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> If you don't care about business practices and general privacy concerns, Bambu. While I agree, I think it's heavily underselling Bambulab printers in terms o

> If you don't care about business practices and general privacy concerns, Bambu. While I agree, I think it's heavily underselling Bambulab printers in terms of UX and print quality, they are the absolute best in the market and by a mile.

trenchpilgrim 1y ago
I got a Bambu A1 Mini a few weeks ago and it's practically easier than 2D printing. Printed a whole tabletop game that I played with friends, and replacement parts for a gun that held up at the range.
- atonse 1y ago
  Wow I’ve heard about these 3d printed guns mostly in the context of the gun control debate. I can’t wrap my head around “how does plastic stuff withstand the stresses of a bullet?”
  - bluGill 1y ago
    Most of a gun doesn't see that stress. put a barrel on a plastic gun and something metal behind and good enough for most needs.
  - GuB-42 1y ago
    Small caliber, lots of plastic, short lifespan, unreliable. Most serious 3D printed guns have at least a metal barrel. Often, 3D printed guns are just a lower receiver, that is the part you hold in your hand, the parts that actually fire the bullets (barrel, pin, slide, etc...) are bought off the shelf from real gun manufacturers. This is a workaround for some laws that considers gun parts to not be a gun. For example, outside of a gun, a barrel is just a metal pipe and can be traded freely. The part that makes a gun a gun is the lower receiver, and you can 3D print that in plastic and still get good performance. In fact, Glock makes this part in plastic and these are some of the most popular and proven guns in the world.
    - SchemaLoad 1y ago
      I think this is why 3D printed guns have not been an issue in Australia. Since you couldn't easily buy all the metal parts you still need.
      - AngryData 1y ago
        They aren't really an issue anywhere because if someone really wants a legit gun they are not that hard to buy on the blackmarket or even produce yourself. There just isn't much actual demand for 3d printed guns, people do it because its fun and an engineering challenge. If someone can buy a tabletop mill or lathe, or if they are patient with a file, we have 100+ years of well documented and engineered gun designs anyone can copy. Like you are seriously only cutting a couple hundred bucks off the price between buying a 3d printer or a CNC mill and all the CAD files you need for either version are easily accessible online.
        rescbr 1y ago
        Yeah, and while 3D printing a gun is cool and all, you can’t print bullets, so the person who is interested in printing guns is at the intersection of two hobbies: 3D printing and gun ownership. It’s a niche. Everybody else who needs a gun for lawful purposes (i.e. self defense) is simply going to purchase one from a reputable manufacturer.
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    > replacement parts for a gun Perhaps the grip.
  - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
    It wasn't for the parts that go boom, it was custom ergonomic parts for a legally purchased, factory made firearm - the bits of the gun that you hold. Those are under less stress, so with the right filament and infill settings it holds up well enough. And when it starts to crack I can print another for $1 instead of buying one for $30-60. Plus I can change the shape and size to fit me better than an off the shelf part. I had a buddy in high school who did competitive shooting, he did the same thing by carving these parts from wood, now it can be done for a fraction if the cost. Check out Olympic shooting pictures for an idea of the parts I'm talking about.
  - numpad0 1y ago
    Most "ghost guns" use factory made parts for pressure bearing components. US is a rare country that treats only serialized parts as "guns" and don't regulate actual gun parts. This allow Americans to trivially "build guns at home", but easd of actually building guns is extremely exaggerated. Also, there's little in 3D printers that actually makes it easy to build gun parts. It's all cosmetics. Real illegal ghost guns are always made with plumbing supplies.
- brewtide 1y ago
  100%. Same feeling when we got our mini. It's neighbor on the desk is a cricut joy extra! (Or whatever) Which I'm always fighting with, to cut paper, in 2d. Next door,3d items literally being built. No fight. No fuss.
baq 1y ago
+1. Bambu is the difference between 'my hobby is 3d printers' vs 'my hobby is 3d printing'. The damn thing sits in the garage idle for months and then it just prints a whole spool of stuff perfectly without even a drop of oil (which it asked for in between plates, I'll grant it that).
