China's current support of Russia is an obvious issue, as well as their threats towards Taiwan and their destruction of democracy in Hong Kong.
Problems with IP infringement abound, and in this case it's particularly disappointing as Prusa is committed to open source.
I hope Prusa continue to innovate, but I also hope people reject Bambu Lab. Doing so is one of the few direct actions we can take against the Chinese principles that directly oppose Western values.
The power supplies are built by Delta Electronics, the bearings and rods are (usually) Chinese supplied, the fans flip between China and misc SE Asia suppliers (Noctua) , the steppers are from China (LDO)... the list probably goes on.
You could make an FDM printer with exclusively American (or otherwise) parts, but the price tag is going to be astronomical.
including the stuff made in india, malaysia, thailand, japan, singapore, indonesia, germany, usa, canada, and mexico.
i say if you want to fight for democracy, pick up a rifle and join the marines, or go work for lockheed or raytheon. our military could always use more smart people.
I have owned a lot of printers over the years, and the only printers I, or any of my colleagues come back to are Prusa printers. They are incredibly reliable. The few times we have had issues with a part, we have been able to print a replacement. I am constantly excited by fancy new printers that all promise to be the next big thing, and stupidly keep buying them.
I will take Prusa's amazing customer support, a product I know I will be able to upgrade when they release the next iteration, and the company that has the best free software as well (the Bambu is just a forked version of Prusa's slicer).
I have had mine (w/ four total AMS units) for two months now and have over 500hrs of printing so far w/ minimal failed prints. I often print in sport and/or ludicrous too. I own eight other 3D printers of various major brands (including Prusa) and it’s by far and away the best I’ve ever owned. Easily comparable to printers 2-3x more expensive imho.
> It is insanely loud, and it seems unreliable and buggy.
Even with the door open to the room mine is in, I never hear it. Sure, if you’re within 5ft of it, it is a bit loud, but not terribly so, especially if you reduce fan speeds (they have conservative defaults). If you are someone who wants to sleep next to your printer farm, maybe not a good fit, but for any normal person the noise isn’t a concern imho.
> I just canceled my X1-Carbon order.
Your loss! I’m doing the reverse, thinking about buying another one.
The Mk4 covers most of the distance, but at a price point matching the X1C, and it's only most. Speeding it up is nice, but... pressure advance depends on detailed characteristics of the filament, such as viscosity, which varies from brand to brand and color to color.
The X1 has a lidar, which from experience actually does work as advertised. The Mk4 has... what? Prusament, maybe? I would not be surprised to find you can only get the advertised speed if you use Prusa's precalibrated filament.
Or you can print the calibration lines and do it manually. That does work; it's a ten second eyeballing procedure, simple enough for the X1 to do full auto. But you're really supposed to do that for every startup -- characteristics change as the reel ages, which doesn't even happen evenly across the entire reel -- and nobody does that.
In my experience this is true of basically all very niche brand subreddits. People go to those subreddits to complain and/or get help. It isn't a representative sample. The people who are completely happy with their Bambu Labs machines have little incentive to spend time on a 14k user subreddit when they can go instead participant in a 1.7m user subreddit like /r/3DPrinting.
I really have no idea what you’re talking about with regard to it being loud, and I’ve had pretty much zero failed prints (at least not attributable to the printer).
If you are printing with enclosure doors closed printer noise is acceptable - I wouldn't sleep in the same room, but I can work (including taking video calls) with printer running 2.5-3m from me. Carbon filter seems to be working nicely too - my air quality monitor isn't picking much VOOCs or fine particulate.
tl;dr; I've had fewer problems with X1 than with any other printer I owned, including laser and inkjet ones.
The Prusa i3 family may feel a little outdated, but what it lacks in cool marketing features it makes up for in amazing reliability. The thing works every single time I try to print something. The CPU not being able to address 4GB of RAM doesn't really limit what you can print, though the community sure loves to talk about it.
I am very tempted to buy the upgrade kit, but honestly, I'm not sure it's worth it. My filament doesn't jam, I don't use filaments the infrared detector can't see, I'm not in a hurry (so don't need input shaping), and my Z is dialed in. The MK3 is a great printer even in a world where the MK4 exists! I'm waiting for the Prusa XL to start shipping so I can print larger models.
