Also, SWP or MWP coffee removes nearly all caffeine unlike the more heavily processed versions.

I have owned a lot of printers over the years, and the only printers I, or any of my colleagues come back to are Prusa printers. They are incredibly reliable. The few times we have had issues with a part, we have been able to print a replacement. I am constantly excited by fancy new printers that all promise to be the next big thing, and stupidly keep buying them.

I will take Prusa's amazing customer support, a product I know I will be able to upgrade when they release the next iteration, and the company that has the best free software as well (the Bambu is just a forked version of Prusa's slicer).

I have had mine (w/ four total AMS units) for two months now and have over 500hrs of printing so far w/ minimal failed prints. I often print in sport and/or ludicrous too. I own eight other 3D printers of various major brands (including Prusa) and it’s by far and away the best I’ve ever owned. Easily comparable to printers 2-3x more expensive imho.

> It is insanely loud, and it seems unreliable and buggy.

Even with the door open to the room mine is in, I never hear it. Sure, if you’re within 5ft of it, it is a bit loud, but not terribly so, especially if you reduce fan speeds (they have conservative defaults). If you are someone who wants to sleep next to your printer farm, maybe not a good fit, but for any normal person the noise isn’t a concern imho.

> I just canceled my X1-Carbon order.

Your loss! I’m doing the reverse, thinking about buying another one.

This reminds me of an attitude I see in some of these hobby communities. The idea that someone who is happy with a different product is somehow wrong or losing. People are highly invested and identified with their choices. Why not just be ok with choices other people make, even if we disagree with them?

Actually, it wasn’t really that I thought they were wrong/losing, it was more a response to the virtue signaling on GP. Nobody cares they canceled their order because they read some words from random people on the internet. Honestly, nobody should care I’m happy with my purchase either! :)

No matter the context, polarization will always happen, and is sometimes fueled on purpose to turn opinionated users into religiously hooked fans.

...and BTW, Amiga crushes the ST any day:^)

But this comes down to basic dogfooding. Prusa dogfoods their stuff. Bambu AFAICT doesn't. Are any of the parts on the Bambu 3D printed or is everything metal and injection molded with plastic? Serious failures are going to happen at the 1/2/3 year mark.

I really don't know that answer for bambu. I do know the answer for Prusa.

I also know because Prusa open sources their designs, E3D had a platform to sell their REVO nozzles.

What do you use 9 3D printers for?

I’m probably going to start pairing that back, in fairness, and sell off 3 or 4 Creality printers in the near future. The reason they were useful is they were decently reliable and “good enough” and the multiples of the same were to run jobs in parallel. With the massive speed up from the Bambu Lab X1 and the better likelihood of a consistent print experience, I don’t need to have as many parallel prototyping runs. The other remaining printers have characteristics that make them worth keeping (huge print beds, different tech as in SLA resin, or simply sentimental value).

My biggest issue is the speed of which my printers print. As printers are getting faster, I won't need as many.

I appreciate this. I have seen though, particularly in the used car parts market, where parts are often unobtanium. Would the X1 Carbon be better with 4040 aluminum extrusion or their custom sheet metal bent parts?

The Mk4 still has the large metal frame. I wish they would move that to 4040 or some other available, easy to source material.

Maybe, maybe not, but is that something you ever have needed to replace? I've had 3D printers for around 10ish years now and even with multiple moves with careless movers I've never once had an issue where I needed to replace a frame component. Extruders, Gears, PTFE Tubes, Hotends, belts, wires, motherboards, PSUs, fans, etc yes, but frame? nope. I even had a Creality CR-6 SE which endured a rollover camper accident which was a total loss for RV and pull vehicle and the printer survived without a hitch and still prints great (happy to share a photo in private to illustrate how bad that accident really was, reach out if interested).

The only two parts listed above in the things I've replaced which I don't have spare parts for are the motherboard and the PSU with X1 Carbon. I'm confident that I could get a replacement PSU if they went out of business, but probably not on the motherboard currently. They have sold enough at this point though that I'm guessing someone would step up and create an alternative part.

