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 "Are you tired of your outdated difficult to use printer that requires constant tinkering, maintenance, and upgrades?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.
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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!