The next six to twelve months are going to be rough for some companies but we're going to have some incredibly powerful, cost effective, and user friendly machines when it's done.
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.)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Can you add any color about why you chose Prusa, and how you view them within the broader market? Are they the Honda CRV of the 3D printer world?
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.
Their new printer features seem to match pretty closely with Prusa updates. Looks like the innovation is heavily based on reverse engineering here.
I have a few Bambu lab printers (perks of being a grad student) and their offline mode is pretty good - there are printers in my lab that are pretty much never connected to internet and print 24/7.
Sure, offline mode doesn't have all the features they mention on their website, but even without it, Bambu lab printers are better than their competition by a HUGE margin. I've had all kinds of printers before, including Prusa. Nothing comes close to Bambu lab ones in terms of no non sense printing and cost.
Sure, their components aren't open source, but official spares are cheap enough. And they promised to keep them cheap enough. Sure, they can change their word, and guess what? The printer would have made it's money's worth (for personal or commerical use) by the time that happens. You can throw away the printer by that point and you'd have net positive gain.
Bambu lab is going to do what DJI did to drones. Period. Every kid is gonna have a 3D printer, every influencer is going to make a 3D printer is cool post, and lots of Christmas gifts are going to be Bambu 3D printers. Bambu lab is former DJI folks - no wonder their product strategy and in some way design language is so close to DJI.
I’ve been burned so many times by other products that I think my wariness is more than justified.
And I’m not alone, which is why this is “classic”.
(But the pricing is really good. I think I’ll wait and see a bit more)
I hate what a pain it is to just get straight lines to print on my 3D printer! It shouldn’t be this hard.
Granted, hopefully a swing towards Bamboo will put pressure on the other players in the market and they’ll up their game so that all the non-enthusiasts who just want to print can select from a variety of products.
But here we have a piece of hardware that was essentially open source where you owned the hardware and could repair it easily, and turns out, no one ever really gave a shit. Not really. You never wanted that. You wanted the Chinese clone that took the ideas, lowered the price and added cloud shit.
I hope to god influencers don’t take up 3D printing. Fuck sakes. 3D printing is a cool way to bring your ideas to life. Not for influencers to waste plastic on shitty trinkets.
1. Bambu has a lot of innovative hardware pieces that aren't in say Prusa - I wouldn't call it Chinese clone that took the ideas. Bambu is not one of those Prusa clones, let's get that straight.
2. Yup, I appreciate lower price and features that make it easy to use. Yup I appreciate minimal setup time and faster/consistent prints. I am not a 3D printing enthusiast - I am a user, like millions of other 'normal' people in the world. Somehow folks on hackernews always discount this.
No one ever really gave a shit precisely because it was expensive and hard to use - Bambu is fixing both of those things. I've seen people who did 3D printing full time, who had Prusa farms and extensive knowledge of repairing them completely give up Prusas and switch to Bambu. Bambu seems to be a better product for a lot of audience.
I don't see anything wrong with influencers taking up 3D printing - they have the reach and I'd love to see 3D printers in the hands of more people. What makes you think influencers/people wouldn't use 3D printers to bring their ideas to life? That's precisely why I want 3D printers to be more accessible (both in terms of usability and cost).
I’m not an enthusiast either, I wanted to produce my own CAD designs. And I understand not wanting to tinker with the printer. I also don’t care about that shit. But I also appreciated that I could just order parts from where ever or even print my own upgrades. I also agree that any decent printer before the Bambuu was expensive. Bambuu really punches above it’s price point.
But a lot of a printer isn’t something complicated and super fiddly that can’t be user repaired. And this style of printer started off as an open source project with maximum right to repair. But at this point, I’m convinced, that if an open source printer with absolute feature parity was released, it would fail. They would never compete on price. Ownership of your device never mattered.
In a sense Prusa are already proving this: they're not really competing on price, and they can't build printers fast enough to satisfy demand.
Not having to fuck around to assemble and use your printer.
I had the spare time and patience to maintain my printer during my university years - but now I really just want something that works out of the box, all the time, every time.
I love open-source hardware, but only in places where having to maintain it myself isn’t burdensome - and unfortunately, I’ve always treated my printer as more of a tool than as a hobby.
Prusas and Lulzbot work great out of the box. They are expensive though.
I'd feel dirty having to upload my designs to the cloud first.
[1] it was much worse a few months ago, but an incident where a cloud outage resulted in a lot of damaged printers (when jobs were erroneously resent after they completed without a re-leveling) seems to have motivated fixing many of the remaining gaps with local operation.
I love Prusa but they were caught sleeping at the wheel, they stopped innovating until bambu labs woke them up.
I completely understand why people hate Bambu Lab, but I wish they'd understand why other people like them. If you want a new hobby, there are lots of excellent FDM printers on the market. If you just want to print good parts, you'd be a fool to buy anything other than a Bambu. There's just nothing else that will reliably produce dimensionally accurate parts out of the box and for thousands of hours afterwards, with absolutely no tinkering or troubleshooting.
If I have to schlep an SD card back-and-forth from my laptop to my printer, that’s a crap experience.
And for them to block local network uploading—and force you to make an account for that feature—sorry, that is a classic dark pattern.
