Comment by sottol
3 days ago
My thing with bambu was always that they polished whatever the industry (and hobbyists) had invented and closed it all off, then also innovating on top of that but never giving back unless they _had_ to. Polish and mechanical design are great but corexy kinematics, input-shaping are imo what made the X1 stand out as the fast+good-qual printer when it launched. A lot of what they added on top was then to build a moat.
This may be a controversial take, but imo it would be Bambu to set the industry back by a decade if they "win" and lock up the market. That's clearly their strategy afaict.
Does anyone remember Bambu patenting existing open inventions as their own? I can't seem to find good links anymore (?!) but there's some details here https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5134/8/6/141
If no one else is willing to give a polished experience, they have no one to blame but themselves. My father doesn't want to be a 3d printer expert or filament researcher; he wants to print things in 3d as a hobby. Looking back at the reprap, ultimaker, and prusa — the big boys of the maker-oriented printers that i remember — none of them made any progress on making the hobby more accessible to someone like my dad. Bambu deserves some recognition for that.
I never had any problem with prusa default filament settings and printing is easy with prusalink or usb stick.
Prusa is also pursuing patents (they say it's because of Bambu but lol), and they are not releasing their firmware sources for recent printers.
Bambu did not close the tech they used to make their printers. Others (including Prusa) are making CoreXY and they 100% also benefit from the RnD that Bambu did (either hardware, or the slicer (without which Orca would not exist in its current form)).
Bambu just made better products for cheaper and Josef got mad. But I'm certain that Prusa could compete had they focused on making price-competitive polished printers, and not focus on $5k monster printers for enterprise.