I’m looking to buy an intermediate level printer to upgrade from a MK2, and I’m deciding between a P1S vs a MK4.
I have never considered getting anything other than a Prusa, since I’ve had such good experiences using mine, however I heard that recently they’ve switched away from their open source model(?)
That and being made in the EU was the main differentiating factor for me, however I do hear really good things about Bambu printers.
Does anyone have experience with either?
Edit: Found a lot of the information I was looking for here: https://lemmy.world/post/9500502
Prusa firmware is all still on github. They are using a few more machined or injection moulded parts where it makes sense for stiffness or things like the spool holder. Most of the printer and especially anything that might get revisions later is 3d printed
Gotcha. I remember seeing that they are switching to injection molding in a recent YT video of their labs. I’m not sure what everyone is talking bout when they mention Prusa is less open source than before. Seems like just some misinformation I guess. Thank you for the reply.
The injection mold comment in the Prusa tour video was sarcasm that might‘ve went over some people‘s heads. Prusa being less open source seems completely made up to me. No idea why someone would say that other than making closed source printers like Bambulab‘s look less problematic.
Ultimately it‘s up to you to decide how much you‘re willing to spend and how much you value convenience vs. actually owning your printer and contributing to 3D printing staying open source.
I for one see enough parallels between the new generation of closed source 3D printers and seemingly cheap HP inkjet printers that became increasingly more hostile towards costumers as they gained market share to not touch them with a stick.
I think that perception comes from a post from Josef Prusa where he expressed disdain for companies that are taking the Prusa design and software and wholesale copying it (while doing a really bad job of removing the Prusa branding in the software/firmware). He said that he wasn’t sure how viable continuing to publish everything openly would be given this. I think that was aimed at Anycubic, but don’t quote me on that.
I would say you’re probably going to have a better time with the MK4 in the long run vs. the Bambu Labs, but Prusa should probably take notice that other companies are starting to sell really competitive machines that are reliable (and not just ripoffs of their designs). Sure the XL is unparalleled, but if you just want to unbox a midsize printer and go, Prusa’s machines are very expensive preassembled. Yeah you can get it cheaper if you assemble it yourself, but that doesn’t cover every potential customer’s desires.
I get the sense that Prusa is getting comfortable with his success, and with that he’s getting more protective of his cash cow. Him complaining about how much value he sees in open source is - in my opinion, anyway - a symptom of that. The entire RepRap community upon which he built his business is thanks to open source.
He made a post about some future printers not being fully open source anymore. The post is here: https://blog.prusa3d.com/the-state-of-open-source-in-3d-printing-in-2023_76659/
These are the working points for their future license (not fully fleshed out):
- If you’re using some code or blueprints to bring software or hardware to market, the original code’s authorship must be clearly stated on the product or in the software. Additionally, deleting copyright information from headers and history from repositories is prohibited.
- The production of nearly exact 1:1 clones for commercial purposes is not allowed.
- License for manufacturing spare parts is valid for service, modification, or educational purposes.
- Upgrades and additional modifications based on original parts are allowed and welcome.
- Parts that can be considered consumables (e.g., thermistors, heater blocks, fans, printing plates, etc.) can be manufactured and sold commercially after the verification by the licensor based on the presentation of samples.
- If a product is labeled by the manufacturer as obsolete (or cannot be purchased or ordered for longer than 3 months), the non-commercial clause is automatically terminated if identical parts are no longer produced within the successor of the product or cannot be purchased separately.
- If the licensor ceases its activity, the non-commercial clause is terminated.
These terms are incompatible with open source.
Those seem reasonable
Do they? Well, that’s up to everyone, I guess. They don’t seem reasonable to me, but that’s beside the point - this is not an open source license anymore.
Yeah, I guess I should say it’s not as bad as I initially thought. It’s not great, but I do see why they want some of those rules for companies that are using their firmware for profit without even changing the headers. Must be frustrating, but at the same time, Prusa just invested a ton into injection molding, and the MK4 is > $1000, so… I think a lot of these bad decisions are trickling down to the end user.
