>Imagine a Prusa where it works out of the box, you can fire up a slicer in your browser which auto-connects to your printer and prints models from a Prusa-operated model repository, paying $10 for a premium model, $1 off the top goes to Prusa, with the same saved payment details which ensure that a fresh spool of Prusa filament arrives at your front door when it auto-detects that your printer is almost out. The print you want is too big for your build volume? Click here to have it cloud printed – do you want priority shipping for that? Your hot-end is reaching the end of its life – as one of our valued business customers on our premium support contract we would be happy to send you a temporary replacement printer while yours is shipped in for service.
What a nightmare. Grimly funny to see 3d printers getting pressured to take up all the 2d printer business models everyone hates (service contracts, proprietary consumables, cloud management software, etc.).
Indeed. Critics of Bambu were all over them when their cloud-connected printers started "creating plastic objects without user intervention" due to a glitch [0]. In fact, the printer had to be connected to the cloud initially but they have since relaxed that.
Having said that, a feature on Printables where you could order a part in the color of your choice and have it delivered to your door for a reasonable price could be a great source of income for them. Not everyone wants / has a 3D printer, but a lot of people could use a 3D printed part.
We use 3D printers @work. Also, some colleagues have their own printers as well. Turns out, there is in fact a market for 3D printed parts already. You simply contact "the printer" with your sketch, get a price quote, and if acceptable you will get you part delivered by mail or whatever.
I'm not sure where the marketplace is at, but you may want to try the usual suspects like fiverr etc.
Then what's the point? It would take effort to develop these "features", the only benefit of which would be predatory. For example:
> Bambu’s cloud slicer is a massive lost opportunity for Prusa.
Bambu's cloud slicer is a complicated SaaS undertaking that incurs hosting and storage costs, yet doesn't (so far as I know) generate any revenue for Bambu Labs. So why do it, unless you want to make sure that a copy of whatever your product prints gets sent to and stored on a server in China? What's the "non-predatory" justification for this over local slicing?
Businesses are more complex than just one facet. Not everything the business offers has to be a direct revenue driver; it builds trust with the brand and improves the experience by putting everything you need with respect to your printer in the same spot.
Which of the following experiences delivers better value to the customer:
1. They buy a printer and can immediately slice and print stuff on the vendor's web app
2. They buy a printer and have to deal with the nightmare of installing and configuring Cura
The former is more meaningful still when you consider how it can integrate with other parts of the value-add, such as Creality's model database, which can take you from the model's detail page to the slicer in just a click or two -- no download, no import into Cura, no setting up Octoprint or whatever. For enthusiasts the value-add is not entirely necessary but for consumers it's massive.
And none of this precludes continuing to support local slicers or free software! In fact, if you value FOSS in your product line (as Prusa… well, used to) they will be using and contributing to the same slicer you run on your workstation as they run on their servers.
The former is more meaningful still when you consider how it can integrate with other parts of the value-add, such as Creality's model database, which can take you from the model's detail page to the slicer in just a click or two -- no download, no import into Cura, no setting up Octoprint or whatever. For enthusiasts the value-add is not entirely necessary but for consumers it's massive.
Consumers? What use case are you imagining? Why is it better than a consumer going on amazon or to a physical store and buying a product?
3D printers are a manufacturing technology. At best it's suitable to hobbyists, DIYers, and enthusiasts.
If you can only print stuff, then you are limited to only what other people are willing to design for you. So you will learn CAD and other tools. At that point, you might as well invest in the effort in learning how to use a slicer. It's not really hard to use.
That said, I am all for making 3D printers more accessible and easier to use, but the magic of 3D printing isn't really in printing things but bringing to life stuff you designed, for your specific needs.
Again I have to ask if you've ever used a Prusa, no really this time?
Prusa users use Prusaslicer, not Cura. Printables.com often hosts gcode files that require no slicing at all by end users. These points completely aside -- do you think 3d printer novices are going to last long without learning a slicer? Is that really your assertion?
Also, is installing Cura a "nightmare" ? So much explosive language!
Yes, I have used a Prusa, but I have mostly used Cura with it. The bulk of my experience with Prusas started with finding one at the local hackerspace, firing up Cura and finding a profile for it, getting it to work and never questioning this procedure again. I used Prusaslicer once or twice, but nevertheless, I cut my teeth on Cura so I used the tool I knew. Not that the comment you're replying to alleges that most Prusa users are using Cura, for the record.
Yes, installing and using Cura is a nightmare for non-technical users, and indeed serious users will have to install a slicer eventually. But that's the point: this product design locks it into the enthusiast market, and most consumers don't want to deal with that overhead.
Clicking "print this" on a model catalogue, having it fire up a cloud slicer thing, and pressing "go" is a better user experience for a novice, plain and simple, and I'm sick of arguing with your enlightened enthusiast takes here.
I'm sorry you're sick of having to defend your baseless claims.
If you don't know about Prusaslicer, you download it, and in some cases click Next a few times to install it. You then select whatever printer(s) you have from a set of pre-populated profiles that include non-Prusa models, btw. You now have a highly tuned profile for your Prusa printer because -- and I can't stress this enough -- Prusa's QC... well exists! which means it's already better than the competition. Because they have QC, they're able to predict very well how the machine is going to behave and are able to release profiles that work very well for everyone.
Also, if you don't know about Prusaslicer -- it's the origin of Bamboo's slicer. They get to ride along for free while you chant "Innovation!"
Also, if you don't know about Prusaslicer, why do you feel so comfortable commenting on what Prusa has and hasn't done? Like when you say things like "comes with an ecosystem that Creality has invested in to a much greater extent than Prusa."
You don't what you're talking about.
> But that's the point: this product design locks it into the enthusiast market, and most consumers don't want to deal with that overhead.
What product design? Cura? Why are we talking about Cura again? Oh yea, you brought it up because you used it one time. Seriously though, what product design are you talking about?
If you're sick of arguing maybe you shouldn't be starting arguments?
