print high-contrast text, e.g. for labels. When I need to iterate a tricky design, I hand-label them "1" "2" ... If I could print better text, It would be nicer to include a version number, dimensions, etc.
This sort of printing is super easy on an bambu and wastes almost nothing if you can design your text onto the top of the print: You simply print the top few layers in your contrasty filament using the layer paint tool in the slicer. It works wonderfully.
> The printer can't print things like ASA. Limited to PLA/PETG/TPU.
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.
ASA is very prone to warping, and thus needs an enclosure to keep ambient temp high enough while printing. You might be able to print small parts in ASA with a non-enclosed bedslinger like this, but you will run in trouble for bigger parts.
I print ASA all the time on my Prusa MK3S. It's the filament I use the most. The printer is not encased, though it's also not in a draughty environment.
I rarely have a warped part, and I've printed from tiny parts to some that would take most of the bed and 10-30cm tall.
Keeping the bed clean is usually enough. For trickier parts I add a brim. I always use a release agent (I prefer a thin layer of talcum powder but glue and others work as well), otherwise it sticks badly and I've damaged more than a couple PEI sheets trying to get them off.
Bambulab itself says it can't print ASA. I've the feeling that while the max temperature is 300 degrees, for some reason and with the volumetric flow that they set, the hotend is not able to keep up.
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 think some fields are just chock full of really bitter people that treat their hobby like a religion: Definitely Gaming, 3D Printing, maybe superhero movies etc.
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.
Their strategy seems to be make a profit by taking everything they can from the community while milking their users. Do everything they can to lock people into their cloud and ecosystem.
How are they "taking everything from the community"? You mean researching user feedback on other printers and building a better product?
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.
I heard the same arguments for the Ender printers when they were popular. Best prints ever, incredible detail, etc, etc. At least Ender wasn't actively trying to trap people into their ecosystem.
It won't work though. The clones are coming. Many companies have tried to get the cloud lock-in but it just doesn't make sense to buy in as a user.
I don’t get how they can trap people into their ecosystem. Does it print STL files, or does it have some way of owning the asset life cycle? Whether I sneakernet an sdcard,m, load via octoprint, or something else, I’m not super locked in. Or does locking in mean “making it so user friendly and easy that you wouldn’t want to use a Marlin firmware printer?” Otherwise it’s just another UI for managing my STLs and slicing. That’s a lot different than an iCloud scenario where all of everything is end to end across the closed device ecosystem. Just the last mile of my STL files is nothing.
As an example, Creality giving in and open sourcing the K1 (their clone of Bambu's tech) after initially going as far as violating the license on Klipper to push their own cloud system.
Their strategy is to make a good printer and allow you to easily use it. Also, the "cloud" thing is not paid or anything its just a way to send files to the printer over the internet and watch the built-in camera from your telephone. You can also just put files on an SD card or whatever and print them.
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.
Just remember if a device that is intended to operate stand-alone/offline requires you to make an account or connect it to the internet to active it. It isn't yours and will stop working one day.
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.
I'm a hardware product design engineer, have been using 3d printers for 20 years professionally to get my work done.
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.
A few weeks ago their mandatory cloud printing service had a bug and caused printers to spontaneously crash in the middle of the night, in many cases doing significant damage to the printer.
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”.
They call it a "bug", and the explanation seems plausible, but consider that a hacker could easily do the same thing.
Good thing these are only hobbyist-level machines, and AFAIK not used in any real production manufacturing. Imagine the same sort of bug (or hack) happening to CNC machines all over the world.
There's no real detail as to whether they're really trying to make whole anyone who's printer was damaged. Just the standard "contact us" type of thing:
If you were affected by this cloud outage, and your printer has suffered any damage,
please don't hesitate to contact our Support Team at Bambu Support.
So, bit hard to tell without hearing from any affected users who have contacted their support.
The cloud isn’t mandatory, it’s just necessary for some features and on by default…
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.
Nope, and you don't lose anything that's not exclusive to the Bambu Handy app, which I believe is just manual object cancellation right now. Bambu Studio, their slicing suite for Linux, Mac, and Windows on their GitHub, can add printer in LAN Only mode.
I felt pretty strongly about not wanting cloud options, but just look at their documentation across their site, videos, and wiki. They're the opposite of that evil, dark pattern, gaslighting, contemptible shit we associate with SV tech today. They let their products do the talking, which makes it clear how much they believe in what they're building.