- Symbiote 1y ago
  A Prusa is equally reliable.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 1y ago
    My Prusa has been very reliable over the years. However, it’s not as cheap as the Bambu. It’s going to be hard to justify supporting open source hardware at these prices.
    - SchemaLoad 1y ago
      I had used a Prusa MK3 in the past and had a good experience with it. When I went looking at printers again Prusa was what I assumed I'd get but after looking at Bambulab, their A1 is about 1/4th of the price while being better than the Prusa MK4. It's almost impossible to justify buying their printers today. The issues and concerns about Bambulab seem to be primarily driven by disappointment with how a new company that didn't open source their hardware was able to absolutely steamroll the entire market, rather than actual real issues you as a user will have.
      - imtringued 1y ago
        It's the crab bucket mentality. Before Bambu Lab 99% of the 3D printer offerings were absolute garbage to the point of not being far from being a scam. You get a CoreXY printer with an enclosure and AMS for a really good price and if you buy their filament in bulk, it is not much more expensive than e.g. Sunlu where buying at least 3 spools per order is mandatory to begin with. The only way to beat Bambu Lab is to be better than them at the 3D printer game, but most companies can't do that, so people have become resentful while grasping for straws to find things to criticize. Snapmaker got the message and decided to come out with the Snapmaker U1, the rest can wallow in their "open source" superiority complex to silence critics.
dangus 1y ago
Also, if you aren't Internet-addicted none of the supposed business practices/privacy concerns amount to anything tangible.
- wpm 1y ago
  The only thing I need the internet for to be disgusted by Bambulabs' practices is to learn about their practices in the first place.
  - dangus 1y ago
    I did read up on them when they and I feel like the Internet echo chamber inflated the issues and Bambu basically addressed all of them reasonably well.
    - wpm 1y ago
      Are you talking just about the "Authorization" thing? Or did you read about them abusing Printables to reverse engineer it for their own copy-cat platform?
      - dangus 1y ago
        Both. Scraping a site isn’t illegal or immoral. None of this impacts the customer negatively in any way.
- hollerith 1y ago
  -- if all you care about is yourself and your family.
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - hollerith 1y ago
bb88 1y ago
> UX and print quality GUI and UX are not the same. Prusa has pretty good print quality too but not as good a GUI as the Bambu. UX would include the ability to easily tear down a hot end, replace a nozzle, tighten any belts, and anything else that would affect your ability to print high quality prints. For prusa, since that's the printer I have experience with the most. Replacing the nozzle and clearing filament jams are pretty easy. But tearing down the hot end to remove debris wrapped around the extruder gear was not.
- antirez 1y ago
  What bambulab printers that have the "A1" series nozzle, replacing one is a matter of 3 seconds, just by naked hands. 10x times faster than in the Prusa world (Nextruder included). Being this the single most important thing a printer need from the POV of servicing, this is a huge difference.
  - malfist 1y ago
    How often are you changing nozzles? I can't think I've ever done it except for swapping out the manufacturer supplied brass with a hardened steel after or arrives
    - bb88 1y ago
      I'm not changing out nozzles daily, but I do sometimes make small parts that need the .2mm nozzle. Not for gaming or miniatures, but typically mechanical interfaces where the .2mm nozzle gives a better result. But then for most stuff I use a .6mm high flow nozzle.
      - sho_hn 1y ago
        It's worth noting though that this part of the game is about to change majorly for both brands. Prusa is widely known to launch their next-generation tool changer at Formnext in Nov, which is going to be a concept where you have a rack of nozzle+heatpipe+filament tube tools that the print head grabs and heats up inductively. And Bambu is more or less working on something similar they will probably launch some time next year. This is totally changing the "nozzle swap" equation. It means purge-free and much faster multi-material printing without outright duplicating print heads like the XL does, and the ability to park and mix nozzle sizes as well. It'll be cool to see which company pulls it off better. As someone who was never convinced by either Bambu's shoddy and wasteful AMS or Prusa's ridiculously humongous MMU+Buffer approach, this is the leap I've been waiting for for an upgrade. Edit: Amazing move to downvote a comment that simply and neutrally adds new information to the thread.