People act like having the power supply die, bed probe not being reliable, not having x axis tensioner are all normal. Just print out a bunch of parts from some randoms to fix.
Also Prusas software are forks too so weird thing to call out bambu for.
Prusa printers are generally rock solid and their quality control is great.
For 1k, I really think we should be looking at a CoreXY machine (or, at least, something that doesn't have a bed that moves, whatever the kinematics). That's a major speed limitation, and it also causes vibrations even in lower speeds as you are moving the bed and your entire model. That's the only thing I cannot easily change in my printer, anything else, from the bed to extruders is easy to modify.
Sure the MK4 has a larger build volume. But so do many other printers.
The breakout extruder board is a nice thing but it is available for other printers too.
I like the loadcell concept for bed leveling but I wonder how much better it is versus a simple bltouch.
I really wonder who is the target demographic for this printer and why they wouldn't get other Prusa offerings instead.
> I love their commitment to open hardware
Prusa is relatively open with their hardware so it's indeed a massive bonus versus some proprietary Bambu Labs printer. However, they are the same company pushing for pre-sliced files which is a terrible idea. Not only they can be malicious, but they will also be specific to a given printer, which would benefit Prusa if most gcode is created for Prusa printers.
Agreed, though should be noted this happens across the industry. Whoever is the current fore-runner tends to push for it. MakerBot did the same thing back when they led the pack. Thing is, the only end Prusa can get from this is encouraging use of their printers. A shady method for sure, but MakerBot wanted to push for an entirely proprietary chain, from the model file to the printer, and because they had just gone proprietary, they could make that happen. Prusa has no legal or technical weight to make that happen (and hopefully they have no intention of going that direction). So long as they keep pushing open hardware and firmware, their push for presliced is (to me) not a deal breaker. It's wrong, and they should be called out for it, but it's not gonna lead to malicious legal action.
I agree that sharing Gcode should end as well, I understand how they thought that might be a good idea given how daunting prusaslicer is for non-techies but that wasn't a good solution.
Although Corexy is clearly a more rigid form factor I wonder if the input shaping advancements will make that bed slinging i3 seem much faster than we are expecting.
The MMU3 seems like a marginal improvement, you still have purge towers & large buffer boxes. Hopefully the reliability out of the box has improved.
I wonder if it's too little too late for Prusa. A Voron, Ratrig, Bambu Lab printer seems like it has all these features & is CoreXY. The multi material options seem better on these options too (Enraged Rabbit Carrot Feeder, Bambu AMS).
In the case of the Voron or Ratrig, you'll load Klipper instead of the tried & tested (and outdated) Marlin.
In 2023, I am not sure I'd buy a MK4 at $1100 when you can get a Bambu for $100 more.
For me, Bambu is too proprietary, Voron is too self-built, Ender is too unpredictable.
By current printer is self built and it works sometimes. My next printer is a Prusa.
I want to upgrade from my Prusa Mini and can't justify the cost for the XL, so the Mk4 seems like a decent choice. I'm sure people building and modding their own printers and flashing firmwares might have other favorites, but that's simply not what I buy 3d printers for.
As for Ratrig, that might be a healthy competition, though I've never looked into the quality of parts there. I know I've sat an Ender next to my Prusa and found the price vs quality to match surprisingly well, so Prusa's not the only game, but for something I can control, while still having a company to lean on when I want to, Prusa's got a good thing going.
I have a Prusa MINI+, which for $450 gets you a great printer. The print volume on the MK3 and now MK4 is just not that much better - 180x180x180 for the MINI, 250x210x220 for the MK4.
If I wanted to upgrade and wanted to stick with Prusa, MK3/MK4 wouldn't come into the picture, I'd go straight to the Prusa XL.
- IMO multi material printing has always been a buggy gimmick (mostly multi material setups are very prone to failure).
- Them advertising that the printer can print "advanced" materials like PC is a gimmick too, the main issue with FDM printers is layer adhesion and no matter what material you are using its going to suck compared to injection molding.