I cancelled my P1S Combo order because of the cloud incident, checked with colleagues with Bambus whether they were affected, and after realizing I probably fell for a little anti-Sino propaganda, bought an X1C.
I can say this with a decade of printing experience, but it's everything I imagined 3D printing would be when I first got into it. Today, we've got Ultimakers with Material Stations, every model of Creality, and the Bambus are just really thoughtful, well designed and engineered products that happen to blow everything else out of the water. It's hard not to be excited about.
I have two Bambu X1C with AMS. These are solid reliable appliances rather than hackable machines. I had a Prusa MK3S+ that always required a lot of fiddling to keep it working well. I replaced it with an X1C and do not miss my Prsua.
I have been really wanting to get a Bambu Lab printer, but the last time I checked, they didn't support offline printing very well. Keywords: last time I checked. I haven't circled back in the last half year or so.
yes, they do seem to improve LAN support in subsequent updates, see[0] for example 1.7.0 release notes where they added camera stream to LAN Only mode as well
I truly love my two Bambu Printers (P1S). The rate of failure is extremely small when in the past printers it was probably close to 10% - which caused a lot of wasted time playing with settings to try to perfect things.
As a biased Prusa MK4 owner, I see them as Genesis. Way better than Ender, but at the end of the day, it’s still just a rebranded Hyundai with luxury finish.
I've been tracking the Bambu printers ever since the crowdfunding days, and the overall feature set is impressive. Like I wrote the other day* Prusa is in trouble here. As much as I appreciate them (being in the EU myself and owning an old Prusa clone), they are not competitive feature-wise (although the XL mostly holds its own against the X1 series as a workhorse printer if you buy it with multiple toolheads).
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).
Here you are assuming that the A1 will be able to print, like the Prusa Mini, for years no-stop without issues and with little servicing needed. That's, IMHO, to be seen.
I wasn't comparing them support-wise -- Prusa has a better track record by dint of being older, but regardless of support and maintenance I would pick the Prusa if it cost the same and had the same software feature set because there are more spare parts around and I can build one from a kit if needed.
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
Totally get your point. I'm not just concerned with support itself, but durability. I had experiences of printing for 24H for a couple of years, and Minis can do that with minor servicing (from time to time the nozzle requires to be changed, the PTFE tube inside the hotend, too. In one of the Minis the thermistor stopped working. Easy tasks, and if you have 3/4 printers you just remove one from the line for a couple of days). Now, the A1 looks solid, but there is to see if it is solid and if the printing speed it is tuned for will not ruin the parts soon, if printing a lot.
I own a Prusa and I'm happy I bought it even at a premium. The team is always cool at the 3D printing fairs I attend, the slicer is nice, they release a lot of cool and open stuff, designed printable face shields during Covid etc. It feels like a company well worth supporting.
BambooLab on the other hand seems to be almost the exact opposite (OrcaSlicer etc.).
Printers are getting cheaper and better all the time. As far as I'm concerned the $200 Ender 3 V3 SE and $230 Anycubic Kobra 2 render everything else in the sub-$1000 space irrelevant. At this point nothing else is an upgrade unless it does multifilament RGB printing.
There's a ton of different methods of multicolor printing each with different pros and cons - simplified
* 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.
In the videos I have seen it does both in the same print - poop and a waste block. But that might have been slicer misconfiguration. Although from the amount of times I have seen that makes me wonder: is the default config in Bambu slicer not taking this into account or all of the reviewers don't know how to configure their own preferred slicer. Just checked and 8/8 reviews of BambuLab A1 mini from channels that specialize in 3d printing showed purge tower.
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?
I am wondering if there is any special hardware needed for the "silent printing" calibration on the A1 Mini, or if this is just a firmware update away from getting into the P1S and X1 Carbon.
I honestly want to use the ams lite with my bambu x1c because it’ll be so much easier to use third party filament in a multi material setup. But I suspect that’s not gonna be an option
I had the same exact thought. I have been using a lot of Overture PETG which comes on cardboard spools. I found some printable wheel attachments that help solve some issues. But occasionally I find that the spools get tangled when retracting.
Have you looked into the hydra mod for the ams? It seems like a lot of folks use it. I’m debating printing it myself or ordering a print from matter hackers.
I own a P1P and it just works™. If you are just interested in printing and not have a 3D printer itself part of your DIY activities, the P1P is a safe choice.
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.