What you say makes very little sense. Prusa has an audience, you are not that audience. So go buy something else and write about how great your experience is instead of kicking Prusa, especially if you haven't bothered using their slicer, which is absolutely fantastic, runs locally and supports linux.
Non-technical users are going to install prusaslicer. I know, because that's what I did when I bought a prusa without knowing anything. It's the first one mentioned in the user manual.
> Yes, I have used a Prusa, but I have mostly used Cura with it.
You just deprived yourself of any claim to represent the "normal user".
> Not that the comment you're replying to alleges that most Prusa users are using Cura, for the record.
... which kind of shows that they do NOT, in any way, shape, or form, "have to deal with the nightmare of installing and configuring Cura". You're the one who chose to use the words "have to".
> this product design locks it into the enthusiast market, and most consumers don't want to deal with that overhead.
There is not now, nor will there ever be, a significant "non-enthusiast" market for these devices. "Consumers" do not want to dick around with them, and a cloud slicer has negligible impact on most of the dicking around.
> Clicking "print this" on a model catalogue,
How many people actually do that for most of their printing? Who would buy such a device only to use canned models? If I don't want to customize things, I can trivially buy them already made, usually with better quality. I will almost never do better by 3D printing them, at least not if I value my own time at even minimum wage.
I'd say 80 percent of the prints done by the several relatively diverse users in my household are either designed from scratch or significantly modified from whatever we found on the net.
> having it fire up a cloud slicer thing, and pressing "go" is a better user experience for a novice, plain and simple, and I'm sick of arguing with your enlightened enthusiast takes here.
I have a Prusa 3D printer and a Glowforge laser cutter. The Glowforge is a slick, trouble-free device in operation (or at least it will be until its tube inevitably fails). It demands much less tweaking than an FDM printer.
But the "cloud" aspect of the Glowforge user experience is SHARPLY INFERIOR to either connecting the Prusa to your computer or writing files to an SD card.
Even though they obviously put a lot of thought and work into making it as easy as possible, just getting the Glowforge onto the WiFi network and associated with your account is harder than installing the Prusa slicer and getting the printer running. In fact, although I don't claim to represent the average user either, I could probably compile and install Cura from source code with less effort... and I have never touched Cura before.
And now you have an untrustworthy remotely controlled device that can start fires. And if you have any secret designs of your own, you're out of luck. You have no guarantee that the feature set or workflow won't change under you at any time.
You also have Glowforge marketing chirping at you every time you use the damned thing. And you have the software not very subtly trying to push you to buy their overpriced materials. And, no, your average corporation can't keep itself from doing those things. If you adopt a model that drives your company toward obnoxious behavior, the smart money bets that your company will engage in obnoxious behavior, even if you claim it's "optional".
In the case of Glowforge, you also have no way to add your own features... and you have a brick if they ever decide to stop supporting you. I do understand that the the 3D printers you're talking about don't have that problem at the moment, but there will always be pressure on their makers to move in that direction. In fact, when customers complained at the beginning of the preorder period, Glowforge itself promised open source firmware, although not an entire tool chain, as a form of "brick-proofing". As far as I know they've totally failed to deliver open source for any of their own code, nor even enough information about the hardware to let anybody write their own. All they've done is bare minimum GPL compliance for upstream stuff.
I use both slic3r and cura.
Both are installed in 2 minutes.
Slicer is good for having better out of the box profiles. But the biggest drawback for me is the auto orientation tool to lay an object flat. For thin complex objects slicer always has issues. Cura does not.
Some people want to be able to launch a print job from a remote location e.g. their living room with their 3d printers being in a workshop. Personally, I think that's a fire hazard, but I've definitely seen youtubers liking that feature.
For 3D printers that's a manageable risk, for laser cutters I would highly recommend against unattended operation. They're fire starters first and laser cutters second, treat them as such.
I agree, but I think the incentives tend to push towards user hostile results. It's a small jump for the business mind to go from free cloud optional to free cloud only to paid features cloud to subscription only cloud, or selling plastic to only supporting their own plastic, and so on. Web services are so cheap and profitable that it feels like every business converges towards them now. I'd really rather buy from a company that makes money directly from selling good hardware (but certainly the hardware is useless without ongoing software development, and we're back to the original issue).
All software requires maintenance, and there are continually ongoing software-driven print speed and quality improvements. That said, I could keep using the firmware and slicer software I have now until the hardware becomes unmaintainable (probably have to run it in a VM at some point), assuming no critical safety bugs.
The desktop software has to keep up with the shifting sands of modern operating systems. But I don’t understand why the 3D printer itself needs software maintenance. It is just executing something like GCode right? How much does that really change?
> All software requires maintenance
Is this a law of nature or our youthful incompetence?
Mainly I think that this temptation is circumvented with strong leadership and weak investors. That big VC money is a poison, but if you don't take it then you can focus on the product without so much of the risk.
Agreed. I thought they had some good points up until this and immediately thought “I would RUN from a company that did this.”
Also do people REALLY pay for models, let alone $10? I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve paid for a model to 3d print. Much easier to find an existing one, hack one, or just make my own.
The icing on the cake is when he says that Chinese competitors implemented all this web-based stuff. So the big idea for Prusa to compete was to provide services that Chinese competitors can and did provide.
I think if you're going to take to the internet to stick to boot into a company you need to do better than this embarrassing drivel.
I can confirm that there is indeed a market for (unprinted) models, just like there is a market for print-to-order parts. The market works such that you pay for the right to print the model even if the model as such has one license or another.
Check markets like Fantasy, role-playing, games, if in doubt
That’s where I do most of my printing. I guess I’m usually okay with using the free prints of “generic goblin” rather than trying to get the absolutely best one I can. :)
Question: Is a 3D printer "a printer"? The difficulty of substituting a 3D for a 2D etc would suggest not so.
