I've heard that Bambus are much better. I have a Raise3D E2 from the Ender era, and it's rock solid. A step up in price, but no finicking. Just works, when new, and now.
I don’t actually think Bambu makes unreliable printers; to the contrary, they are excellent machines that, if anything, are much more reliable on the whole than Creality. But they’re kind of like sports cars, in that their target market is either people who want something fast and flashy and are willing to throw money at any problems to make them go away, or for technical types who want something they can take out on the track and don’t mind wrenching their own machines. The problem is that Bambu printers are marketed and touted as being great for beginners, and while they certainly make it easy to get into 3D printing for nontechnical people, I think most of them will end up ultimately being disappointed at either the lack of customization they allow or amount of time, effort, and money required to diagnose and fix them when something goes wrong.
I've had an MK3S+ for years and even though it's a primitive machine in comparison to the current Bambu hardware I see no reason to upgrade to something else. It just keeps printing whatever I throw at it and the results continue to be very good. In fact, I seem to have better luck with it than the Bambus I sometimes use at various hacker/makerspaces.
If you just look at the numbers (speed, volume, ...) against Bambu hardware they're not as good, but the reliability and simplicity make up for it IMO. The main missing feature is multi-material support, but that's something I'm not really interested in due to how wasteful the current technology is.
But they cost more than Bambu. Most Chinese things tend to cost less than alternatives, for obvious reasons.
Most consumer-level 3D printers are derived from the RepRap project, which was about making a 3D printer that prints 3D printers. So if you want your own printer, find someone who already has one to print the specialized parts for you, add a few standard parts (screws, motors, etc...) and build your own, which you can then use to make 3D printers for others. You can then share designs, improve, etc... Totally in the open source spirit, of course, the software part is similarly open source, usually GPL licenced.
And this spirit is found in most of the consumer-level 3D printing world. With open source firmwares and slicers, easy to modify machines, and standard parts. I think one of the the companies that exemplify this the most is Prusa. They 3D print their printers using their own printers, and open source most for their work.
But then BambuLabs came along, and they have proprietary components, a proprietary firmware and a cloud-based system. Their slicer is open source, they don't really have a choice because it is based on GPL software, but they recently made it harder to use the forked version some people made (namely OrcaSlicer), and they did so via an automatic update. Of course people didn't really appreciate.
But maybe the worst part is that BambuLabs printers are actually really great and popular printers, for an affordable (but not cheap) price. And many people think that from now on, proprietary will become the standard.
If you don't care about that, then BambuLabs printers are maybe the best you can get. If you care, go with Prusa. If you are broke and don't mind getting a new hobby, go for something like an Ender3.
It's where Bambu forked much of their software from, they're equally easy to use after recent updates, very reliable and easy to service.
They also added US-based manufacturing recently, and I think you can get US-made Core ONEs, which given the tariffs may mean they're soon to be cheaper than equivalent Bambus.
Some people will groan that every 3D printing thread must have a Prusa fanboy, but then again the company inspires that attachment also not without reason :-) I've printed for thousands of hours on my MK4(S) and I've had zero issues, and it's pretty great they offer upgrade kits to turn this into their next-newer model.
As a big fan of the company I'm hoping this will make them price-competitive to Bambu (or even considerably cheaper) while the tariffs rage. I'm not a fan of the tariffs, but if it gives a boost to the Core ONE launch, welp ... good for them.
BBL parts are not very expensive and their support is stellar. Of course if they go bankrupt we'll be high and dry.
Prior to my two A1s I spent more time, and more money in parts, mucking about with the printers, modifying and calibrating, tweaking Klipper than getting anything done.
This is the correct answer. A lot of people got used to eating shit. Turns out the 3D printer industry was selling you overpriced garbage. Bambu Labs was too good to be true so people were thinking that there must be a catch and now that there is a barely significant inconvenience, they start dog piling the company as if all hell had started breaking loose.
Now look at reality: everyone is building copycats of bambu lab printers, proving that the 3D printer industry was selling overpriced garbage products, because they knew they could get away with it. What people really wanted is the alternative reality where bambu Labs didn't exist and printers still sucked.
