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.
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.)