I’ve been really happy with the MK4 kit I built months ago. While I haven’t seen a Bambu in person, I’m pretty satisfied with the print speed and picked up an 0.6 nozzle in case I really want to print something bigger, faster.
I had seriously considered building a Voron Trident, but have no regrets about my decision to go with Prusa. It’s nice having a machine that didn’t require a bunch of tweaking; it was fun to build the kit but now it’s an appliance I don’t have to mess with; it’s almost like my Brother laser. I hit print, it prints*. (Asterisk because I have to clean the bed sometimes, occasionally I make a poor choice slicing and don’t add a support I needed, etc, but these aren’t printer-specific issues).
As far as bed-slinger vs coreXY, even Bambu recently released a new bed slinger, so I suspect the tradeoff is more complex than just “coreXY is better”. The whole “model flings around” just isn’t a problem I’ve seen in practice; maaaaaybe if you’re building exceptionally tall, thin structures that can’t be oriented properly it could matter but realistically most people are going to mostly print relatively small things. Even fast printers are slow; as soon as you use a printer you’ll realize that huge build volumes are absurd because big prints just take soooooooo loooooong even on fast machines. And there’s either upcoming support or existing support for bed-axis input shaping, since the slicer does know the amount of filament it’s extruding and can tell the firmware how much more the bed weighs as the print proceeds.
I don’t think Bambu printers are an unreasonable choice for people, but I think if Prusa is affordable to someone, their products are still a good choice.
I mulled between the X1c and the MK4.
I have an X1C, but the hardware is the same as the P1S minus the Hardened Extruder/Nozzle which can be upgrade on the P1S. The only thing different is the Bed temp is limited to 110 and no LIDAR.
The X1C is a click and go machine requiring little to no user meddling as far as bed leveling goes. Profiles built-in are OK and you can get community tuned profiles for many different filaments that work even better.
The AMS was the winning factor for me. The purge/pooping can be tuned to produce as little waste as possible. That is the nature of the AMS on Bambu, this is no different then the MMU on the Prusa. The AMS can act as drybox. The downsides of the AMS being you can’t really run non-bambu abrasives and TPU. Certain spools don’t fit in the stock AMS tray, but there is a printed mod called the Hydra Pro that lets you fit bigger spools.
Obviously, the closed vs open source debate is a matter of preference, and if you don’t care about that this is a not really concern or a point to mention. I wish I researched this matter more carefully before I bought it and tried to connect it to Octoprint (no usb port). Also there is no Ethernet, only 2.4 ghz wifi. X1E has Ethernet, but that thing is a scam for businesses and schools requiring Ethernet.
You can run the Bambu in LAN mode which means no cloud is involved at all and you can send your print jobs to the printer from the slicer. The only downsides is losing mobile app access, and you MUST connect the device to the cloud to get firmware update, which you can bring back to LAN mode afterwards.
The bambu is a much faster printer even on the stock hotend, you can upgrade to a CHT clone hotend or the E3D nozzle to push even further flow rates. The hardware is fully capable of running at about 35-ish mm^3 before the 45W heater can’t keep up.
The biggest complaint about the printer was how loud the stepper motors were and now that P1 series get the active motor noise cancelling, it is very silent. The fan noises are the same since you need more cooling when going faster. I print ASA/PETG/PC on this printer so they don’t need much cooling at all and runs practically silent. You can always print slower on PLA and reduce the fan speeds.
Get the printer for you needs. MK4 would have prob been fine for me too if I didn’t want to wait months for it. I am building Voron Trident to fill my needs for a bigger print bed.
Edit: I forgot to mention the repairability of the printer. CoreXY machines are more complicated then bed-slingers. Most parts are replaceable on the X1/P1 with OK documentation. The XY Gantry is a single piece. The front idlers are PERMANENTLY glued. Repairing the printer is a more of a hassle on the Bambu due to how it is was constructed. I think Prusa wins in this category.
If you are looking for an opinion on the MK4, I’ve had one since August.
The printer itself is fantastic, but I have gripes.
The auto bed leveling isn’t perfect, it tried to destroy my print bed at least once. But with new firmware it hasn’t happened since.
The swappable nozzles are great but way too fiddly to remove. Love how clean the process is though.