So, if we agree that somehow there is not much overlap in the 2D vs 3D printing businesses it would seem sane to suspect that business models adopted in one market might not all be suitable for another market.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
Specifically, that complaint is that PrusaSlicer (the software which turns a 3D model file into GCode instructions for the printer to follow - think PostScript, but for a 3D printer) is not developed as an open project. PrusaSlicer is open source, but most of the development happens internally at Prusa. It's a legitimate complaint, but not at all the complaint Armin claims it to be.
To provide some more commentary here. Prusa has not changed it's behaviour towards either PrusaSlicer or its printer firmwares in the time since Bambu has existed as a force in the 3D printing community, so Armin's claim that Bambu is making companies reconsider open source, is not at all substantiated.
Furthermore, the Bambu A1 is clearly positioned against the Prusa Mini - they're priced the same, have the same gantry style, but the A1 comes with a multi-material system.
Bambu's higher end printers (X1 Carbon, P1P, etc) are positioned against the Prusa Mk3/Mk4 in the ~$1000-1500 range.
Again, Armin doesn't know the specifics of what he's talking about, so the conclusions are nonsense.
In which they clearly articulate that they are not reconsidering open source:
* We stand by our roots in open-source and will continue to do so.
* Our desktop 3D printers will always be open source. We intend to continue publishing plastic parts, along with firmware source codes.
* We will stay open to third-party component manufacturers, accessories, add-ons, and unofficial upgrades.
* PrusaSlicer will always be open source.
* Our investment in PrusaSlicer and firmware development will continue at the same or higher level.
I did, and I agree. I was commenting about the software/firmware because that's what seemed to be under discussion in OP's and your post. Now it seems like actually maybe the whole thing was about the controller board designs?
Are you talking about the xBuddy board? I haven't been able to find the repository on their github page. I took a look and found Adafruit reporting on it.
If they're worried about cloning, I don't see how making it proprietary will prevent Prusa from being cloned.
One of the big takeaways from this for me is that Jo doesn't really understand IP law. He talks about wanting a new license for open source hardware; the trouble with that is that a copyright license does not and cannot protect a hardware design. That's what patents do.
That's not a defense of current IP law, just a statement on the reality of what it is.
Yeah. I read that blogpost. I don't think the hardware license protects him from Chinese cloners, scrupulous or unscrupulous. They're just very good at cloning and I don't think he has the funding or the legal resource to sue them into oblivion.
Going non-free is going to lose him a lot of goodwill, just as what happened to makerbot.
Yeah. I checked to see if MK4 firmware is open source. It is indeed, aside from designs and graphics being CC-NC-SA, which seems to be an attempt to protect their trademarks?
Now, the complaint about development is not being open is a weakness that should be fixed. I have not read evidence that Prusa does this. It does incorporates code from other projects from time to time.
I would like to see Prusa lean more strongly on open development.
Thanks for the heads up, I have corrected the incorrect statement that the MK4 firmware is not open source. My post is primarily about the tensions of running an open source business and Prusa is on the record of expressing similar challenges. What the present state of firmware is, is not really all that relevant to what I wrote.
> but it's pretty clear he doesn't really understand the specifics of what he's talking about here
I think this goes without saying, my exposure to 3d printing is as mentioned measured in days.
> the Bambu A1 is not positioned against the Mk4 like your post says - it's positioned against the identically priced Prusa Mini
Is it? Why would the A1 be positioned against the mini? It has the same bed size as the MK4. If anything the internet suggests it’s very much competing against the MK3 and MK4. So do YouTube videos reviewing it.
The author starts out discussing licenses and by the fourth paragraph has jumped to the standard "I've never used a prusa, but here's why they suck" talking points and then at the end of the article even points out that the license talk has nothing to do with their assertions.
> Prusa responded to this certainty by not diversifying their business model whatsoever. There has only ever been one Prusa product: their latest 3D printer model.
These are just the first few pages of their blog, I could go on.
> Or, you can buy an Ender 3 off Amazon right now for $180 and you’ll get better than half of the value of an Mk4 at an 85% discount.
It's difficult to assume that the author is communicating in good faith when one reads something as obviously wrong as this. If you can't spot the difference between a Ender 3 and an MK4, you shouldn't be writing about 3d printers.
> Prusa’s naive strategy is causing their position to fall like a rock.
Are Prusa's financials available somewhere that I'm not aware of? They seem to be doing fine considering they can't make printers fast enough to keep up with demand.
Author here. I have used Prusas, as well as many other 3D printers. I know how they are distinguished from the rest. The thing is, there really isn't much of a difference between an Ender 3 and a Mk4 that a typical consumer (that is, not an enthusiast) would understand as justifying the bigger price tag. The Mk4 is a better printer, by a long shot, but not by the same factor as the price tag. The Mk4 price completely eliminates Prusa from the entry- to mid-level market which is a big lost opportunity when new enthusiasts are learning on other brands -- and by the time they want to upgrade to a Mk4 price-point, they have much, much better options than Prusa and brand loyalty to someone else. Prusa is not the right choice at any price point anymore and has little to no market relevance left, except maybe among a certain niche of enthusiasts.
> The thing is, there really isn't much of a difference between an Ender 3 and a Mk4 that a typical consumer (that is, not an enthusiast) would understand as justifying the bigger price tag.
I'm not sure what makes you feel so comfortable deciding that for everyone? Having vastly better components that are much less likely to fail is something I think anyone would find valuable. If you give an absolute beginner an MK4 and an Ender 3, they're going to use the MK4 every time. It's vastly less effort to get started and the QC of one vs the other isn't even a competition.
> The Mk4 price completely eliminates Prusa from the entry- to mid-level market which is a big lost opportunity when new enthusiasts are learning on other brands
I mean, this is the trick of your faulty logic, right? Prusa makes flex-plates popular and the Chinese printers all jump on board. Prusa makes auto-leveling popular and the Chinese companies (eventually... why aren't you talking about how long it took them to do this?) jump on board. And on and on it goes. And it's not just Prusa, it's the whole 3d community that's been looted by these Chinese companies. They're happy to steal from Voron and really anyone and then you act like it's innovation and decry Prusa for not innovating recently enough for you and praise the looters for selling you something cheaper because it's made by slaves.
