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 would personally never buy a Bambu printer due to their closed source products and questionable cloud software design decisions. Plus the AMS is just irresponsibly stupid with the amount of filament waste it generates. Printing in multiple materials for pragmatic purposes is one thing… Assemblies with two types of plastic, dissolvable supports, that kind of stuff. But if you need your model to be multicolored, just friggin’ paint it without spending more material on waste than made it into the model.
And if you don’t want to overpay for a Prusa, check out the current gen 3 Qidi machines. I know I keep harping on them and I have no affiliation other than owning two myself (that I bought with my own money) but it has Bambu-like CoreXY performance at a fraction of the cost and the firmware is technically open source, running a modified version of Klipper.
The X-Plus 3 is comparable in raw performance with the Bambu P1S (minus the AMS capability) but is just shy of $100 cheaper, and has a build volume a couple of millimeters larger.
How do you like the Qidi? Sorry I’ve been neglecting this group for a while if you’ve been “harping” on them… I saw a couple reviews and they looked interesting
So far so good.
I have two, an “old” original generation X-Plus and a new X-Max 3. I missed out on the 2nd generation.
The X-Max 3 is: enormous, heavy, very capable, and very fast.
It has a couple of things about it I don’t like, but they’re not the end of the world. For instance, it comes with a filament feeding dry box, but the location where it mounts to the printer is astoundingly stupid (on the back, where you can’t easily access it to change filaments). I just feed it from a heated filament dryer box off to the side, connected with about 10" of Capricorn tubing instead. It came with a dumb build plate that’s textured the same on both sides, so I had to buy a flat sided build plate for it. Other than that it needed nothing out of the box except to set the Z offset and let it run its little initialization song-and-dance, and to put filament in it. Oh, and it didn’t come with the internal camera even though Qidi makes one purpose built for it, which is only $40. Seems to me it wouldn’t have broken the bank for them to include that in the box.
Apparently the first batch of the generation 3 models had plastic baseplates and some cooling design issues that caused problems, but Qidi figured it out pretty quickly and rectified these. Going so far as, I understand, sending some owners entirely new printers.
I wrote a whole long post about my X-Max 3 in this community not too long ago. It probably hasn’t fallen off the first page yet.
My old X-Plus was a workhorse and printed many silly things for me. It still works flawlessly and has eaten no parts other than a few nozzles. I still have it, but I put the new printer in its spot and I haven’t figured out what to do with the smaller, older, slower printer yet.