The elefant in the room  

RE: The elefant in the room

This is Nr. 1000 of these discussions - They all lead nowhere - there is no clear statement - this is good and that is bad - you can chase me with the idea of owning a Bambu Lab printer - price and speed are not the factors for me! To each his own! 3D printing is still miles away from a "Rudi carefree product". A lot of experience is still required for dimensionally accurate and stable parts.Let's see where the two companies will be in two years' time ...

Best regards, Clemens

RE: The elefant in the room

Well, you could ask me. I own both. And I've been printing a number of years already...

RE: The elefant in the room

I think you are the only one here having printing experience! 😉

As I said -  take yours and go with Bambu - fine for you, fine for me - hope fine for everybody.

Best regards, Clemens

RE: The elefant in the room

If the price is the primary purchase criterion, I recommend buying products from the Far East.

I personally prefer good support and discussion forum, availability of spare parts and above all "open source".

wbr,

Karl

RE: The elefant in the room

Let me add few of mi toughs here.

A1 is good printer which looking nice and useful. I am just sad that it is a Chinese company behind of it. Not a Czech, German, or American ... Is it important? You may ask. For some like me, yes for most not. It has several reasons why. They took all open source know how developed by many of you and by Prusa and bundled it into a nice package with some extras. They used endless Chinese manufacturing capacity initially build for us (mean west) with our money. Especially via Covid times when EU and USA companies had very limited access to them. Prusa is building machines in EU for EU labor price. They rely on vendors most of them are from Chine. Meanwhile Bambulab just goes over the corner and finds production capacity, direct live communication and short supply routes with rapid feedback. Regulations in EU are much higher and democracy also is coming at some cost. Intellectual property is handled differently in EU , USA and entire free world than in the totalitarian Chinese regime. For me all this matter, that is the reason why I didn't buy any of they product so far. I really don't want to see something like DJI happening again with 3d printers. We had good start in EU especially thanks to Prusa. With great guys like in Prusa community and Prusa itself  it could go very far ... if ... all who can, picks up the challenge and do not let them win ...

Prusa needs to decide what to do. They had clear advantage of several years. It has been clearly wasted 🙁 I worked in Nokia by their last 4 - 5 years. Exactly know how stubborn relentless the leadership was. When they dropper Symbian switched to Windows Phone. Made great phones like Lumia 1040, but it was late, Apple made a huge damage. Nobody believed that a company like Nokia who had the very first smart phone Nokia Communicator 9110i, much before anyone imagined it will die so fast. It should be warning for Prusa too.

This year Bambu Lab made a huge damage especially with A1. You can buy it here in the use directly in Microcenter for $559 without tax. Just walk in a take. There is a super Hype around it. Like it was around iPhone and they won. Even despite the fact that the copy paste was not working with the very first versions. The hype is what Prusa should mitigate at the first place and come with a clearly mass market product if they want. If they won't the name will slowly fade away just like Nokia. It is not too late, however there is no more time to waste.

Actually I ma a very happy owner of a 5 toolhead XL. I love it and looking forward for huge multi material / nozzle prints.

RE: The elefant in the room

The Elephant in the room or in this case the Panda in the room that no one is talking about.

I have a few things people seem to forget about when talking about stuff made in China. Human Rights, IP Theft, Toxic Chemicals ...............

RE: The elefant in the room

The elephant in the room also has a fire potential with a poorly designed AC heat bed cord. Next add poor handling of the situation and no customer support.

RE: The elefant in the room

Heard Bambu is having a FIRE sale on the A1, get them while there hot!!! 

RE: The elefant in the room

So now they can show how to handle such an issue. Video is very informative.

Thanks for sharing,
best regards, Clemens

RE:

If you order an A1, i would wait a bit before they ironed out their fire hazard. (correct me if i'm  wrong but there's recently been a recall for a lot of A1's, no?)

Also, i understand your point but i'm also a big fan of Europe-designed & manufactured tech/products. And i read a lot of reviews before i buy.  Other point; open sourcing is very noble imo and despite me being (next to) dirt poor i didn't mind to spend a little extra for all that.

I also don't know jack sh*t about 3d printing (for now) jet i assembled one (mk4) without a glitch thanks to very good directions / manuals from prusa. 

RE: The elefant in the room

Hahaha. Yep I'll keep the fire extinguisher close. It won't be so bad if my house doesn´t burn though. They are sorry as only oriental know to be truly sorry, and they are giving me 120 € in products while I wait for the spare part they' have prepared. I remember what your great leader Josef gave me when my MMU2 didn´t work. What he gave me was more parts that didn't work (the spool buffer thing) but NEVER AN APOLOGY.

I'm a bit amazed how much bigotry and politics in the enviroment. Even here. It's funny nobody has a problem with DJI drones being chinese, though they are made by the same company. Might it be because they are the best drones in the market?

RE: The elefant in the room

I suppose it was only a matter of time before a Bambu fanboy threw down the race card.

RE: The elefant in the room

Posted by: @clemens-m

So now they can show how to handle such an issue. Video is very informative.

Thanks for sharing,
best regards, Clemens

If you watched the same video as I did, you would know that their response was to tell their pet influencers one thing, while telling the public something else.

