Why stay with prusa?  

RE: Why stay with prusa?

I can understand your concerns.

If you were to say that it's all about the money, I could counter that Chinese products are always cheaper.

There are also still Prusa printers that can technically compete with Bambu's flagships. However, these are also in a completely different price league.

I have also already played with the idea of bringing the competition into my home.

What is currently holding me back from doing so are several factors:

Product lifecycle: While I can demand extremely long lifespans from my Prusa devices and still find spare parts and installation instructions many years after purchase, I am dependent on the goodwill of Bambu support. If parts for the previous year's model are no longer offered, the printer can more or less be thrown away.

Support: Good support costs money, good support cannot be bought

Ecosystem: Bambu printers work wonderfully and "out-of-the-box", but they are also tailored to their own ecosystem. If this closes, you lose many amenities. If there are tensions between countries, some services could be closed.

If you choose a different supplier for the filaments, you lose amenities again. Even if I see many advantages in reading out the RFIDs of filament spools, which Prusa could certainly also make use of, it would be a small matter for a closed-source company to restrict this reading of tags in the future. I don't want to accuse anyone of anything here, but the possibility exists and is already being used by other manufacturers.

Community: While the Prusa community is characterized by being very helpful and wanting to advance the whole thing, the Bambu community regularly and exclusively strikes me as negative. There are supposedly no better printers or alternatives there, every other printer brand has lost its right to exist. Other techniques are always worse. Everything that is not related to Bambu is systematically made bad. There is currently NOTHING that could motivate me to identify with such a community!

RE: Why stay with prusa?

My first printer was a Prusa Mini. I ordered it the day after they were announced so it's one of the originals. It still runs great and I have no intention of getting rid of it. Two years ago I bought an MK3S+ kit. I was never able to get the bed completely level so I'm constantly changing the Z depending on where I print on the plate. Otherwise I like the printer. A year ago I bought a Bambu Lab P1P after reading all the great reviews. This printer quickly became my favorite and still is today. Later I bought an AMS unit for it. I recently bought a Bambu Lab A1 mini with an AMS lite. What a great little printer. If I need another printer someday I'm pretty sure it won't be a Prusa. If someone were to ask me for a printer recommendation, I'd suggest one from Bambu Lab.

RE: Why stay with prusa?

I built an MK3S back in 2020 and used it for about three years before selling it and buying an MK4 kit in January. I liked my MK3S but I love my MK4. They basically improved everything that wasn't quite right with the MK3S. My printing needs are fairly simple though. I don't have a MMU and I don't tend to print every day, unless I'm doing a big project.

Before I bought the MK4, I struggled for a couple of months trying to decide between the MK4 and a Bambu Lab P1P. I admit that for me it finally came down to the fear of the unknown. I was concerned about the elevated noise level. It doesn't work with Octoprint (which I use with Prusa). I wasn't sure that I could get it to work on my "guest" WiFi network, and I wasn't about to give it access to my primary LAN. I was worried about support if there was a problem. I didn't like the fact that I couldn't take it apart to fix something if I had to.

The MK4 checks all of the boxes for me, but I'm probably in the minority nowadays.

RE: Why stay with prusa?

I backed the Kickstarter X1C+AMS out of curiosity, but I will never buy another Bambu, no matter how cheap it is. There are many serious problems with the machine which you will never know because any criticism is downvoted or hidden on the forums or Reddit, and large numbers of YouTube and Instagram influencers cannot be expected to be impartial as giving good reviews to sponsors is their source of income. For example, the poor design of the X1/P1 hot end causes the nozzle to be bent after a meaningful amount of usage, through no fault of the user. But you will never know this because support and the community will blame you for using grid infill, or not choosing to do a bed level calibration after EVERY print etc. AMS is notorious for being a pain when trying to remove broken filament stuck after the first stage feeder. But it is your fault for not ensuring it isn't brittle in the first place. You cannot do live Z-offset, which is critical for printing on different build plate substrates or different materials. You cannot print Shore 60A filament without having to do modifications. The extruder gear is weak AF and grinds into a powder. Replacing an extruder motor requires you to remove 30 screws. There's a long list more and I suggest you do your own in-depth research.

RE: Why stay with prusa?

I thank you all for your feedbacks. After a mental breakdown during a MMU3 print, I've purchased  a Bambulab P1S with the AMS, sold my MK3S+ and I have to say, the overall experience of installing the printer is very comfortable. After 30min you're ready to print. 

The first moment of excitement was great. Everything just worked and I was also able to do multicolour print right after installation, without calibration or anything else. A very different experience than with the MMU3 I had. (beside of my very unhappy firewall, but that's my personal issue)
I also really like the auto bed leveling.

I've now printed around 500h with the P1S and have to say, I miss my Prusa and my customized Octoprint.

Why so? Well, if you stick to the Bambu ecosystem also for filaments, you're overall fineish. But I have around 50 spools of other filaments, also 1kg spools which don't fit in the AMS, a lot of carton spools, so I have to respool them. Also the generic print profiles are just not on the quality side I expected them to be and Bambu doesn't care about other vendors filaments in the way Prusa supports them with great print profiles.

And then there is the big one, the support if something happens... I was used to Prusa support, which is absolutely outstanding (I really love you guys)! Any time of the day you could open the chat window and have a greatly trained Prusa professional on the other side and instant assistance. Most of the time, even if it was my fault, I could resolve the issue on the same day, in the same chat session or if anything happend to the hardware it was sent instantly.
On the Bambu side, you create a support ticket and wait... and wait... and wait... then the solution is maybe to reset your printer and nobody knows what happened or what exactly the issue was. The ticket gets closed. In my experience the support case takes around 3-7 days to get an answer or resolve the software issue and if you have a special network setup, your firewall hates the Bambu and my IDS/IPS blocked it in the first moment, but if you want to have the full feature set, you need to stick to the slow and faulty Bambu cloud service.

There are also other topics like the extruder change which is a nightmare compared to my Revo Setup I had, but also to the default nozzle change of the stock Prusa.

So as summary, I still like the hardware, but would not buy a P1S again, mostly because of the company and the software that you need to stick with. If I would need to recommend a Bambu printer, it would be the X1C, because the plus in features should improve the print quality overall.

What should Prusa do, that I purchase again a Prusa? Get rid of the MMU3 and create an AMS like Material changer as Creality also has. This is just the way to go, in my opinion and Prusa has to admit, that they invested on the wrong technology there. And I would love to get a Prusa again! If they create a material changer like the AMS / CFS, I would instantly go for the waiting list. I even don't care so much about the corexy topic, as I was pretty happy with my MK3S+ and I'm not in a hurry, speed doesn't matter this much and I would say, I've managed to get better quality prints, than with the Bambu out of the box.

Why are there not more insights about the Bambu issues that exist? The only thing I can imagine is the Apple like or religious bonding of the users to the product, you have to praise the product and don't denounce the god. Everything is great and if anything isn't great, you shall not talk about it. At least, if I'm asking my colleagues that also have a Bambu, if they had this and this sort of issues, the admit it, "but it's not this bad...". Before the purchase, everything was golden and shiny, like a marketing prospect.

In the end, I just want a printer that prints with great quality with different filaments without a hustle and don't cost 4k like a XL with all options. I'm even thinking about selling the Bambu and try the Creality K2 with CFS, but there again, I'm no fan of the company and also have heard nightmare stories from friends with older Creality setups, spending more time optimizing the printer then printing.

This so far as update to my journey. Maybe I'll write again, when I've got a new setup in a few years 😉