Comment by TimMeade | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TimMeade | Hacker News Reader

I think this is missing a little context. I believe Prusa and to some extent the older market leader Creality were sideswiped by a better product.

A group of engineers got together and formed Bambu Labs. Their printer are all less than 2 years on market and they have become the new standard for the simple fact they just work. 3d Printing historically has been "early adopter". I'm long term tech. It took me a month of configuring and tinkering and changing to get me first ender 3 to work about 3 years ago.

I got a Bambu Labs P1P and it just worked. Right out of the box day 1. Beautiful multi color prints. All for less than my Ender 3 S1PRO cost.

I then got the new Creality K1 Max that they meant to compete with Bambu. Now 6 months later it's still not "just works". I have upgraded the Hot End and it has ruined 4 plates do to bad firmware. I am currently waiting on new mother board to fix the current issue. Waiting for 3 weeks as it comes from china. When it does work its very nice. But I have to say that's 50% of the time.

In the meantime I ordered the new Bambu A1 with the AMS Lite. Again it just works. Some issues. But in general it just works. And it's 2/3 the cost of the K1 Max.

Building a great product and doing it cheaper is why everyone is getting Bambu Labs and Not Prusa and a declined Creality market.

IMHO.

Prusa was better positioned than anyone else in the market to do exactly what Bambu did, but actively chose not to out of a combination of stubborness and hubris.

Prusa had an established reputation for relatively low hassle, premium machines.

There legitimately isn't much in the Bambu machines that didn't already exist in some form in the high end hobbyist space. What Bambu did was take the best of what was out there and combine it into a single coherent, easy to use package. And, just as critically, they cost-engineered it for mass production.

Prusa has long resisted anything outside their own ecosystem. They invest crazy amounts of effort into reimplementing and reinventing things because NIH syndrome is deeply engrained into their company culture. They clung to using 8 bit controllers long past their expiration date. They spent years working and reworking their flagship $2000 XL which still isn't widely available and suffers fundamental design flaws that will result in it being slower and producing worse prints than its competitors when it is.

A lot of this is Prusa refusing to move past their hobbyist roots. Their printers are still made largely out of aluminum extrusion and printed parts -- this is a great way for a hobbyist to prototype one-off designs, but it's an abysmal way to mass produce a machine.

Bambu's great innovation is the fact that the machine is largely stamped sheet metal and injection molded parts. This results in a machine that is sturdier, higher quality, and cheaper than the way Prusa insists on doing things. It requires a significant investment in tooling upfront -- this was the great tell that Bambu wasn't some scrappy startup when they launched their Kickstarter; they were easily deep into six if not seven figures in tooling costs before the X1 was ever publicly announced.

Prusa was one of the few players in the industry who had the resources and could have done all of this. They actively chose not to. They were stagnant and seemed to think they could continue selling $1000 bed slingers forever. The market finally moved on.

What are the fundamental design flaws of XL?

I haven't looked into it in detail but the design appears from a glance to be really good.

If you ignore the cost, which is really hard to do in this case. But that is also somewhat justified by them targeting businesses. It just means they are lagging (which is evident by how delayed mk4 was, if it had been on time mk5 would be imminent by now).

I do feel that the XL is a good stepping stone for their consumer line though, and up until the mk4 launch that is what I thought mk4 would be all about.

The gantry is on a cantilevered open frame.

This is something that the hobbyist world recognized as a really bad idea a long time ago because it makes the machine fundamentally less rigid than a well-supported closed frame would be.

Lack of rigidity results in higher vibration which results in lower quality parts and limits the speed that you can run the machine at. Prusa has tried hard to frame this as them prioritizing quality over speed but that's absolute marketing bullshit -- the things that allow a printer to run fast are largely the same things that allow it to produce high quality parts. A fast printer simply has a higher ceiling and while a fast printer can run slower if you need it to, a slow printer will always be slow.

Jo's said explicitly in interviews that the choice to use that frame design is because he wanted to prioritize easily being able to see and remove completed parts from the print bed.

The toolchanger on the XL has a problem where the tool heads don't like up properly/accurately all the time.

Current community solutions are slamming the toolhead into a printed block after every toolhead swap.

A lot of experienced YouTubers have also had problems with the machine:

https://www.reddit.com/r/prusa3d/comments/17samr9/the_5_tool...

Yeah I got into 3d printing a few years ago to start a side business for a niche hobby, got a nicer Creality CR-10S, I think it was. Endless hours tinkering with the thing, and still could only get nice solid prints like half the time. I just don't have the patience to deal w/ stuff like that anymore as I've gotten older. I just want something that works OOTB.

I think in the next few years if I get back into it I'll get one of the prosumer fully enclosed ones with an exhaust vent.

I'm curious why you didn't buy a prusa? was price the only factor? It's sad to me that these low end machines have made so many people think that 3d printing is very finicky and tedious.

It's been years so I don't remember the exact details, but it's probably what I saw recommended as an entry level printer on various fora.

For me it was obvious that there was a massive "Learning" curve. I needed to be sure this was viable for what i wanted to do. So i went with the $400 Ender 3 S1Pro. But ended up with new hotends new most everything. I didn't think there was a large difference between it and the Prusa. I intended to move up to the Prusa but the bambu lab printers came out before. Very lucky on my part.

The creality K1 Max was because i needed a bigger bed. I had an anycubic max in between and it was worse than the Ender. I never got it reliable. The K1 Max at least does get used. I just throw away a lot of filament from failures. The ones that complete are very nice.

I print casually on my cr-10 and I feel the same way about not wanting to invest time in it. I made a little checklist for myself for when I re-visit it every few months I can get right back into it: open filament, heat the nozzle & bed, level the bed, tram it, etc. I'm such a casual I didn't know Bambu existed until this thread. I'd love to just have something that works. Keeping up with software stacks is enough for my tired brain.

That's exactly the point of the article. Chinese competitors have better, more diversified products and sell them cheaper as well while Prusa failed to diversify and to keep up:

"Chinese manufacturers did all of this and more, and they’re winning. They aren’t just cheaper – they offer an outright better product. These are not cheap knock-offs"

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