You seem great at spotting these lost opportunities, but you act like just because a company isn't doing the things you want, they're dying. It's poorly conceived at best and astro turfing/stanning at worst.
> and by the time they want to upgrade to a Mk4 price-point, they have much, much better options than Prusa
You could really help your position by backing up these claims. What makes them "much, much better" ? Initial cost of ownership and what else? Cloud slicing is not something I would want -- ever, so please don't list that as some objective "better."
> Prusa is not the right choice at any price point anymore and has little to no market relevance left, except maybe among a certain niche of enthusiasts.
I generally agree with your comments but I think you've accidentally brought up a really good point. Prusa would do well do improve on getting their new models out the door faster. The Mk3S was getting fairly long in the tooth before the Mk4 came out. The printer they introduced before that also suffered from a very long development cycle. This leads to lost sales in a competitive market.
What you've said is true, but it assumes the goal is money. If that's the measurement, then yes they should do that. I'm not him so I can't say for certain, but money doesn't seem to be Jo's end-goal.
I’m 100% in favor of money not always being the primary purpose of a business. That being said, you still have to be profitable (if even by a penny), or the business will cease to exist at some point. I hope there is enough of a niche for what Prusa wants to continue to do, but I’m not sure.
They will be doing fine until suddenly they're not doing fine. There's a delayed effect that you see from your business decisions because it might take years to play out. It's best to get ahead of problems before they become problems.
I think Prusa should step up their again and realize that open source isn't really the problem. Everybody gets cloned, closed source or not. It's the nature of the beast.
>If you give an absolute beginner an MK4 and an Ender 3, they're going to use the MK4 every time. It's vastly less effort to get started and the QC of one vs the other isn't even a competition.
The actual market isn't Ender 3 vs Mk4.
It's extremely hard to argue that Prusa printers represent a good value in any market segment in a post-Bambu world.
>What makes them "much, much better" ? Initial cost of ownership and what else?
They're cheaper and produce better prints faster without requiring any manual tuning by the user.
I'm a hobbyist. I own multiple high end printers that I've dumped $2k+ into. They're fantastic machines that I enjoy tinkering with.
But I've also got an X1 for when I just want a part and don't want to think about it. It's an appliance. It just works. That has massive value for people where printing is a means to an end rather than a hobbyist journey.
If you're a hobbyist that wants to tinker, there's nothing that justifies dropping 5x the cost of an E3 on a Mk4. $800 will go a long way toward making up any difference.
Or just go all-in and build any of the full hobbyist designs that will be a far better printer than a Mk4 anyway.
>And yet, they can't make printers fast enough.
Because they refuse to engineer their products for mass production. Which is, coincidentally, one of the reason why they're also failing to compete on price.
I assume they want to keep their printers with 3d printed parts for the following reasons:
(1) Dog fooding their own printers (in mass production) so they're reliable;
(2) Making DIY, modifications and repairs easy on their printers;
(3) Ease of prototyping and making new products.
It seems that given a large production scale, (3) would not be so important. (1) seems very important, but maybe they could reduce the number of printed parts and still have "enough dogfooding"? As for (2), perhaps they could compromise on having injection molded parts that can be replaced (i.e. are interchangeable with) printed parts.
> It's extremely hard to argue that Prusa printers represent a good value in any market segment in a post-Bambu world.
I don't find it hard.
> produce better prints
Citation needed*
> faster
I've heard this is true, so let's roll with it!
>multiple high end printers that I've dumped $2k+ into.
You must mean high-end China, yeah? $2k doesn't sound like much when it comes to FDM high end.
> But I've also got an X1 for when I just want a part and don't want to think about it. It's an appliance. It just works. That has massive value for people where printing is a means to an end rather than a hobbyist journey.
Are you thinking that Prusa printers are a "hobbyist journey"? Because they're definitely an appliance. Not only that, they're an appliance that can be repaired with off-the-shelf parts for the most part.
> If you're a hobbyist that wants to tinker, there's nothing that justifies dropping 5x the cost of an E3 on a Mk4. $800 will go a long way toward making up any difference.
I totally agree (given the constraint.) No tinkering necessary on an MK4. Have you ever used one?
> Because they refuse to engineer their products for mass production. Which is, coincidentally, one of the reason why they're also failing to compete on price.
This is more eye-of-the-beholder stuff. You think this is bad. I think this is good. Makes the world go 'round.
While it does hinder them competing on price, it also grants them some flexibility to improve designs over time. Since the printer has printed parts, users can print the new/better designs if they want.
The thing I've noticed about Chinese-printer proponents is that they're hyper focused on price. Even when I say "Initial cost of ownership and what else?" you lead with "They're cheaper" Let's say that the prints are better, I think they do print faster and I'll take your word for it that they don't require any manual tuning by the user (just like Prusa.) What about repair? What about contributions to the 3d printing community? What about support (and I'm not talking about Prusa's chat/email)?
My first Prusa printer was an MK2. After its release, Prusa continued to iterate on that product and offered multiple upgrade kits over its lifetime at reasonable prices that brought compelling features. Do you think BL will do the same? Or will they instead want you to buy a whole new printer to get the latest whatever that they've lifted from the community?
I'm going to guess that you don't care. That's your right of course, but there are people who do care about e-waste and planned obsolescence and buying as few products made by slaves as possible. Those people aren't wrong just like you're not wrong. We just value different things.
I'm not the one who set that goalpost and I disagree with it because it's nonsensical. The market is not a binary between a $1000 Mk4 and a $200 Ender 3, period.
>You must mean high-end China, yeah? $2k doesn't sound like much when it comes to FDM high end.
No, I'm talking about hobbyist builds. Yes, you can drop a couple of orders of magnitude more on industrial printers but I was under the impression we were discussing the consumer space, unless you'd like to move those goalposts?
