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 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.