But at what point, I asked myself, how long does a 3d printer company need to be around before I'll buy from them.

My answer is 3 years for myself. Others might have a different opinion. Further, if they dogfooded their own printers, I would have a change of opinion.

I don't think it takes 3 years. But the Mk4 has 1M hours in Prusa's print farm for Prusa to iterate on.

the other thing is that as a general rule, I don't buy the first model of <thing> when it comes out. I'll wait until v2 or v3 of thing.

With that said, I'm certainly looking forward to what the Bambu labs carbon x1 v3 looks like.

The Mk4 covers most of the distance, but at a price point matching the X1C, and it's only most. Speeding it up is nice, but... pressure advance depends on detailed characteristics of the filament, such as viscosity, which varies from brand to brand and color to color.

The X1 has a lidar, which from experience actually does work as advertised. The Mk4 has... what? Prusament, maybe? I would not be surprised to find you can only get the advertised speed if you use Prusa's precalibrated filament.

Or you can print the calibration lines and do it manually. That does work; it's a ten second eyeballing procedure, simple enough for the X1 to do full auto. But you're really supposed to do that for every startup -- characteristics change as the reel ages, which doesn't even happen evenly across the entire reel -- and nobody does that.

That's not to say that the X1 itself is - just that lidar is imho a gimick.

For PLA it doesn't make a big difference. But when you're printing polycarbonate or PETG, the quality difference is dramatic. Perhaps you have a defective unit?

Thing is, the X1C isn't really for printing PLA. If you only want to do that, you'd get a V400 or a Voron. When I print PC Blend, though, it's... the difference is glaring. This isn't something that needs a lot of testing; with the lidar off, the corners look like semicircles.

Also monotonic top/bottom layers don't fill the full surface, because they have corners on both ends. About like you'd expect, and the difference isn't visible from the outside; external perimeters are always printed slowly anyway.

The X1 also prints ABS perfectly. I should remember to make a Nevermore filter one of these days, so I can take advantage...

In my experience this is true of basically all very niche brand subreddits. People go to those subreddits to complain and/or get help. It isn't a representative sample. The people who are completely happy with their Bambu Labs machines have little incentive to spend time on a 14k user subreddit when they can go instead participant in a 1.7m user subreddit like /r/3DPrinting.

I really have no idea what you’re talking about with regard to it being loud, and I’ve had pretty much zero failed prints (at least not attributable to the printer).

If you are printing with enclosure doors closed printer noise is acceptable - I wouldn't sleep in the same room, but I can work (including taking video calls) with printer running 2.5-3m from me. Carbon filter seems to be working nicely too - my air quality monitor isn't picking much VOOCs or fine particulate.

tl;dr; I've had fewer problems with X1 than with any other printer I owned, including laser and inkjet ones.

The Prusa i3 family may feel a little outdated, but what it lacks in cool marketing features it makes up for in amazing reliability. The thing works every single time I try to print something. The CPU not being able to address 4GB of RAM doesn't really limit what you can print, though the community sure loves to talk about it.

I am very tempted to buy the upgrade kit, but honestly, I'm not sure it's worth it. My filament doesn't jam, I don't use filaments the infrared detector can't see, I'm not in a hurry (so don't need input shaping), and my Z is dialed in. The MK3 is a great printer even in a world where the MK4 exists! I'm waiting for the Prusa XL to start shipping so I can print larger models.

People act like having the power supply die, bed probe not being reliable, not having x axis tensioner are all normal. Just print out a bunch of parts from some randoms to fix.

Also Prusas software are forks too so weird thing to call out bambu for.

Bambu slicer is a fork of Prusa's slicer. Prusa's slicer is a fork of Slic3r. Although perfectly fine it is notable that both Prusa and Bambu make 3d printers while the Slic3r project was just making a slicer.

They've been developing and supporting those forks in house for years, giving back to the community. I don't know about Bambu, but typically other Chinese companies don't really do that.

It is still as fun today as it was back then.

Over 2k active players daily (edit: by active I mean there are over 2k players logged in and playing at any given time). The devs are incredibly active, and there is a lot more to do here than original UO.