randomNumber7 1y ago
I looked at a bambu printer a friend owns and it is pretty high quality engineering. It stands on soft rubber feet so the whole machine has a low natural frequency (similar to the drum of a washing machine). This has the advantage that the high frequency movements of the motors/axes never resonate with the casing. In the beginning it does a lot of tests and seems to also shake the machine to analyse the frequency behaviour.
- brewtide 1y ago
  Watching the tests is fun. First run,.loud. second. Less loud. Third. At worst case 1/2 the original volume. Up through a large tonal range. Your ears can immediately note that it is a nice feature for sure.
sho_hn 1y ago
Prusa generally has better print quality in terms of accuracy and better overhang performance. Prusa drives the slicer development ecosystem (Bambu Studio is a fork), so new production-ready advances typically come from them first, which is lovely to support. The Bambu products are fine. They print well. But the "it's on another level" stuff is mostly paid influencer narratives (a rampant thing in 3D printer YouTube, etc.) that don't really hold up to any professional scrutiny. With advent of EasyPrint etc. arguably Prusa may have also one-upped them on ease of use? Though this isn't first-hand knowledge as I haven't tried it personally.
- syntaxing 1y ago
  I haven’t tried the Prusa XL so I can’t say much about that and I’m a fan how Prusa supports OSHW. But let’s be real, Bambulabs printer are vastly superior. I don’t deny that a lot of “free” and open source work was used to make Bambulab printers today but their printers just work out of the box for less money. I’ve been 3D printing since the reprap days, had cheap printers like Enders, tried Prusa used upto the MKS2. The Bambulab printer feels like a product. All the previous printers I owned or used was more like a hobby. (Minus maybe the Ultimaker 3, that thing was amazing for its time).
  - sho_hn 1y ago
    Truly meant without offense, but I'd say if you haven't had a Prusa since the MK2S (which I think predates Bambulab entire existence?) your opinion is outdated and not really relevant anymore. The out of the box experience between a Bambu printer and a modern Prusa is not noticably different. You'll be onto your first print in 10 minutes with either. Prusa's product history simply goes back longer to when 3D printers were more hobbyist kit. But they've grown up just the same. It's a bit like saying a 2025 Lexus is superior to a 2025 Maybach because Mercedes' first car in 1886 was a rickety afair.
    - bartvk 1y ago
      I've been eyeing 3D printers and since a friend of mine is so happy with the A1 Mini, that's what I was leaning towards to. Is there a Prusa equivalent model of the Bambu A1 Mini?
nebula8804 1y ago
1000% this. I used to "lightly" follow 3D printing when it first started to become cool among hackers a decade or so ago, then I dropped off until 2023 much older and much less tolerant to BS in technology. I went onto Reddit to get their recommendations. To someone completely new who hasn't followed any real developments occurring in the industry, it was confusing but it seemed like the Sovol SV06 was a good "starting point". Well I didn't realize how far behind the industry still was. I thought surely at this point all printers much just be load file -> load filament -> click print. Just like regular printers no? Nope, doing dumb things like using some third party slicer tool, transferring a file to a microsd card manually and then babying the printer for its super slow error prone prints feels like its still a toy not a professional device. Imagine having to do that level of nonsense for your laser printer? Yeah maybe back in the days of "Office Space" but not today! I was in a time crunch so out of desperation I took a gamble and dropped a wad of cash on a Bambu X1C. It is what I consider a professional product for normies in my eyes. Most everything else are just toys. I was ready to say Bambu, Bambu and nothing but Bambu but then I read the user's last few sentences. Seems like he is not really looking for a end to end professional product and so hes got infinite options but for anyone else, its gotta be Bambu!
5bolts 1y ago
i have an x1c sitting next to an elegoo centauri carbon. i rarely use the AMS on the bambu. potential print size is basically the same print quality is the same as far as i can tell.. i use the elegoo more often.