>Are you thinking that Prusa printers are a "hobbyist journey"? Because they're definitely an appliance. Not only that, they're an appliance that can be repaired with off-the-shelf parts for the most part.
That's not what I was saying at all. I was saying that if you're after the hobbyist journey, dumping $1k into a Mk4 doesn't make sense. That's money better invested in something that will ultimately be a better printer.
If you're after the appliance experience, the Mk4 is a worse option than a Bambu would be.
>While it does hinder them competing on price, it also grants them some flexibility to improve designs over time. Since the printer has printed parts, users can print the new/better designs if they want.
This isn't mutually exclusive.
Bambu has made revisions to the parts they send out of the factory. End users have made extensive modifications like the excellent Hydra AMS.
Being flexible doesn't mean locking yourself into low volume, expensive production.
>don't require any manual tuning by the user (just like Prusa.)
Not just like Prusa. Better than Prusa does. The machine calibrates itself for EM and PA for any arbitrary filament. This is a large part of the "produces better prints" equation.
>What about contributions to the 3d printing community?
Their slic3r fork is the basis for Orca Slicer, which has become my preferred slicer on non-Bambu printers.
>What about repair?
Bambu provides detailed repair guides for the entire machine in both text and video format:
>What about support (and I'm not talking about Prusa's chat/email)?
Nearly every part on the printer is directly available on Bambu's webstore and reasonably priced.
>Or will they instead want you to buy a whole new printer to get the latest whatever that they've lifted from the community?
Long term support remains a question mark but they've made promising first moves on that front. The P1 series have seen a number of upgrades since launch and the firmware for the X1 continues to receive significant firmware growth -- a completely new motor calibration routine got pushed out this month, for example. It's an unknowable at this point.
I will say that as someone new to the space, the initial cost and having access to reasonably priced filament is the only thing I can look at ahead of time. Bambu's A1 printer is a no-brainer for people completely new to it. And given that most folks deep in that space have more than one printer, you can treat it as an introduction thing to figure out if you like it before committing fully.
But the author isn't saying (only) "Prusa is losing the ultra-beginner market." That's moving the goal posts. The author is making sweeping claims beyond just that market, right?
When you're in the market for a new TV or phone or whatever, do you buy the absolute cheapest one you can find and then decry the other players in the market because their stuff is clearly low value because the ICO is higher? Maybe you do, that's your choice of course, but there are plenty of people who buy, for example, Apple because they see beyond the ICO.
ok, fair. i wasn't adressing the whole range, but merely pointing out that there is a subset of consumers who will only consider the initial price.
myself i do that for any product that i am not familiar with unless the running costs are evident. (so i'd buy a more expensive car that uses less gas, if i were in the market for a car) for someone new to 3D printers, running costs are not evident because i don't even know how much i'll use that thing.
TVs are an odd example because they don't have any running costs beyond how long they live before they break down, but even the cheapest lives long enough to make a more expensive one not worth it unless it has better specs that i care about.
From experience in the 3D printing space, it's too early to say Bambu out-Prusa'd Prusa, because there hasn't been enough time to know whether the Bambu printers will outlast a Prusa printer. The business model the author is discussing is not unlike the business model for Glowforge, and based on my wife's experience in that industry I'm not sure that business model is working out so well.
I've been printing continuously on a pair of Mk3s for 4+ years, minimal maintenance. (That is, wear and tear on print plates and nozzles, and one thermistor replacement.) Maintenance is important once you venture beyond hobbyist needs.
I did buy a Bambu P1S instead of a Mk4 this year when it was time to add a another printer for my wife's side gig. It's a great machine, except when it has problems. The software is bad at diagnosing the problem, and the UI gets really confused on status messages, and the software wants nothing more than to hold your hand down the wrong path to fix the problem. There's a veneer to everything Bambu that makes it look good as long as you don't look too closely. I'll see where this printer is at after 4+ years of continuous printing, but based on my present experience I'd be surprised if my P1S is still running in 2 years. (And no, its not lost on me that as a Prusa purchaser I bought from their competitor this time around.)
I expect Bambu to push Prusa to compete on features - I am fine as a non-hobbyist paying a higher premium for reliability.
I wasn't aware that Prusa is floundering and wouldn't have minded a little more development there. However it wouldn't surprise me as when I was shopping for my latest 3d printer replacement it was too easy to choose something else. For the price of the Mk4 most of the market is within the same budget (many options arguably better and more capable).
> They have been struggling as of late, and came under criticism for making the firmware of their Mk4 printer non-free.
One of the biggest reasons I didn't choose a Mk4 was precisely because they moved away from open source.
If you're like me an values open source highly and is looking for a printer, the VORON printers are the way to go. They're DIY printers where you assemble them yourself, so they're not for you if you just want to unbox and press print, but if you want a completely open source printer (from software to hardware) then look no further.
You can even get a cheaper VORON 2.4 or Trident kit for less than the Mk4, and still have some room to replace parts with! And you'll get a much more powerful printer to boot.
Oh, and I avoid the Bambu labs printers because they demand an always on internet connection for you to be able to print with them. The repair-ability is also very poor.
I have a half assembled Trident on a table behind me right now. Like you, I greatly value open source. I didn't realize at the time I ordered the Trident that the Mk4 firmware was non-free, but Prusa didn't make the final cut regardless. In my mind, Prusa hasn't been showing enough innovation. The bed-slinging Mk4 coming out at the price it did against CoreXY printers like Voron and Bambu was like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Their new extruder is nice but not enough.
I've been really impressed by the Voron community as well. I've found them very helpful and supportive, and the creativity here is amazing. The long list of mods is also impressive: some are incredibly useful and some are more fun than anything else. I understand that a lot of people just want a box to show up at their door that they can plug in and start printing with. Those folks should buy a Bambu. For everyone else, there's Voron.