Mostly cheap "garbage" actually. Before BambuLabs, manufacturers competed on price more than anything else, using the Ender3 as a model. BambuLabs printers were considered rather expensive. Kind of an intermediate between semi-professional printers like Ultimakers and Ender3 clones. Even the affordable BambuLabs A1 at its base price is about twice the price of an Ender3.
They did shook things up on the high end though, and this, I think, is a good thing.
It's not magic and faces the same limitations as all other 3D-priters but it's execution is top notch. I can't remember a single instance where I felt the need to change the printer settings in the slicer besides selecting one of the presets.
Our filament purchases went up by at aleast an order of magnitude and new members to our club get the hang of it really quick.y
Buy used Prusa! Their printers are reliable machines, easy to fix or upgrade. I have seen MK3 or even Prusa Mini (which is a newer option) for ~150 EUR. Still great options for anyone who wants to go into this hobby.
I totally don’t trust China from a manufacturing perspective. I think it’s literally an intentional policy of the Chinese government to try to de-industrialize the rest of the world (in particular the West and the US, geopolitical rivals), and this is most clearly seen with how China has dominated drone manufacturing and rare earths mining and (just as important) processing. Rare earths is relevant not because it’s irreplaceable or incredibly rare (they’re not, in spite of the name)but because it’s super easy to see the Chinese govt use access to what would otherwise be a kind of niche mineral group as a geopolitical trade weapon. DJI leveraged corporate espionage and stolen IP of rivals (like Parrot) as a launching platform for absolute dominance of what has become a national security relevant sector. And Bambu Labs was started by former DJI folks, so they’re playing some of the same game. But geopolitical motivations aside, they legitimately HAVE upped the game dramatically, bringing to bear just an insane level of electrical engineering, software, and mechanical design and manufacturing expertise on what was not long ago a hobbyist driven sector, producing machines superior to the industrial Statasys machines at a hobbyist price with an Apple-like polish.
But I do think Prusa has, against all odds, actually kept pace. The Mk4S and XL, and then especially the Core One really are comparable machines that keep most of the core of the open source Prusa ethos (although diminished as Prusa got burned by cheap Chinese clones in the past & now doesn’t open source as much) and far less of the corporate control and surveillance embedded in the IoT-ified Bambu machines. The ONLY non-Chinese company to still make competitive machines.
If I remember what I saw during the day, and from recaps since then, it was only the Bambu Studio slicer (that is a fork of Prusa Slicer), which was provided with review units but without the source code being released yet. The code was released in time for production units. The only violation of the license is if they did not provide the code to reviewers when asked (which may have happened, but is not as clear cut as what their competitors imply)
Also comparing recent printers and the old enders is very unfair, you have to compare with similar current technology
This is the only part I was aware of: I own an A1 Mini and having lots of fun with it. Almost "it just works" (not really there yet, in my opinion, but getting really close).
Thanks for sharing the rest of the background. I was aware about the update (which is optional so far) and wasn't too concerned about it, but I understand why other people may be. I wasn't aware of the "open source", printers printing printers part of the hobby; I'm new to it.
I see my printer as a tool, a means to an end. I already have hobbies I want to use it for, I don't need another hobby of tweaking, configuring, modding, trying different brands of things, etc. My A1 is almost there and requires very little fiddling. "It Just Works". If I were younger, around the same age trying different Linux distros was a viable hobby, maybe I'd try more open source friendly printers, but I simply don't have the time or patience anymore.
I'm nominally against the Chinese company ingesting and reselling everything possible thing but in this case it's more business as usual as the entire market does it - I mean it all originated in reprap with everyone sharing stuff anyway. Only thing is when they try to create a moat (and both Bambu & Prusa are guilty of this).
It would be lovely for the BL printers/AMS to use a colour sensor at the hotend and then you can run a calibration on purges to determine what is an acceptable threshold when transitioning colours and use the absolute minimum purge amount.
For instance: https://github.com/prusa3d/Prusa-Firmware-Buddy/issues/189 (over 5 years old)
I'm not using my AMS much, precisely because I simply cannot stand the waste and the additional print time.