trenchpilgrim 1y ago

I got a Bambu A1 Mini a few weeks ago and it's practically easier than 2D printing. Printed a whole tabletop game that I played with friends, and replacement parts for a gun that held up at the range.

atonse 1y ago
Wow I’ve heard about these 3d printed guns mostly in the context of the gun control debate. I can’t wrap my head around “how does plastic stuff withstand the stresses of a bullet?”
- bluGill 1y ago
  Most of a gun doesn't see that stress. put a barrel on a plastic gun and something metal behind and good enough for most needs.
- GuB-42 1y ago
  Small caliber, lots of plastic, short lifespan, unreliable. Most serious 3D printed guns have at least a metal barrel. Often, 3D printed guns are just a lower receiver, that is the part you hold in your hand, the parts that actually fire the bullets (barrel, pin, slide, etc...) are bought off the shelf from real gun manufacturers. This is a workaround for some laws that considers gun parts to not be a gun. For example, outside of a gun, a barrel is just a metal pipe and can be traded freely. The part that makes a gun a gun is the lower receiver, and you can 3D print that in plastic and still get good performance. In fact, Glock makes this part in plastic and these are some of the most popular and proven guns in the world.
  - SchemaLoad 1y ago
    I think this is why 3D printed guns have not been an issue in Australia. Since you couldn't easily buy all the metal parts you still need.
    - AngryData 1y ago
      They aren't really an issue anywhere because if someone really wants a legit gun they are not that hard to buy on the blackmarket or even produce yourself. There just isn't much actual demand for 3d printed guns, people do it because its fun and an engineering challenge. If someone can buy a tabletop mill or lathe, or if they are patient with a file, we have 100+ years of well documented and engineered gun designs anyone can copy. Like you are seriously only cutting a couple hundred bucks off the price between buying a 3d printer or a CNC mill and all the CAD files you need for either version are easily accessible online.
      - rescbr 1y ago
        Yeah, and while 3D printing a gun is cool and all, you can’t print bullets, so the person who is interested in printing guns is at the intersection of two hobbies: 3D printing and gun ownership. It’s a niche. Everybody else who needs a gun for lawful purposes (i.e. self defense) is simply going to purchase one from a reputable manufacturer.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  > replacement parts for a gun Perhaps the grip.
- trenchpilgrim 1y ago
  It wasn't for the parts that go boom, it was custom ergonomic parts for a legally purchased, factory made firearm - the bits of the gun that you hold. Those are under less stress, so with the right filament and infill settings it holds up well enough. And when it starts to crack I can print another for $1 instead of buying one for $30-60. Plus I can change the shape and size to fit me better than an off the shelf part. I had a buddy in high school who did competitive shooting, he did the same thing by carving these parts from wood, now it can be done for a fraction if the cost. Check out Olympic shooting pictures for an idea of the parts I'm talking about.
- numpad0 1y ago
  Most "ghost guns" use factory made parts for pressure bearing components. US is a rare country that treats only serialized parts as "guns" and don't regulate actual gun parts. This allow Americans to trivially "build guns at home", but easd of actually building guns is extremely exaggerated. Also, there's little in 3D printers that actually makes it easy to build gun parts. It's all cosmetics. Real illegal ghost guns are always made with plumbing supplies.
brewtide 1y ago
100%. Same feeling when we got our mini. It's neighbor on the desk is a cricut joy extra! (Or whatever) Which I'm always fighting with, to cut paper, in 2d. Next door,3d items literally being built. No fight. No fuss.

baq 1y ago

+1. Bambu is the difference between 'my hobby is 3d printers' vs 'my hobby is 3d printing'. The damn thing sits in the garage idle for months and then it just prints a whole spool of stuff perfectly without even a drop of oil (which it asked for in between plates, I'll grant it that).

