Hi there,
I’m considering upgrading my old ender 3 and it looks like the prusa MK4 or bambu labs p1s are the current best options out there.
I like the bambu labs for the fast print speed and x/y print bed. I also love the idea of the AMS - it would be awesome to print in colour! But being closed source puts me off a bit as I currently use octopeint and obico to monitor my ender 3 which, as far as I can tell, Is not possible to use with bambu labs. Also having to upload gcode to the cloud is not ideal.
The prusa however is great because of the open source nature. However the slinger bed and slower prints are putting me off. I have also read that the mmu can be temperamental at best, so printing colour may not be an option?
Any thoughts/recommendations?
Thanks
Gonna “both sides” this one…
I’ve never used a prusa printer, but know two people that swear by them. I know 2 with P1P’s (including me)and one with an X1C. I can attest that it’s a great printer.
Now, the open source nature of the Prusia is the clear winner in the privacy arena, but ask yourself if the rest of your network/hardware is as locked down as you want your printer to be? I’d be willing to bet a surprising number of people who tout this as their number one concern about BambuLabs printers are using Windows.
Also, you can print just fine using other slicers and dropping your files on an SD card, never having to connect your printer to the internet at all with the Bambu printers. But they do sort of lead you down the networked path without expressly telling you that it will work offline.
Not going to get into specs, price or any of that shit, just saying both printers are great and more than capable of what the majority of FDM users want from their machines. I’d love to go Voron all the way, bit I do not have the time to commit to the building/calibration or testing.
Tl;dr… this doesn’t need to turn into a bloods vs crips argument about which printer is better
I means … There is no official release of the bambulab slicer available for linux so yeah ! People using a bambulab are probably using windows.
I use Manjaro and the unofficial Bambulabs slicer works fine, only things not working for me is the live view and remote access of the SD card. Neither bugs me since the printer sits right next to my desktop, but I could see those as negatives for some people
Edit: for clarity
I was in the same position two months ago and decided to go with the Prusa MK4 kit with the enclosure. So far I’m happy with my purchase. The deciding factor for me was lastly the loudness of the device because I wanted to use the printer in my apartment. Reviews said that the printer is relatively quiet and I can confirm that. If the door to my “printer room” is closed I’m not able to hear it.
Some points about the MK4:
Positives:
- It prints very fast with the new Input Shaper firmware
- I can control the printer via LAN and WiFi (or print directly from a USB drive)
- Excellent print quality
- Open Source and spare parts are avaiable for a long time
Negatives:
- Maintenance is complicated after installing the printer in the enclosure. You can only access the printer through the front door which makes reaching the sides of the printer difficult and removing the printer from the enclosure is not easy as well because you first have to disassemble the display unit.
I dont’ have access to a Bambulab printer so I’m not able to compare both the Prusa MK4 and the Bambulab P1S. Nevertheless, I’m happy with my printer and can recommend it.
Sorry, I was in a rush earlier and would have forgotten to post at all. .
Take a look at the WUXN printer Comes fully assembled and ready to go I prefer Open platforms They are far easier to get parts or get fixed when needed There is also the massive amount of waste that Bambu Lab printers make out of their poop shoot to print color
I think it depends how much you care about the FOSS credentials of Prusa - in terms of printer ease of use, quality, features, I think you’d have to go PS2. AMS by itself is real deal winner, even if you don’t do mmu printing.
ile now, it’s clear to me that Prusa sat on its hands for too long. The P1S is fantastic, involves virtually no setup, and gives me out-of-the-box prints better than my MK3S ever gave me even after months of fine tuning. I can’t imagine a world where Bambu doesn’t significantly erode Prusa’s market share.
Came here to second this, I run a print farm of primarily MK3’s and MK4’s and have recently added a P1S due to my MMU’s all dying at the same time (not that they were worth much of a damn before then), the P1S “Just works” and beautifully I might add. I switched over all my multicolor prints to the P1S and have been impressed with better results than with those in the MK3+MMU2S environment. I’m also really starting to like the app and connectivity of the machine. Considering the price of the P1S with the AMS being <= than a MK4 Let alone with the MMU add on, I’d say go for it.
The thing that gets me is that the P1s is SIGNIFICANTLY louder than the MK4 according to everyone who has a prusa and got a p1s.
That is definitely a big concern for me personally. I don’t know if a voron can be built to be very quiet, but it is always something that prusa did very well.
My 2.4 voron’s motors and drivers are pretty quiet. The electronics bay fans I initially built it with not so much. Those fans are now noctuas, which move more than enough air for this type of application and are very quiet. I recently added bed fans (well, really an under bed filter) and they’re a little louder but still not that bad. I work from home 3-4 days a week with the printer about 12 feet behind me. I spend most of my days on meetings and no one has ever mentioned printer noise, but someone will occasionally comment on the print head moving around.
I’ve never owned a Prusa, but my old i3 clone was way louder.
Trinamic silent stepper drivers make a world of difference. On my printer I swapped the main board for one with silent drivers. Identical hardware as before, 1/10th the noise.
I never believed people before when I read how much of a difference it made. But I’m so glad I did it now.
Noctua fans are also a world of difference.
