I follow 3d printing pretty close but can't claim to be an expert. With that said, I truly thought they served different consumer segments with the only overlap being those who bought a Prusa pre-assembled beleving it to be a one stop shop machine. Bambu is a black box from China for an end user with little knowledge or care of maintaining a machine themselves (down to printing replacement parts)
Prior to Bambu, prusa was as close as you could get to “put it together and it’s ready to print” including printer profiles and such. Bambu did this cheaper and better, and much faster, so basically took that entire market from Prusa.
For anyone that wants a printer that “just works”, there’s little reason to choose Prusa over Bambu at this point.
I bought my Prusa before Bambu became popular, and honestly I always see Prusa’s in school's and libraries and feel their main market in the United States is in that higher end role of something that is just fairly reliable and used where organizations want to provide 3d printing where a lot of different users are going to use them.
But I regularly see Bambu winning the reviews and awards these days, and I’m not sure if I would have been aware of Prusa if I were in the market today.
I really would love a multi-tool change core x y, but it’s soooo expensive.
Bambu Labs' quality and feature set is much, much higher and larger than Prusa's, and the price is right. Prusa bet on people wanting to continually fiddle with their 3D printer, but that segment is already niche and likely dying off.
The experience I have on MK4 and X1C are similar, as far as reliability, etc.
There's different annoyances for each; if you calibrate each time X1C is slower to get going. X1C is faster overall on bigger jobs. X1C has weird wifi error-out issues more often. MK4 gets a bit more gunk on the nozzle. X1C wastes more filament. X1C had some issues with retracting filament at first that I printed someone else's bracket design to fix, while MK4 just worked. X1C quality seems slightly better with PLA; MK4 does a slightly better job with PETG.
When wear makes major maintenance necessary, it's going to be easier on MK4.
I follow 3d printing pretty close but can't claim to be an expert. With that said, I truly thought they served different consumer segments with the only overlap being those who bought a Prusa pre-assembled beleving it to be a one stop shop machine. Bambu is a black box from China for an end user with little knowledge or care of maintaining a machine themselves (down to printing replacement parts)
Prior to Bambu, prusa was as close as you could get to “put it together and it’s ready to print” including printer profiles and such. Bambu did this cheaper and better, and much faster, so basically took that entire market from Prusa.
For anyone that wants a printer that “just works”, there’s little reason to choose Prusa over Bambu at this point.
Prusa grew up with the market. Their printers sold very well, that I had to wait for quite awhile for my (MK4) kit to get delivered.
> the only overlap being those who bought a Prusa pre-assembled beleving it to be a one stop shop machine
Thats a surprisingly large segment of the market, though.
Yes I agree, I suppose my point was as soon as Bambu went mainstream that entire Prusa appeal was killed
I bought my Prusa before Bambu became popular, and honestly I always see Prusa’s in school's and libraries and feel their main market in the United States is in that higher end role of something that is just fairly reliable and used where organizations want to provide 3d printing where a lot of different users are going to use them.
But I regularly see Bambu winning the reviews and awards these days, and I’m not sure if I would have been aware of Prusa if I were in the market today.
I really would love a multi-tool change core x y, but it’s soooo expensive.
Bambu Labs' quality and feature set is much, much higher and larger than Prusa's, and the price is right. Prusa bet on people wanting to continually fiddle with their 3D printer, but that segment is already niche and likely dying off.
Most fiddling these days have to do with the printing surface being unclean. I also experienced issues with my X1C too.
But the most common problem is the surface is unclean(on both printers), and my soap to water formulation not being quite dialed in.
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The experience I have on MK4 and X1C are similar, as far as reliability, etc.
There's different annoyances for each; if you calibrate each time X1C is slower to get going. X1C is faster overall on bigger jobs. X1C has weird wifi error-out issues more often. MK4 gets a bit more gunk on the nozzle. X1C wastes more filament. X1C had some issues with retracting filament at first that I printed someone else's bracket design to fix, while MK4 just worked. X1C quality seems slightly better with PLA; MK4 does a slightly better job with PETG.
When wear makes major maintenance necessary, it's going to be easier on MK4.
Bambu didn't killed its open source dream. Prusa did.