GUI and interface as a little slow. Wished they gave it more power, or less to draw.
Bed leveling can leave drops of filament on the bed.
But all of this is just gripes. I have very happy with my purchase and would buy another if the need arises.
It kinda blows my mind that the bed leveling calibration is still doing that. I have a modified MK3S printer profile setup in Prusa slicer to keep the temperature below the oozing point (usually 180C works) until after the process because of this.
The MK4 touches the nozzle to the bed during probing where the MK3 does not. I do the same with my nozzle temp on the MK3 which I don’t know why Prusa hasn’t just made as standard yet.
Ah, that explains it. Doesn’t it seem weird to you that they would design it that way with such an obvious flaw?
TBH I’m not a huge fan of using the nozzle for probing, but I wouldn’t call it a flaw. It works pretty well as long as the nozzle is clean.
Well I mean, if it’s leaving material behind that affects the first layer I would call that flawed. If not, then no biggie.
The nozzle temp is 170 by default and it does it.
That’s odd. Could be something with the filament maybe?
Just edit your start g-code to use a colder temperature. I don’t have a Mk4, just a mk3s+. I use a temperature of 160C for the start routine to prevent any dribbles from happening.
I would personally never buy a Bambu printer due to their closed source products and questionable cloud software design decisions. Plus the AMS is just irresponsibly stupid with the amount of filament waste it generates. Printing in multiple materials for pragmatic purposes is one thing… Assemblies with two types of plastic, dissolvable supports, that kind of stuff. But if you need your model to be multicolored, just friggin’ paint it without spending more material on waste than made it into the model.
And if you don’t want to overpay for a Prusa, check out the current gen 3 Qidi machines. I know I keep harping on them and I have no affiliation other than owning two myself (that I bought with my own money) but it has Bambu-like CoreXY performance at a fraction of the cost and the firmware is technically open source, running a modified version of Klipper.
The X-Plus 3 is comparable in raw performance with the Bambu P1S (minus the AMS capability) but is just shy of $100 cheaper, and has a build volume a couple of millimeters larger.
How do you like the Qidi? Sorry I’ve been neglecting this group for a while if you’ve been “harping” on them… I saw a couple reviews and they looked interesting
So far so good.
I have two, an “old” original generation X-Plus and a new X-Max 3. I missed out on the 2nd generation.
The X-Max 3 is: enormous, heavy, very capable, and very fast.
It has a couple of things about it I don’t like, but they’re not the end of the world. For instance, it comes with a filament feeding dry box, but the location where it mounts to the printer is astoundingly stupid (on the back, where you can’t easily access it to change filaments). I just feed it from a heated filament dryer box off to the side, connected with about 10" of Capricorn tubing instead. It came with a dumb build plate that’s textured the same on both sides, so I had to buy a flat sided build plate for it. Other than that it needed nothing out of the box except to set the Z offset and let it run its little initialization song-and-dance, and to put filament in it. Oh, and it didn’t come with the internal camera even though Qidi makes one purpose built for it, which is only $40. Seems to me it wouldn’t have broken the bank for them to include that in the box.
Apparently the first batch of the generation 3 models had plastic baseplates and some cooling design issues that caused problems, but Qidi figured it out pretty quickly and rectified these. Going so far as, I understand, sending some owners entirely new printers.
I wrote a whole long post about my X-Max 3 in this community not too long ago. It probably hasn’t fallen off the first page yet.
My old X-Plus was a workhorse and printed many silly things for me. It still works flawlessly and has eaten no parts other than a few nozzles. I still have it, but I put the new printer in its spot and I haven’t figured out what to do with the smaller, older, slower printer yet.
I’d go with the P1S. What are you really getting from the Prusa for $1200? A bed slinger with old stepper drivers that just barely got an upgrade from their old 8-bit control boards. Prusa made sense 4-5 years ago, but at their current price point, they’re getting beat in features by printers half their price. The P1S CoreXY construction is a major improvement for print speed and quality and its ready to go for AMS if you decide you want it at some point.