- bashing bed slingers is wrong too, they have their advantages compared to CoreXY setups (mostly simpler mechanics)
IMO FDM printers have 2 main issues:
1. Unreliable due to lots of moving parts. A solid design with quality components mostly mitigates this.
2. Layer adhesion sucks limiting possible applications. Some very innovative non-planar printing could be a solution but it does not exist yet. Or could be solved by printing metal, but these devices are far from home use.
Resin printers solve both issues, but bring their own (mostly that resins are very toxic stuff that you dont want in your home.)
So no, this printer is in no way revolutionary (neither is the Prusa). Until both of these issues are solved home 3D printers will be mostly used to print benchies and accessories for tabletop games.
Agreed, with the asterisk that this applies more to multi-feeders (Prusa's MMU, Bambu's AMS) rather than IDEX. Which is where Prusa's going with the XL, and I'm excited about it.
> - Them advertising that the printer can print "advanced" materials like PC is a gimmick too, the main issue with FDM printers is layer adhesion and no matter what material you are using its going to suck compared to injection molding.
Flag on the play: sweeping generalization, ten yard penalty, repeat second down.
PC printing is really handy for intrinsically bespoke things like tools in the wood shop. I don't need an injection-molded run of them--but nobody's selling things I can buy that address problems in the way I want to.
> - bashing bed slingers is wrong too, they have their advantages compared to CoreXY setups (mostly simpler mechanics)
This is an effectively solved problem with modern motion system controls. CoreXY on Marlin might be a mess, but CoreXY on Klipper is clean. Aside from cost of development and manufacture, I don't understand developing new bedslingers except for cost...and the MK4 costs $1100.
Tangent: why was moving the bed the solution over having X and Y on independent axes? I’ve always wondered. Cost and initial reliability?
Prusa also makes the open source XL if you want an CoreXY model, or you could go with a Voron which is also open source.
They are still very good machines, but I would have a hard time recommending anyone get an i3 style printer when the advantages of CoreXY are so obvious, and particularly because the price gap between the X1C is not very big.
Can you expand on this?
Newer printers (including the Prusa XL) use a CoreXY design, where the extruder is controlled in the X and Y axes by belts, which results in less mass that has to move, and allows the printer to print much, much faster. In the case of the Bambu Lab printers, it can be two to three times faster for a similar print quality.
Here's the best I can come up with: A well-insulated enclosure with a filter ... on the balcony, with internal heating and PID temp control. Maybe some thing for humidity control as well. Thoughts? Any good off-the-shelf enclosure products that would fit an Ender S1 Pro or a Prusa MK3/4?
But i recently got a resin printer and that thing lives in the bathroom now beside the washing machine. It has build in ventilation through a coal filter but the stench is just awful.
In a pinch Bathrooms are not the worst place for printers because they have ventilation and are not in use most of the day.
Just don't store your filament in the same room since it might get wet from the showers steam.
Although this might have a very low WAF, so check with your better half if applicable :)
It's also worth noting that the smell varies considerably between different kinds of resin. having a dedicated space is optimal, but with the right materials it's farily manageable, especially if you're not planning to run it 24/7.
You could also buy a Bambu Labs P1P, which is fully enclosed, or build a Voron. There's also the Creality Sermoon V1, but with chinese printers you always have to replace / upgrade the parts, so they're really not that cheap in the long run.
I think it's questionable how much those tiny filters help anyway. If you print a lot, you would have to constantly swap filters, if you don't print a lot, it doesn't really make that much of a difference.
When I want to print ABS, I go to a Makerspace and use their Ultimaker.
For me, ventilation isn't required for PLA. The smell is minimal and not unpleasant, and I often print (in a cupboard) while working two metres away.
So I recently moved mine from the middle my medium sized house to the far end from the bedroom, behind a door. And even with that I'm considering enclosing it in a cabinet, to reduce the noise on that side of the house too. Yet the model I have is not particularly loud.
With a closed door between my bedroom and the printer at night, it's no problem.
Also, buying good quality filament is important. You want stuff that isn't made in China.
> MK4 is fully compatible with the Original Prusa Enclosure.
Does anyone have a good recommendation to go “from zero to hero”?