Symbiote 1y ago
A Prusa is equally reliable.
- 2muchcoffeeman 1y ago
  My Prusa has been very reliable over the years. However, it’s not as cheap as the Bambu. It’s going to be hard to justify supporting open source hardware at these prices.
  - SchemaLoad 1y ago
    I had used a Prusa MK3 in the past and had a good experience with it. When I went looking at printers again Prusa was what I assumed I'd get but after looking at Bambulab, their A1 is about 1/4th of the price while being better than the Prusa MK4. It's almost impossible to justify buying their printers today. The issues and concerns about Bambulab seem to be primarily driven by disappointment with how a new company that didn't open source their hardware was able to absolutely steamroll the entire market, rather than actual real issues you as a user will have.
    - imtringued 1y ago
      It's the crab bucket mentality. Before Bambu Lab 99% of the 3D printer offerings were absolute garbage to the point of not being far from being a scam. You get a CoreXY printer with an enclosure and AMS for a really good price and if you buy their filament in bulk, it is not much more expensive than e.g. Sunlu where buying at least 3 spools per order is mandatory to begin with. The only way to beat Bambu Lab is to be better than them at the 3D printer game, but most companies can't do that, so people have become resentful while grasping for straws to find things to criticize. Snapmaker got the message and decided to come out with the Snapmaker U1, the rest can wallow in their "open source" superiority complex to silence critics.

dangus 1y ago

Also, if you aren't Internet-addicted none of the supposed business practices/privacy concerns amount to anything tangible.

wpm 1y ago
The only thing I need the internet for to be disgusted by Bambulabs' practices is to learn about their practices in the first place.
- dangus 1y ago
  I did read up on them when they and I feel like the Internet echo chamber inflated the issues and Bambu basically addressed all of them reasonably well.
  - wpm 1y ago
    Are you talking just about the "Authorization" thing? Or did you read about them abusing Printables to reverse engineer it for their own copy-cat platform?
    - dangus 1y ago
      Both. Scraping a site isn’t illegal or immoral. None of this impacts the customer negatively in any way.
hollerith 1y ago
-- if all you care about is yourself and your family.
- dotancohen 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - hollerith 1y ago

bb88 1y ago

> UX and print quality GUI and UX are not the same. Prusa has pretty good print quality too but not as good a GUI as the Bambu. UX would include the ability to easily tear down a hot end, replace a nozzle, tighten any belts, and anything else that would affect your ability to print high quality prints. For prusa, since that's the printer I have experience with the most. Replacing the nozzle and clearing filament jams are pretty easy. But tearing down the hot end to remove debris wrapped around the extruder gear was not.

antirez 1y ago
What bambulab printers that have the "A1" series nozzle, replacing one is a matter of 3 seconds, just by naked hands. 10x times faster than in the Prusa world (Nextruder included). Being this the single most important thing a printer need from the POV of servicing, this is a huge difference.
- malfist 1y ago
  How often are you changing nozzles? I can't think I've ever done it except for swapping out the manufacturer supplied brass with a hardened steel after or arrives
  - bb88 1y ago
    I'm not changing out nozzles daily, but I do sometimes make small parts that need the .2mm nozzle. Not for gaming or miniatures, but typically mechanical interfaces where the .2mm nozzle gives a better result. But then for most stuff I use a .6mm high flow nozzle.
    - sho_hn 1y ago
      It's worth noting though that this part of the game is about to change majorly for both brands. Prusa is widely known to launch their next-generation tool changer at Formnext in Nov, which is going to be a concept where you have a rack of nozzle+heatpipe+filament tube tools that the print head grabs and heats up inductively. And Bambu is more or less working on something similar they will probably launch some time next year. This is totally changing the "nozzle swap" equation. It means purge-free and much faster multi-material printing without outright duplicating print heads like the XL does, and the ability to park and mix nozzle sizes as well. It'll be cool to see which company pulls it off better. As someone who was never convinced by either Bambu's shoddy and wasteful AMS or Prusa's ridiculously humongous MMU+Buffer approach, this is the leap I've been waiting for for an upgrade. Edit: Amazing move to downvote a comment that simply and neutrally adds new information to the thread.