I'm a bit further on with my Trident than you are[0], and with around 350 print hours I'm starting to get into the modding swamp. There's just so many good/cool things to add!
I also disqualified the Mk4 on other factors. The Mk4 not having an enclosure and the Tridet having such a small footprint was another major factor for me. (I know there's an enclosure for the Mk4, but it's very large and expensive.)
Pretty much this ^^^. Some people just want to _use_ tools and some people want to build/hack/tinker with them. Voron and Bambu seem to cover both use cases. Annex Engineering has some cool stuff in the 'build' category as well.
Voron kits are pretty tempting, but although I have been thinking about a Trident one myself, I’ve been looking at the Vivedino Troodon 2.0 series, and wondering why there aren’t more Voron-like pre-assembled printers out there.
Ah, you have a quote right above that line stating it is the firmware that is non-free; hardware isn't mentioned. You might want to edit your original post so it is consistent with what you are trying to communicate.
No worries, the edit cutoff has bit me before as well. But just to clarify, you do mean that the hardware is closed source, and the firmware is not? I did see some licensing stuff on prusa's GitHub, looks like they have non-commercial licensing for their graphics package.
There’s a bigger issue I noticed lately that really concerns me more than situations like Prusa. I’m trying to build a Millennium Machine Milo CNC and sourcing the aluminum plates cost a pretty penny. Whereas if you were in China, you probably know someone that can machine it for you for a fraction of the cost even factoring cost of living. You can see people on YouTube making these really elaborate hobby projects like 6 DoF robot arms with parts they machined and anodized. This makes me concern about our future and what it means for future companies like Apple.
Funny. I look at American youtube and I worry exactly the same thing about the UK ("where have all our hobbyist engineers gone?"). The grass is always greener.
I guess you just have to know right people, I have a machinist friend who does small jobs for his friends all the time and some people have milling machines in their garage.
You can probably get machining work done very cheap in the local technical school.
I suspect this article isn't accurate about Prusa. It's not clear that they're "floundering" (versus worried). They do have other products (resin printers, supplies like filament). There is a PrusaConnect cloud service and they recently launched a Printables website for sharing models. And probably other stuff I missed.
I think Prusa has had a couple of missteps of late, but they’re not in the gutter yet.
On the XL: the 0.6mm makes sense with the build volume, to significantly improve print times, but seems to really not work well with the 5 toolhead models, and introduces massive amounts of zits, stringing, cross-contamination, etc.
On the Mk4: at the price point, it’s maybe missing a few features to really hold up against the X1C, maybe even the X1E. Spaghetti detection (camera support), klipper, real input shaping, etc.
On input shaping: Prusa bet on the wrong horse with input shaping. Adding a <2g sensor to the toolhead was the right solution, and generating default input shaping profiles based on models in the factory was not. Most Prusa customers would’ve been happy to add the part themselves. Now they’ve sunk so much development and money into this, they refuse to accept it was the wrong approach and switch gears.
Klipper: Marlin is old. Sure, it’s amazing what Prusa is able to squeeze out of it, but at some point, the tech debt is just going to hold you back too much to be competitive. That happened around mid 2022 for Prusa, and yet Prusa decided to push 3 new printers on the same ancient firmware.
>On the XL: the 0.6mm makes sense with the build volume, to significantly improve print times, but seems to really not work well with the 5 toolhead models, and introduces massive amounts of zits, stringing, cross-contamination, etc.
More fundamentally, the XL uses an open frame design specifically because Jo wanted to prioritize being able to easily see and remove prints.
The entire gantry sits on a cantilevered open frame -- that's a fundamental engineering failure that's going to mean the XL will always be slower and produce lower quality prints than closed frame designs.
Please explain to me why you think there is a fundamental engineering failure in the frame design - I'd like to see the data.
Just so you can get an idea of where I am coming from, I have a Prusa XL and a Voron 2.4 right next to each other.
The Prusa XL frame is very solid and it's also not a quad gantry. The lead screws take the weight of the bed. The Voron uses 20x20mm extrusions and the Prusa XL uses 30x30mm extrusions and it has stamped steel for additional rigidity and support. On the Voron, I've added titanium backers to reduce flex from thermal linear expansion. While the XL would technicall have thermal expansion, when enclosed, it will be much less from the much larger extrusions and additional support.
The toolheads on the XL on the other hand are heavy, they will likely be the larger issue with speed+quality. People also complain about the Stealthburner weight with TAP.
There are faster projects than the Voron just like there are faster printers than the XL. You have to weigh what you want. The toolchanger design, for me, works flawlessly and is so much better than the AMS, ERCF, MMS. More companies will clone it.
This is getting into first principles territory. The short version is that the gantry being on a cantilever and an open frame means it's going to act like a tuning fork under toolhead acceleration. Higher resonance limits toolhead acceleration before print quality nose dives.
I haven't seen any accelerometer graphs posted for an XL, but it doesn't take much more than opening up PrusaSlicer and finding maximum accels set to 3k to see the direct result of that. That's where the rest of the community was 4-5 years ago. There's a reason why Prusa has an entire blogpost making excuses for why their printers' performance numbers aren't up to snuff compared to modern designs (while also cherry picking comparative numbers)[1].
It's not my only complaint about the XL but it's the most obvious one. I haven't been impressed in general with the prints I've seen come off those machines.
You should also check out multi-color print times on the XL vs the ASM or any other solution.
I think what Bambu has done is incredible but these are different machines for different reasons. The XL has a massive print area compared to the Bambu printers and the toolhead design I prefer. I just gifted an x1-carbon to my mom for Christmas. I'm not a hater or Prusa shill but people are just spouting opinions without data or truly understanding the differences between the machines.
It's based on basic engineering principles. Prusa can't magic away physics and these are lessons the rest of the community learned years ago. E3D had to course correct on some of the same mistakes with their toolchanger. There are good reasons why nearly every other CoreXY design you're going to encounter uses a closed frame (and the best will use structural panels).