It has a cool video camera built in. But oops!, it can only send a video to our servers, not to you.
When companies employ dark patterns like these, it is a signal that I no longer ignore.
EDIT:
I forgot:
> but I wish they'd understand why other people like them.
Yeah I get it. Given how many people I’ve seen using these printers rave about them, I do understand how leaps in speed and quality make it worth it. I’m not in as great a need for that personally. But I get it.
I own BambuLab and make use of their LAN feature all the time. The camera stream works without account and cloud access (albeit, they recently added that!), so does uploading g-code through the LAN without any account. You _just_ install BambuStudio, connect to the printer with a code shown on it and assuming you're in the same network - it just works. No account or any cloud needed for that.
> and assuming you're in the same network
to make it go across subnets you just need to send the announcement packet yourself. It's a pretty easy hack, but it's kind of embarrassing for the manufacturer that their own software won't let you type in an IP address.
That's why they made this cloud enabled software, you should use that.
You hypothetically have to sneakernet it because you refuse to embrace new tech.
Ultimately 3d printers are like washing machines or vacuums. They're not a lifetime purchase. But it, use it for 4 years while it's up to date and has support, etc. Then when it doesn't, buy a new one.
It's like the people that worry about parts availability for 10 years from now when they buy a Camry. As long as you buy a Camry not a Jaguar, you will be able to buy parts.
Useful in what respect?
You actually have two different options aside from cloud - completely offline with SD-Card (which is what you get in ... almost all the other 3d printers?) and partially offline (I.e. via LAN) where you upload the g-code locally without passing it to the cloud.
Look, I'm not trying to be a shill for BambuLab, but it just feels like people are making their opinion based on what they read at a glance without actually getting into details or even being able to confirm it themselves.
Personally I believe they just enable less technical folks to actually make use of their printers and not be totally confused at variety different methods and learning about all the Linux stuff just to be able to get something basic as making it possible to see the print without standing next to it. I totally understand why The Cloud is perceived as an evil, but I think there is false dichotomy here where it's either everything or nothing. Looking at Bambu's team actions I truly believe they are at least _trying_ to provide to different kind of audiences (i.e. their LAN feature)
[0] https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/releases/tag/v01.07....
It just doesn't seem worth the lock-in risk to me. I will continue to buy printers from Prusa, even though they have zero interest in managing the supply chain. (Still have to import them from Europe, even though they bought a US-based retailer? Weird stuff. But I like them so I will give them a large benefit of the doubt.)
It's just like ink jet printers, you say this will be a problem but it just won't, the community will solve it for you.
Here us a good thread on the whole thing:
This sentence from your link…
> Since we don't know how Bambulab will react on this guide and the general reverse engineering of the tags: Please don't share you tag's UID and the related keys for now.
…means the answer is “no”. That the RFID system is meant to drive sales of their own inkjet cartri—er, I meant filament spools.
People have hacked the Keurig 2 coffee pod system, people have reverse-engineered Lexmark’s toner control system. Neither of those initiatives made me a more likely to purchase from Keurig or from Lexmark.
That sentence means, we (the hackers) have no idea what BambuLab (the company that makes this printer) is going to do in the future, so please don't do things that would help them make it harder for us to hack these RFIDs in the future.
Yes, but what ink jet printer did you buy?
In this case, this printer prints 4x as fast with 2x the quality of all the competitors on the market. Would you then still not buy it based in this theoretical, hypothetical, future con?
If the RFID system was truly meant to improve the user experience, Bambu would offer it to other filament producers to make it a standard, and really make it useful to the user.
I gave up on consumer inkjet printers because they all seem to be wildly expensive on the consumables. I have a Brother laser now that is still using the same toner it came with 10 years ago. I do not have an account with brother.com.
I know this printer is bad-ass, technically. If that was something I needed to optimize for, I would probably hold my nose and get one. I might actually still do that!
But for now, my existing Monoprice printer still works, and it respects me as a user.
I have one you do not need the rfid to load filament.
There is a hole on the back of the printer, you put filament in it just like any other printer and then tell it what you have.
It doesn't even have a rfid reader back there.
That's in the case you don't want to use the AMS. If you do want to use the AMS it's similar. Open AMS, put filament in, push it into hole, select what filament it is on the touchscreen. If the filament happens to have an rfid tag, you don't need to do the last step. That's all.
I have 4 bambu labs rfid enabled spools loaded now, 4 spools from matter hackers without rfid in my second AMS right now, works great.
You know what would make it even better? If those RFID tags were available to filament makers. This would improve the user experience.
Just a side note, but Apple is actually the "beige box" here, because you can only get it in one color and one design. You can build a DIY PC in lots of different form factors and colors.
Top of class hardware tech, great design, almost too good to be true pricing, software is a bit weird and has some "weirdness".
With multi filaments, all the tuning wizardry, and the quick-change nozzle, I might consider this.
The big thing that gives me pause is the closed nature of the platform. My current printer might be "just commodity parts" or whatever, but that can be huge plus! This feels very much like deciding whether to join the Apple Ecosystem™ or to stick with a beige box so I can run whatever OS I want. And that isn't an easy choice to make these days.