Below is pretty much how I did it:
Step 1:
Buy an Ender 3. It's cheap and there are tons of upgrades out there. Start printing stuff from Printables/Thingiverse in order to understand how slicing and printing works. Learn the jargon by researching issues you run into (don't just ask on forums, search for yourself).
Step 2:
Find some upgrades for the printer through Youtube, Reddit and the likes. Buy (or print) them and upgrade your printer. Run into issues, fix them and start understanding how the entire thing works.
Step 3:
Print this [0] model and watch this [1] video on how it was designed. It shows really well what constraints you're working with when designing for 3D printing and how to work around them. Then, start designing your own prints in whatever CAD software you want to learn. I started with Fusion 360, but anything is fine, probably.
- Start your journey with PLA, and small prints. PLA is the easiest/least fussy material to print because it doesn't tend to string, or warp/shrink/lift off the bed like PETG/ABS. Nothing's worse than having a large print fail (usually boils down to slicer settings, hence the need to get familiar with your printer via smaller prints first).
- PrusaSlicer is, IMO, one of the best slicer options out there... works for virtually all printers and it's free/open source: https://github.com/prusa3d/PrusaSlicer/releases
- TPU filament is AMAZING to have for functional 3d prints... but you need a direct drive extruder to be able to print it reliably. If you can afford it, shoot for an Ender with a direct drive extruder e.g. the S1 or S1 Pro.
- Other stuff: Use Mainsail on a Raspberry Pi or similar for remote control/monitoring from any browser or phone (alternative: Creality Sonic Pad), Klipper firmware for GOING FAST (pressure advance setting), print mods/upgrades for your own printer (e.g. webcam mount, tool holders, parts cooling fan ducts, etc)
/r/3DPrinting has a comprehensive guide to getting started with 3D Printing: https://www.reddit.com/r/3DPrinting/wiki/gettingstarted/
The designing and iterating of physical components is a learned skill, just like designing and iterating on software becomes easier with experiences. Best way to learn is to just get started, and have tons of fun!
Having tried most of the options there are, I’d recommend downloading Fusion 360 and following a few of the many online tutorials. While the free version is a little restricted, it’s a high-quality parametric 3D CAD package, and to my mind is superior to everything else at a hobbyist price point. It’s also faaaaaaar more approachable (IMO) and/or fully-featured than other free options such as OpenSCAD or FreeCAD.
A few weeks of following tutorials and trying to make your own simple models should see you to a level where you can judge whether it’s the right hobby for you, and therefore whether it’s worth investing in a printer.
Sure, I'd be happy to help you get started with 3D printing! I'll break it down into a few steps, from learning the basics of 3D modeling to printing your first custom part.
Learn the basics of 3D modeling:
To start, it's important to get familiar with 3D modeling software. Two popular free options are Tinkercad and Blender.
Tinkercad (Beginner-friendly): Tinkercad is a browser-based, user-friendly CAD software that helps you create 3D models easily. It's perfect for beginners. Tinkercad tutorial: https://www.tinkercad.com/learn/designs
Blender (Advanced): Blender is an open-source 3D modeling software with a steeper learning curve but offers more advanced features. Blender tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa1F2ddGya_-UvuAqHAks...
Understand 3D printing basics: Learn about 3D printing technologies, materials, and the process. This will help you make better decisions when designing your parts.
3D Printing basics: https://www.3dhubs.com/guides/3d-printing/
Choose a 3D printer:
When you're ready to buy a 3D printer, consider factors like build volume, material compatibility, and price. A few popular entry-level 3D printers include:
Creality Ender 3: https://www.creality.com/goods-detail/ender-3-3d-printer Prusa i3 MK3S: https://www.prusa3d.com/original-prusa-i3-mk3s
Learn to prepare models for printing:
Once you've designed your 3D model, you'll need to prepare it for printing using slicer software. This software converts your model into instructions for the 3D printer. Popular slicer software includes:
Ultimaker Cura: https://ultimaker.com/software/ultimaker-cura PrusaSlicer: https://www.prusa3d.com/prusaslicer/
Print your first project:
Start with something simple to familiarize yourself with the 3D printing process. Then, move on to more complex projects like your custom Magic Trackpad support.