>I think what Bambu has done is incredible but these are different machines for different reasons.
Sure, it's got its niche. But the drawbacks will narrow that niche. Prusa's ever narrowing niche is kind of the focus of the OP.
> The XL has a massive print area
Which makes running slow compared to other designs more painful since print times are cubic with volume.
>just spouting opinions without data or truly understanding the differences between the machines.
If you showed me a square wheel, I can tell you it's not going to roll particularly smoothly without needing to perform extensive testing on that specific implementation of square wheel. I can do that because it's something that's been tried elsewhere and we already know the results.
This style of open frame has been tried before. We know Prusa didn't choose to use it because there's any sort of engineering advantage because Jo has explicitly told us why they're using it.
I didn’t know about this point. Which printer would be closed frame, so I can understand the difference?
From what I’ve been able to observe, the quality of the XL is quite good for single tool head prints, however the quality really nosedives when multiple tool heads are introduced, and a bunch of people have been finding tricks to improve things (more wiping, less lifting, insane retractions, etc).
There is nothing wrong with Marlin, especially not for the purposes Prusa uses it for.
Marlins biggest weakness is needing to recompile for some things because they are defined by compile-time. All other things like active input shaping calibration can be added relatively easy.
There is _a lot_ wrong with Marlin. It is a complex codebase, full with ancient artefacts, litterred with preprocessor ifdefs every 2-3 lines of code, dynamic includes in the middle of CPP files, etc[1]. It's about as unreadable as C++ code gets--well, I guess it's not template metaprogramming.
Klipper by contrast is a breeze to read through[2].
I am very grateful for Marlin, for all of reprap, and everyone who has contributed to it. But saying there is nothing wrong with it is straight up misguided.
I’ve converted all my Marlin printers to Klipper. The ease of tuning and macros made a substantial difference, and now I have a proper API (and MQTT integration) to get notified of printing progress and issues.
And just as far as _printing_ is concerned, the speed and quality I can get out of an 8-year-old Prusa clone with Klipper is pretty amazing.
One problem is the inherent assymmetry. Bambu gets to trivially copy open-source innovations like automatic bed-leveling or the corexy motion system without man-years of research. Then they get to use the saved time to improve upon those designs or the user experience but don't return anything back in return (for the most part, their slicer spawned Orca due to the software OS license). But now the OS community is at a disadvantage if they introduce something novel and keep it secret as they have to spend countless hours catching up, whereas the commercial entity can in turn just easily copy the community's new innovations and is free to spend the saved time to innovate in other areas again.
It would be nice if there was something like the GPL for "designs" or mechanical systems like automatic bed leveling where companies would have to open source their hardware and software implementation details in turn for using the "idea".
Watch Naomi Wu on YouTube. Look beyond her jarring aesthetic, and you’ll get to see the process of building something from idea to prototype and even production in China, specifically Shenzhen.
It genuinely makes me happy that a place like that exists, but sad that there doesn’t seem to be any place like it anywhere else; certainly not in the west.
If you wanted to build a 3D printer from scratch, they have what are functionally large indoor malls selling every component you could possibly need. The people at these shops all know their stuff, and the whole place is just buzzing with genuine makers. And for production it seems as though everyone knows someone with a machine shop and an injection molding setup.
For all of the talk of China’s decline, I wouldn’t count someone out with a place like Shenzhen; the west has nothing like it. Silicon Valley would be so much better socketed into an agile manufacturing juggernaut like that.
I think it's a bit premature to say Prusa is floundering. If they were a VC funded startup with billions of debt needing to grow x% YoY to prevent a catastrophic implosion I would agree. Prusa seems reasonably self sufficient though and if they stop growing or shrink I wouldn't say they've failed. I think some people forget that businesses can still continue to exist, pay their employees well, and that's success.
On the other hand, Bambu still has to prove itself as sustainable in this regard and if they're selling their printers with tiny margins (or even at a loss) we've yet to see what their actual plans are, and with an ecosystem comes the potential for exploiting customers. They've already been dishonest in terms of their use of OSS.
And while Bambu did "steal" some software, their hardware seems reasonably novel - I don't think they've exploited Prusa specifically, and any trouncing they've done is because Prusa sat on the MK3 a bit too long.
One last thing is I think Bambu and Prusa can coexist. Prusa evolved from RepRap and combine both out of the box quality and DIY-ability, which is still a good draw for the same kind of tinkerers after a printer in the first place. In the other hand, Bambu products are the Apple/HP of printers - you dont do any tinkering even if you want and if it stops working you send it back.
Basically, the whole argument is "If Prusa had created a closed source moat to trap customers....", and that view is an anathema to open source where Josef came from.
The current line of printers are this bastardized mixture of DRM and open source: There's a piece of the PCB you have to break to "allow" loading unsigned firmware. And breaking the PCB like that makes it non-returnable. That crap's lost a lot of open source people just with that stunt alone.
And now, his newest printer is closed source. Basically one of the major selling points you paid for (high quality components, open source) is now gone. Vanished.
As for me, I'd rather open source printers so I can fix them when they invariably break. This closed source crap, especially combined with a "cloud slicer", is just premeditated e-waste. I've been down this road before of "buy cheap shit but cloud aware, and breaks when the company gets bored".
At a larger view, I'd say it's an incompatibility between FLOSS and commercial when they're being shoehorned together into a company. I would say that FLOSS is an ethic, in which businesses demand ethics to be sold off for cash. And that's what we saw with the PCB break-off for DRM removal, and now just straight up closed source. (SSC Meditations on Moloch covers this selling of ethics and being worse off than you started)
> None of the opportunities that Prusa missed called for them to compromise on open source. Not a single one.
I made a distinction of FLOSS, not just "open source". There's a massive distinction between them. And now, they're going closed source. (Or technically, they have been as long as they have DRM signed firmware.)
> Especially when you make that 10% open: someone else is going to repurpose it, do the other 90%, and eat your lunch.