I do support the open source and customer service of Prusa, and Printables is my preferred site to find STLs, but at the end of the day their printers are just too damned expensive for what they are and I suspect Prusa is going to have a major wakeup call within the next couple years. Previously, they’d only been competing against stripped down Chinese copycats but now they have some serious competition that makes them nearly irrelevant.
Yep definitely agree with all of this here, my friends and I have been saying the same things about Prusa too, they need to innovate or drop their prices in 2024.
I am also a big oss supporter but the user experience of the Bambu ecosystem is really great, lately it has basically become the same argument as iPhone vs Android.
To sum it up, I usually tell people that while both work, if your interest in the hobby is in the things that come off the printer then get a Bambu, if your interest is in tinkering and optimizing the printer then get a Prusa or something.
I have a mk3s that is modded and an X1C and I always reach for the X1 because prints basically always work in any material without changing settings beyond infill/strength etc, I don’t even calibrate anything on it anymore, their auto calibrate function is extremely good and I have used it with PLA,PETG,ASA,ABS, PA/Nylon, PC, PLA/PETG/PA-CF, PLA+wood, and even TPU. The Prusa does well but it is definitely more finicky but I’m definitely a core-xy convert now so my next printer will be a core-xy because the accuracy is so much better for tall and square objects especially.
My Mk4 is great. Orders of magnitude better than my Mk3. I hate lazily stolen or copied tech. I also hate always online devices. And I do not trust China or Chinese companies with literally any data. So supporting Prusa is a very easy decision for me.
I’m the same way. All my smart devices are on their own VLAN with no WAN access (egress or ingress). Does Bambu require that?
Yeah… Bambu is required to be connected to the internet. You interact with the printer via their cloud service.
Ahahahah. That’s hilarious 😂. Well that makes the choice easy, thanks.
Bambu is required to be connected to the internet
There is a LAN mode.
https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/knowledge-sharing/enable-lan-mode
From what I’ve seen the Bambu might do better prints - but having started 3d printing with a Flashforge printer a few years ago with the main issues I had related to their closed source slicer and some problems with spare parts I’d never buy into a closed ecosystem again. And Flashforge was doing variants of open designs, so you still could put in more effort to rebuild parts to non-Flashforge-components on issues - no such luck on the Bambu.
The biggest difference between the two is CoreXY vs CoreXZ. CoreXZ printers like Prusa MK4 are useless in my opinion. Constant bed side to side movement causes your model to vibrate and this vibration amplitude increases with every layer. That means you either have to print everything very slowly or limit yourself to very short models. You’re also missing out on cooling performance.
If you’re looking for an actual upgrade, I’d recommend looking away from bed slingers. Please note that I’m not saying that you should buy any Bambu products, just don’t buy bed slingers.
Having finally seen a Prusa in action, I would have to say they’re both great printers (I have a p1p that I upgraded to a p1s). I understand the arguments against Bambu, but honestly if you’re not printing anything overtly illegal or truly creating things you plan on copyrighting, you’re fine, and if you are that paranoid, you can remove the tape behind the front faceplate and simply unplug the wifi antenna and just print from the SD card, just save in .3mf
Think of the two as Android (Prusa) vs Apple (Bambu). Both will do the job just fine, just depends on which ecosystem you prefer.
Both are capable, but the biggest difference is open source (Prusa) vs Closed source (Bambu).
I much prefer the open source projects over proprietary projects, so the Prusa is a no brainer for me. But if that is not something that matters, then both are solid options.
Firmware is closed, yes. Bambu’s slicer is just a skinned version of Prusaslicer though. Which, tbh, is kind of scummy lol.
At some point I’ll take the Voron plunge, but for now I’ll just watch my p1s shake all over the place on its silly rubber feet 😂
Voron seems to be a project in itself haha.
I know that bambu slicer is a reskin of prusa slicer, but it feels a bit janky.
We have a bambu p1p at work and it’s a good machine, but I am not a fan of closed machines because you depend on the manufacturer to get the part to service your machine.
At least with a prusa I know I can find parts from other suppliers if needed
I think it’s “Ze German” in me that wants to build a printer from scratch lol. That, and 350x350 core xy sounds like fun. I need to have at least three unfinished projects going at once to feel sane 🤣
