I’m looking to buy an intermediate level printer to upgrade from a MK2, and I’m deciding between a P1S vs a MK4.
I have never considered getting anything other than a Prusa, since I’ve had such good experiences using mine, however I heard that recently they’ve switched away from their open source model(?)
That and being made in the EU was the main differentiating factor for me, however I do hear really good things about Bambu printers.
Does anyone have experience with either?
Edit: Found a lot of the information I was looking for here: https://lemmy.world/post/9500502
I’ve been really happy with the MK4 kit I built months ago. While I haven’t seen a Bambu in person, I’m pretty satisfied with the print speed and picked up an 0.6 nozzle in case I really want to print something bigger, faster.
I had seriously considered building a Voron Trident, but have no regrets about my decision to go with Prusa. It’s nice having a machine that didn’t require a bunch of tweaking; it was fun to build the kit but now it’s an appliance I don’t have to mess with; it’s almost like my Brother laser. I hit print, it prints*. (Asterisk because I have to clean the bed sometimes, occasionally I make a poor choice slicing and don’t add a support I needed, etc, but these aren’t printer-specific issues).
As far as bed-slinger vs coreXY, even Bambu recently released a new bed slinger, so I suspect the tradeoff is more complex than just “coreXY is better”. The whole “model flings around” just isn’t a problem I’ve seen in practice; maaaaaybe if you’re building exceptionally tall, thin structures that can’t be oriented properly it could matter but realistically most people are going to mostly print relatively small things. Even fast printers are slow; as soon as you use a printer you’ll realize that huge build volumes are absurd because big prints just take soooooooo loooooong even on fast machines. And there’s either upcoming support or existing support for bed-axis input shaping, since the slicer does know the amount of filament it’s extruding and can tell the firmware how much more the bed weighs as the print proceeds.
I don’t think Bambu printers are an unreasonable choice for people, but I think if Prusa is affordable to someone, their products are still a good choice.