randomNumber7 1y ago

I looked at a bambu printer a friend owns and it is pretty high quality engineering. It stands on soft rubber feet so the whole machine has a low natural frequency (similar to the drum of a washing machine). This has the advantage that the high frequency movements of the motors/axes never resonate with the casing. In the beginning it does a lot of tests and seems to also shake the machine to analyse the frequency behaviour.

brewtide 1y ago
Watching the tests is fun. First run,.loud. second. Less loud. Third. At worst case 1/2 the original volume. Up through a large tonal range. Your ears can immediately note that it is a nice feature for sure.

sho_hn 1y ago

Prusa generally has better print quality in terms of accuracy and better overhang performance. Prusa drives the slicer development ecosystem (Bambu Studio is a fork), so new production-ready advances typically come from them first, which is lovely to support. The Bambu products are fine. They print well. But the "it's on another level" stuff is mostly paid influencer narratives (a rampant thing in 3D printer YouTube, etc.) that don't really hold up to any professional scrutiny. With advent of EasyPrint etc. arguably Prusa may have also one-upped them on ease of use? Though this isn't first-hand knowledge as I haven't tried it personally.

syntaxing 1y ago
I haven’t tried the Prusa XL so I can’t say much about that and I’m a fan how Prusa supports OSHW. But let’s be real, Bambulabs printer are vastly superior. I don’t deny that a lot of “free” and open source work was used to make Bambulab printers today but their printers just work out of the box for less money. I’ve been 3D printing since the reprap days, had cheap printers like Enders, tried Prusa used upto the MKS2. The Bambulab printer feels like a product. All the previous printers I owned or used was more like a hobby. (Minus maybe the Ultimaker 3, that thing was amazing for its time).
- sho_hn 1y ago
  Truly meant without offense, but I'd say if you haven't had a Prusa since the MK2S (which I think predates Bambulab entire existence?) your opinion is outdated and not really relevant anymore. The out of the box experience between a Bambu printer and a modern Prusa is not noticably different. You'll be onto your first print in 10 minutes with either. Prusa's product history simply goes back longer to when 3D printers were more hobbyist kit. But they've grown up just the same. It's a bit like saying a 2025 Lexus is superior to a 2025 Maybach because Mercedes' first car in 1886 was a rickety afair.
  - bartvk 1y ago
    I've been eyeing 3D printers and since a friend of mine is so happy with the A1 Mini, that's what I was leaning towards to. Is there a Prusa equivalent model of the Bambu A1 Mini?

nebula8804 1y ago

1000% this. I used to "lightly" follow 3D printing when it first started to become cool among hackers a decade or so ago, then I dropped off until 2023 much older and much less tolerant to BS in technology. I went onto Reddit to get their recommendations. To someone completely new who hasn't followed any real developments occurring in the industry, it was confusing but it seemed like the Sovol SV06 was a good "starting point". Well I didn't realize how far behind the industry still was. I thought surely at this point all printers much just be load file -> load filament -> click print. Just like regular printers no? Nope, doing dumb things like using some third party slicer tool, transferring a file to a microsd card manually and then babying the printer for its super slow error prone prints feels like its still a toy not a professional device. Imagine having to do that level of nonsense for your laser printer? Yeah maybe back in the days of "Office Space" but not today! I was in a time crunch so out of desperation I took a gamble and dropped a wad of cash on a Bambu X1C. It is what I consider a professional product for normies in my eyes. Most everything else are just toys. I was ready to say Bambu, Bambu and nothing but Bambu but then I read the user's last few sentences. Seems like he is not really looking for a end to end professional product and so hes got infinite options but for anyone else, its gotta be Bambu!

5bolts 1y ago

i have an x1c sitting next to an elegoo centauri carbon. i rarely use the AMS on the bambu. potential print size is basically the same print quality is the same as far as i can tell.. i use the elegoo more often.