Join online communities:
Participate in online forums and communities to get advice, feedback, and inspiration. A few popular 3D printing communities include:
r/3Dprinting subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/ Thingiverse: https://www.thingiverse.com/
Follow these steps, practice regularly, and you'll be well on your way to becoming a 3D printing hero. Good luck!
Until recently (most notably until the Bamboo Labs Carbon X1) you had to spend time setting up your printer to get a good first layer. This would involve changing the distance between the nozzle that lays out the melted plastic and the bed on which the model is printed. Because this distance varies not just between different units of the same printer, but also has to change based on what material (PLA, PETG, etc) you're printing with, it needed some knowledge to set correctly.
While that process did get much simpler (with most of it being automated), it still involved some tweaking on the part of the user. That's a problem for people who are new 3D printing. It meant that you couldn't start printing immediately after unboxing your printer. It also meant that you had to spend considerable time (a few hours at least in my case) figuring out what a "good first layer" means, and then tweaking your printer to print the first layer well.
With this update, you can now start printing immediately after unboxing your printer (after some minor assembly), which is a huge thing for people who are new to 3D printing.
When I got my first printer a few years ago, I remember having to spend a couple of hours initially learning how to do this calibration, and I didn't get great results until a few more weeks of learning and tweaking.
Note that this is from the perspective of a hobbyist. People using 3D printers on a commercial scale might find the other improvements to be a big thing for their use case.
Unlike Ender etc., Prusa is the true “just works” FDM printer
That acknowledged, my (lightly modded) Ender3s, a Flashforge Creator clone, and an SKTank kit-built printer all also “just work” and, other than capability differences, use the same machine settings in slicer/same gcode thanks to Klipper macros (to the point that I’ll often start a print on them in the basement without ever going down there and checking that the first layer looks okay). I’d say I’m well above 97% for prints work without any fuss.
Lighter, stronger, faster extruder
Easier to swap/maintain hotend
Faster and more automated bed leveling
Better stepper motors
Reliability is a huge, huge deal. Back in 2009 we were dealing with constant nozzle jams, delamination from the print bed, print errors, drifting, ooze, extruder slip, and all sorts of other problems. You had to keep a constant eye on the printer, and manually tweak the G-code generation parameters to get good results. It's come a long way and still going.
There’s also constant improvements to the algorithms; what can be printed in the first place. To name one, it used to be that anything above a 25 degree overhang would cause problems…
These days 60 degrees isn’t too bad, and there are experimental algorithms that can handle 90. Support algorithms have also improved dramatically lately, so we’re pretty close to the point where any and all geometries will just work.
Several of the features in the MK4 are for quality (but also help speed). For example, VFA steppers are purely for quality improvement.
If you don’t care to become a part-time 3D printer tech, and value your time more than a few hundred dollars vs. dozens of hours spent trying to get it right, buy Prusa and get printing.
I have another Ender 3 that I upgraded. It has a Bigtreetech SKR Mini with a full color touch screen, a bed leveling sensor, and a Micro Swiss direct drive extruder. It just works as well, and probably doesn't benefit a ton from the fancy extruder or touch screen since I tend to use a web UI.
I also have a Prusa MK3S+. It performs equally well to the Enders.
For what I paid for the Prusa, I could have a 5+ Enders with upgraded 32bit controllers running Klipper. Or a lot of rolls of filament.
Come to think of it, I haven't even used the Prusa in over a month because one of its steppers or that stepper motor driver is failing, skipping steps or just going rogue. I haven't bothered looking into it yet because the Enders are easily keeping up with whatever I need printed.
I honestly think that when you buy a Prusa, you're buying the brand, and supporting a company who's founder helped shaped the industry we all benefit from. At least that's what I tell myself to justify the huge (by comparison) price difference.
But the key thing is that the Bambu (and other upcoming Core XY printers) are aimed at the non-modding market and seem to be a much better deal overall, so I'm not sure what Prusa is going for here other than leveraging brand traction...
I built a Prusa kit, and enjoyed building it, and enjoy printing with it. I consider it a bit of a hobby product, and wouldn't recommend it to someone who isn't interested in learning anything about 3d printing. It works great, but you have to take an interest in it.
For the person who just wants a consumer product, I suspect the Bambu might be the best option.
