Is it just me or do all Bambu posts read like a thinly veiled ad or cult recruitment attempt? "Are you tired of your outdated difficult to use printer that requires constant tinkering, maintenance, and upgrades? Well let me tell you about our lord and savior Bambu.". There are just some things with printing that seem like they would be universal problems across devices, yet there is rarely any mention of those issues.
Could be guerilla marketing, but it also could be that having va printer that just works is a godsend for some.
When was the last time you heard about someone tweaking and calibrating their 2d printer? Unless your are old, probably never.
Wireless printing can be tough to setup and can fail on a 2d. Print head alignment as well. Then there is the issue similar to Bambu where you're locked into buying their proprietary parts like ink cartridges which they overcharge and get away with for the most part since you really have no choice.
That it is some kind of guerilla marketing is kind of what I was suspecting. Someone else referred me to the Bambulabs reddit and definitely plenty of problems being reported there. Here where it makes more sense that they still need to hook people who haven't bought one, it is all sunshine and rainbows and Creality printers don't ever work.
Bambu locks you into proprietary parts like ink cartridges (or do you mean filament?) ?
Tell me more about this, never heard of that before.
Most wear and tear type parts have to be through BL. That was the comparison I was making to 2d printers. There are some parts where alternatives will work though. Some filament brands won't fit in their AMS, but otherwise others work.
Admittedly, the replacement parts aren't that expensive. And even if they're dearer, it's because they moved on from brass nozzles to steel as stock and hardened as an option, and hardened extruders as an option. And replacing the hotend assembly is 2 screws.
It boils down to this.
For some, tinkering and building is as big a part as making stuff is.
For others, making (& designing) stuff is the hobby. This is the market Bambu is aiming at. People who don't want to constantly upgrade, businesses that might not be able to afford time for endless tweaking.
I don't see the big drama.
Over time the pie (3D printer users) will get bigger, and over time the products will get better.
Who knows, in a few years there may be a group of people that get a non Bambu printer for exactly the reason I mentioned above.
Think of it like cars.Most of us get a car and it's an appliance. Then over time, as you learn things, you still have the appliance, but you get one to tinker with as well.
Edited spelling so it resembles English.
This is the kind of post I'm talking about. I'm less than a year at printing with an Ender 3 pro. Any of the BL models would be an upgrade for me no doubt, and I've had a couple issues like thermistor coming loose, and needing to tighten eccentric nuts on the bed and gantry but those were easily fixable. All talk though is like with BL nothing like parts coming loose or breaking is ever going to happen, that there are no slicer settings to fine tune, and that any other brand spends 99% of its time gathering dust because it's broken or is waiting for an upgrade. My printer started printing its first model within an hour of being taken out of the box and completed successfully just like BL touts. I am also a paper-leveller only and I can print multiple models without having to level or adjust anything.
See, there's a large group of people that aren't on Reddit (or are, but don't see the point of posting for reasons) that get an Ender or similar, then get sick of doing the tinkering (modding) and the rituals like bed levelling, etc, and they're lost to the hobby.
Then there's people like me. Like the idea of making stuff, the modding sounds like fun, to a degree, but are also realistic enough to realise that their equipment destroying skills far outstrip their fixing skills.
I doubt if I bought an Ender or similar I'd have had it as long as I've had my P1P (5 months) before breaking it, chucking it or break then chuck. I took the 'buy once, cry once' Kool-aid, but flipped it into motivation to learn stuff to justify the $ spent.
Now other people, like parents with kids might also look at the A1. Easy enough to get going with, without the initial outlay of the P1/X1 series.
But there's people like you that learnt on an Ender because maybe nothing else was around (depends when you get on the merry go round, time and tech wise). And they're amazed at with just a few improvements how much fun it can be.
Get it out of the box and make stuff.
The extent of tweaking I do is cleaning the build plate. I'd undoubtedly forget to do bed levelling and the other things, even if I had a list on paper next to the printer!
Shill alert.
A lot of stuff on the printer is proprietary and you have to buy from them, but their prices are not much, if any, more expensive than parts from companies with a name I recognize. Some or their parts are being knocked off. They also improve parts, it would be easy to use the same extruder on all models but they have changed the wires and for the A1 it looks easier to change nozzles.
I had an Ender. Learned a lot using it. It was never as easy as the Bambu. If you total up the cost of the printer and all the "improvements" I made it is quite a bit and it was not close to the Bambu.
If your hobby is 3D printing then non Bambu printers have a much wider area for tinkering and upgrading. If your hobby requires 3D printed things then I like the Bambu.
There are bad things. I have had some filament jams with the AMS that took hours to clearc, dry filament helped or made me think it helped. The hot end/nozzle is hard to work with, I do seem to have less need to mess with it. Until recently their support of the powder coated bed was bad, they changed stuff to make it work.
Some of the problems on their reddit are the same as here, what is this line up the back of my print. If there have been adhesion issues then I missed them, unlike here where they happen several times a day. People complain about the amount it purges, if you don't like it print with one color or get an IDEX setup. It's noisy, get the P1P without an enclosure and the noisy fan and print slower to cut down on movement noise. It's hard to work on, yeah it is enclosed and much harder to reach than a printer without an enclosure.
For me, I had an Ender and I got the X1 with my own money. I enjoy the X1 almost a year later, by this time I was over the Ender. I built a RatRig, Voron 2.4 like, and it had a lot more stuff that I had to touch every print.
If there have been adhesion issues then I missed them, unlike here where they happen several times a day.
I see multiple first layer issue problems daily on the BL sub-reddit. Generally the causes seem to be much the same as for anything else.
Given your history it's quite possible that you've subconsciously learned all the little things to be aware of for successful prints so much so that you're not even aware of the impact of your experience on your success rate, although I do agree that the X1C specifically does offer some nice QoL features to make life a little easier, as opposed to either of the P1 models for which (aside from the AMS integration) there isn't much difference between their feature set and a good number of other competing offerings.