> Just spend some time on the Bambu Labs subreddit and you will see a lot of frustrated owners.
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?
> The idea that someone who is happy with a different product is somehow wrong or losing.
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! :)
Yeah, mea culpa for falling into the trap of ambiguity there. Agree it’s too prevalent and should’ve done better to distance myself from that toxicity.
The problem is going to be what happens when the <thing> needs to be serviced, whether it be a car, boat, lamp, or 3d printer. I'm glad that your experience is good -- as the way it should be with most consumer equipment.
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.
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).
I own 4 printers and looking at adding a 5th. I got my first 3d printer in 2015 because I needed to make things for my quadcopter. That morphed to making things for everyone in my quadcopter racing club. Then it became souvenirs and collectibles for conferences I attend.
My biggest issue is the speed of which my printers print. As printers are getting faster, I won't need as many.
I own replacement parts for every expendable and/or non-warrantied part. I’ve test replaced a bunch to prove it works (engineer mindset, you don’t have a backup unless you know it works).
> (engineer mindset, you don’t have a backup unless you know it works)
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.
> Would the X1 Carbon be better with 4040 aluminum extrusion or their custom sheet metal bent parts?
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.
I guess to some point, my qualms with Bambu are that they haven't been around long enough...
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.
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.