RE: The elefant in the room

@Raavhimself

The MMU was never threatening to set your house on fire. The A1 is. Not quite the same isn't it?
That said, Prusa did itself a disserve by being not frank about what the MMU2 is and what it isn't. When it was launched it was the by far cheapest way of getting impressive multicolour abilities on your printer but it was never plug and play, at least not without a good dose of luck. However, for those ready to trouble shoot and calibrate it is actually a pretty reliable machine. 

With the AMS however Bambulab managed to launch a tool that is much closer to plug and play than the MMU2 ever was. I can't comment on the MMU3 but from what I have heard it has come a long way as well by optimizing some critical things, being much easier to get work reliably as well. 

Not sure why you insist on thinking in racist categories, I prefer to judge brands on their merit instead. 

PS: To my knowledge DJI and Bambulab are not the same company, correct me if I am mistaken.

RE: The elefant in the room

Posted by: @raavhimself

Hahaha. Yep I'll keep the fire extinguisher close. It won't be so bad if my house doesn´t burn though. They are sorry as only oriental know to be truly sorry, and they are giving me 120 € in products while I wait for the spare part they' have prepared. I remember what your great leader Josef gave me when my MMU2 didn´t work. What he gave me was more parts that didn't work (the spool buffer thing) but NEVER AN APOLOGY.

I'm a bit amazed how much bigotry and politics in the enviroment. Even here. It's funny nobody has a problem with DJI drones being chinese, though they are made by the same company. Might it be because they are the best drones in the market?

 

Its NOT about race and politics its about Human Rights!!!

In the future you might want to be a little more careful about using words like Bigotry.

RE: The elefant in the room

from the last blog entry, link below:

“I can get the same quality printer for half the price”

We manufacture our printers, filaments and resins directly in our HQ in Prague, Czech Republic, in the heart of the European Union – meaning that there are components that need to be imported from other countries. After the COVID-19 pandemic, we fully realized that being so dependent on faraway suppliers is too risky, so we decided to change things up.

We started finding ways to get components locally and even produce them in-house (printed circuit boards, for example). We’re also looking for more suppliers in the EU and USA – they usually provide higher quality parts. However, they are usually also more expensive and they often have lower manufacturing capacity, which may cause situations like a sudden shortage of important components. Some can be sourced from other suppliers (which takes time), other parts may be so specific that we have no other option but to wait until the supply returns back to normal. Very often, the problem isn’t in the quantity, but in the quality.

It is quite common for a supplier to change some seemingly insignificant manufacturing process and even parts with the same specs suddenly show different results in our tests. This can negatively affect the printer’s performance.

To give you an example: some MK4 printers from the initial batches had stepper motors causing unexpected noise, contradicting our claim about the extremely quiet operation, something our printers are well known for. It was hard to find these noisy motors because they were mixed randomly in different batches. It took our team two weeks to create a special device that could quickly identify them. We used this device to check motors in our factory and also built another one and sent it to our motor supplier. Once we fixed the quality issue, we had to return many motors we already had in our warehouse. This situation has made our production a bit slower and more complicated.

Similar problems happen when a supplier suddenly changes any of the used materials or a step in the manufacturing process. This one case was unusually complex, but similar (although less severe) issues are something that our purchasing and quality departments need to deal with several times a month. Dealing with such problems in the supply chain happens often and can cause unexpected delays, which is why we sometimes inform you of these issues at the last moment.

A dedicated department focuses on the development and upkeep of custom testing machines

From time to time, I see a simple suggestion: “Well, forget the local suppliers, I want my 3D printer and I don’t care where you source your parts.” In light of the problems described above, it’s not a universal solution. You will find parts sourced from China in our printers because some components are manufactured in sufficient quantities only there. And things are more complicated than just finding the supplier. Government subsidies, tax breaks and strategic efforts to dominate the 3D printing industry (similar to what happened in the market of drones, pharmaceuticals, or currently, electric cars) have resulted in such situations as diverting ordered and already paid-for components to Chinese companies.

I’m trying to state the facts with as little emotion as possible. Simply to give you a bit of background on what it means to produce something in the EU. It’s obvious that when you’re choosing between various brands, the questions of “morality” or “fate of the industry” are definitely not anywhere near the top of the priority list. And that’s ok. But as perhaps the last western manufacturer of desktop 3D printers, we have to fight back. Because we believe that in the long run, our approach will pay off for both us and you.

source: https://blog.prusa3d.com/what-it-takes-to-manufacture-3d-printers-in-europe_91532/

RE: The elefant in the room

It should be interesting to see how Bambu handles the future time bomb they created with sending out replacement parts. Hopefully people read the fine print. Do you void the warranty by installing the parts yourself? Are they going to replace a printer after you made a mistake and had an electrical fire? If it was me I would just send it back!!!

RE: The elefant in the room

If that self-repair voids the warranty, this is a PR nightmare in the making, when the first people can't claim warranty for something Bambulab messed up because they repaired another issue themselves that Bamublab had messed up before. If it doesn't it is a nightmare in the making whent he first self-repaired printer catches fire (possibly due to user error, doesn't matter). I am not sure Bambulab has thought this through but maybe I am too paranoid and it will work out for them. We'll see.

RE: The elefant in the room

It is not known which printer (company and model) it was - just to keep in mind it can be dangerous. Today in our local news in Austria:

https://tirol.orf.at/stories/3244310/

Best regards, Clemens