That said, if I put a price on my time I think the X1C would be 1/10th the cost :D
I’d love to just click print on a thingiverse page and have my printer start going.
https://forum.prusa3d.com/forum/prusaslicer/guide-config-pru...
As others have mentioned, the closet is using something like PrusaSlicer and using 'Upload and start print'. You do the slicing manually, then you just press a button and it uploads the gcode and starts printing.
Especially with slicers still introducing all sorts of improvements which might need tuning of their own to adapt to older designs.
They Print 3 Times faster than the MKS3+ with same or better quality in some prints. 24/7 printing almost with zero issues in my print farm. BVery easy to send jobs to it from the Bambu slicer based on the Prusa slicer which is open source and enhanced to make complicated print jobs spread across multiple virtual print beds a beautiful thing!
At this point i see ZERO reason to consider a MK4. Bambu hit this out of the ball park and into the neighbouring city as far as I am concerned.
However, I see all this and think, man... Prusa, you were 2 years too late on the XL and the MK4. And it's going to hurt the Prusa marketshare immensely.
Prusas are user serviceable with lots of spare parts available. Bambus are far from that and if there's a problem with the design (e.g. ghosting) you're out of luck for as long as it takes them to fix it.
I don't have a Prusa (I have a VzBot). Just saying there's far from zero reasons.
I have a Ender 3 V2 with self-leveling bed (without self-leveling it's not that great) and I use it a lot, enough to justify buying a better $1k+ printer but it's not clear what I get from spending that much money on it.
Is it printing speed, better materials, or something else entirely?
An Ender 3 will produce good prints if it's well tuned, but there are a lot of quirks to the design (mostly as a result of cost-cutting) that can cause problems out of the box and will cause problems over time. Prusa printers are far from perfect, but they're trusted by a lot of print farm operators to run 24/7 with very little attention.
Modern CoreXY printers like the Bambu Lab or Voron machines are crazy fast compared to an Ender 3, without any real compromise in print quality or reliability. That isn't necessarily a big deal for hobbyists, but it's very useful when you're iterating on a design. For users who care about print speed, the issue is generally latency rather than throughput.
If you're just interested in the hobby, the Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro is, for my money, a fantastic entrypoint that you can get for under $250. (I own the larger version, the Plus, which has a bigger bed and turns the fans off when not printing; it's sub-$350.)
There's also the Sovol SV06 (and its larger Plus variant) in the same ballpark, though they're having some significant QC problems these days. It's also in the $200-$250 range. I have one of these too and it's pretty nice, but I have a first-run one before the QC problems started to rear up.
The Prusa stuff is absolutely better made than the Sovol stuff--though the Elegoo stuff is remarkably high-quality, especially for the price--but frankly it is emphatically not four times better. The delta shrinks further if (and in this crowd, maybe when) you install the Klipper firmware to replace the stock Marlin stuff; Prusa's custom Marlin builds are better than the competition, but Klipper beats it all hollow, and the performance benefits of Klipper on the SV06 and the Neptune 3 Pro/Plus are huge when it comes to faster acceleration and thus faster printing.
- OOTB ready-to-print is a big one. There's a bit of a learning curve to calibrating everything on the MK3S+. It took me a few days to get mine dialed in and I'm not one of those people that's looking for perfect prints, I just needed it to mostly work. - Touch-screen + wifi + remote printing saves on setup: no SD card needed. I added an OctoPi to mine to achieve similar but that takes some tinkering and the OctoPi performance is spotty. - They're claiming a 70% decrease in print times
I've had two Prusa mk3s for a few years now and they've been excellent. No problems at all, and now Prusa is my default recommendation. I'd run batch jobs on them for days for "customers" without concern.
Crazy to see how far Prusa has come with his stuff, I still remember sitting and laughing in a hacker-space with him a couple years ago. He is one of the few people that actually stuck to the open-source rep-rap philosophy even after success (fun fact: he has a tattoo of the open hardware logos to remember his roots).
0: https://blog.prusa3d.com/the-state-of-open-source-in-3d-prin...
Getting your lunch absolutely eaten by some kickstarter printer in near silence, announcing the first few minutes of pre-orders for your already delayed printer will take months, near zero build up to the launch of the MK4...
And they won't even let the win from that just sizzle a bit, they need to take all that heat and dump it into the murky depths of Open Source Licensing.
Edit: Also, its 799 for the kit you can't buy now compared to 699 for the P1P that you can buy today and literally prints out of the box.
Prusa's slicer is just a fork of Slic3r so I'd say that's fair play. Prusa just aggressively brands opensource stuff.
I mean, they fork it, develop it further, and give it back to the community. That's entirely within the spirit of open source!
"Aggressively branding open-source stuff" would be like Chinese Alibaba sellers ripping off open hardware or Amazon redistributing PostgreSQL as an AWS SaaS offering.
It's nice to pay for actually open development.
It is clear now that people who preordered the Prusa XL had availability sacrificed for the MK4. It just sucks if you've been waiting more than 18 months for that, only for the MK4 to get day-one availability before your long-awaited preorder.
Also, people who manufacture the printers are paid peanuts and are managed super strictly.
Also, XL was announced because they were "feeling like they were not releasing for too long". Not because they felt inspired. Then they literally slept on it for a year.
Don't expect anything special from them.
Source: know people inside and from the relevant social circle.
I'm not super happy about the wait myself, but the XL is a considerably more complex beast, and I'd rather see them getting it right than sacrificing quality to meeting some self imposed deadline.
EDIT: I read some of the other comments in this thread and did some more research. Found some Reddit posts as well. I think I'll definitely go with the Bambu Lab printer.
No matter what, make sure it’s in a room with an air filter and active ventilation. Safety matters.
There’s a lot of really cool open source printer designs too, and having an abs/asa capable machine really makes a lot more cool prjects possible.
I got the x1cc and I’ve been really happy so far. My biggest problem was accidentally printing pla as asa and I still managed to make ok but weird prints
I still use Prusas for my robotics work because I can print multiple parts in a work day and iterate quickly. Either you are ordering parts and have to wait days for them to arrive, or your budget is very different from mine.
I did work at Google X and have a few MJF parts still from their in house machine. They are nice, but they are in a totally different league. My MJF benchy sits next to my Prusa MK3s at home.
Eh, that's not really the case any more. If you spend a sensible amount of money on a properly built machine, it's pretty close to fire-and-forget. Features like automatic bed levelling, PEI build plates, runout sensors, reliable direct-drive extruders and spaghetti detection have removed most of the annoyances in FDM printing.
I was a long-time FDM sceptic, but the technology has reached a level of maturity where it fills a useful niche. FDM machines are an increasingly common sight in machine shops, tool rooms and MRO facilities; in an environment that's staffed by people who are familiar with CAD/CAM, they can produce a useful subset of parts with an almost trivial level of cost and effort.
Unless your employer is extremely generous, you probably don't have an MJF or SLS machine that's just sitting idle in case you need a widget in a hurry. FDM thrives in the niche traditionally occupied by hand tools and that sloppy old Bridgeport - workholding one-offs, kludgy parts to keep a machine running until the field tech arrives, parts you only need in order to make other parts. An FDM printer is the mechanical embodiment of the phrase "close enough for government work".
Here is the full kit https://www.prusa3d.com/product/original-prusa-i3-mk3-s-to-m...
May as well buy the full printer and sell the old one :(
https://blog.prusa3d.com/announcing-original-prusa-mk4_76585...
I've lost count of the number of times I've been promised this.
The AMS has been wonderful for me: no longer manually swapping out filaments, and cool tricks like automatically laying down a layer of easily-removed support filament between model and support structure.
I print mostly functional parts (home repairs & improvement, prototypes), and while I could have printed a fix for the broken part, the prospect of taking the whole thing apart (as well as for an upgrade to an S+) doesn't appeal to me.
I have a MK3S+ with MMU2S, bear clone upgrade, a head upgrade, Octoprint with 2 cameras, a temperature regulation chamber, and filament dryers.
If anybody here is big into DIY 3D printer hacking, do you see any big blockers with using a 1-D Prusa system to host a record cutting head?
Every other 3D printer I have used: Calibration, Settings, Filament, Buggy, Spaghetti, Error.
Doubt this will be much of an improvement, there is little to improve upon with the MK3S+.