Which is why setting up moats is absolutely required with "open source" stuff, or stuff you plunder from open source. Which is why Bambu did cloud-shit with things like stl storage and slicing.
Prusa is doing the requisite dev work for everyone else. They too need a moat, lest they die. Which is the point of the article (them struggling).
> Note that none of this is material to the license of the product, be it free or non-free. It’s about building a brand, developing a customer relationship, and identifying and exploiting market opportunities.
Um... ok? But the product is what they are selling, and that is based on research on development, which is under a license. Other companies use this R&D, do not open it, and sell their product cheaper while having an completely opaque R&D process.
> Hackers and enthusiasts who found companies like Prusa tend to imagine that the product is everything, but it’s not. Maybe 10% of the work is developing the 3D printer itself – don’t abandon the other 90% of your business.
3D printers became accessible to consumers because of a focus on open source and engineering. It is no where near mature. To call it '10%' is ridiculous. You think they should spend 90% of their effort to heavily monetize something that isn't mainstream consumer ready? So they can choke the market while it is entirely filled with hobbyists and enthusiasts, who are probably the most notoriously picky consumers in the world when it comes to hardware?
> You need to deal with sales and marketing, chase down promising leads, identify and respond to risks, look for and exploit new market opportunities, and much more to be successful.
What does that even mean with regards to 3D printing?
I find this really fascinating as my company has several products and we've been considering for years whether open source is a better direction than what we are doing now, which is to sell closed source software to enterprises. Needless to say, this is a very different market than the one Prusa is attacking, but I've still got opinions.
I find it interesting that this comes the day after Xmas. My house was already completely swamped with cheap Chinese (or similarly cheap manufacturing country) crap. Plastic toys, fire-retardant ugly Disney-esque pajamas made in Myanmar. My kids threw tantrums because they "only" got 14 presents instead of the 16 their siblings got, but almost all those toys are forgotten now a day later. I bought my daughter reproductions of prints from Anna Atkins (the first person to create a book of photography in 1843), a kit to make cyanotypes (the technique she used), and had them solve riddles to get their presents (my daughter's clue was "blue"). I bet she won't remember that. My kids are buried in junk, and it is partially my fault, but let's at least assign a little blame to relatives trying to make up for their parenting failures years ago.
I say all that because I disagree with DD's assertion that the low-cost strategy at Best Buy is something that will always win and is what Prusa should have done. Sure, they probably would have earned much more by somehow offshoring to China. But, I still try to buy things consciously, and would making a bunch of cheap plastic shit from a cheap 3D printer from China be better for my life? I am skeptical.
If all you took away is “cheap plastic from China” and that they should have gone for low cost, you haven’t paid enough attention while reading this article. It talks about building a better product and investing in the experience and ecosystem, which the chinese alternatives have done. We are about to witness the same thing happening to cars very soon.
It's been interesting seeing this happen in multiple industries. Hifi is one of them, companies like Topping, Fiio, etc.. make great products for a fraction of the cost of previously well-known Japanese or western companies and have the measurements to prove it.
Robot vaccuum cleaners are the same, we went from irobot being the best to being eclipsed by companies like Roborock or Dreame (although given privacy issues, I'd get something can be rooted)
> Fiio etc.. make great products for a fraction of the cost of previously well-known Japanese or western companies and have the measurements to prove it.
Ironically, most of the ADCs on the market are equalled or beat out by a $10 Apple USB-C-to-3.5mm dongle smaller than my pinkie finger, and the measurements prove it.
Fine, I'll admit I am not always a careful reader.
But, I did read it as: they should have diversified. I know from first hand experience that this is really expensive to do for a company. And, only possible when you can reduce costs in other ways, which China obviously has an advantage in the manufacturing realm.
I think what I'm trying to say is that instead of diversifying, maybe their best bet is to make a really high quality product that appeals to a different category of people than Best Buy consumers. I have no evidence to prove this feeling though. It is just what I aspire to buy when I do buy things.
Prusa's big problem is that they stopped innovating. They plateaud on their current tech, and just made tiny incremental improvements, years apart. There was plenty of things they could have been working on, new technologies, massive speed increases, etc. Bambu Labs created a better product in all ways (but one; very hard to modify), and now there's just no reason to buy a Prusa. You'll be spending more for an objectively inferior product.
The trouble is, the author doesn't at any point discuss what makes the products better. They just claim they are as if initial cost is the only factor.
Author here. For the price tag of a Prusa Mk4 you can get a Bambu X1 Carbon 3D which is, metric for metric, a better printer -- larger volume, 16 color prints, faster printing, better resolution, pretty much all stats. Go for Creality and you can get the K1 Max at $300 less than the Mk4 (currently on sale, so more like $400 less) which is even better, again, in every spec and comes with an ecosystem that Creality has invested in to a much greater extent than Prusa.
You should know you can't just compare specs and stats and say the K1 Max is better. Print quality and reliability isn't something that shows up on a spec sheet, and Creality struggles here. Bambu is certainly a credible competitor though.
Honestly, as someone who's been in the 3d printing space for over a decade... Bambu Labs isn't a competitor to Prusa. There is no Prusa printer that is as fast, as reliable, produces the quality prints, as any printer from Bambu. I've used both extensively, the X1C since Kickstarter days, the Prusas for... just about ever. The only edge, the only objective property that Prusa holds over Bambu Labs is customization; Prusa gives away all the details you need to majorly modify their printers. Beyond that there just is no reason to buy a Prusa. Print quality on any of my Bambu printers was equal or better out of the box (minus one that had a warped bed, that was replaced for free) than any of my Prusa printers, even ones with extensive tuning. It's just a better product. Better design, better manufactur, better price, better quality output, better software (though I've migrated to Orcaslicer). Prusa has spent the last decade being the top of the pack, holding market share and stagnating. Now they've been dislodged, and I can't see any compelling reason for them to come back.
My experience did not match your. My X1C combo hadn't really work out of the box. I was able to get maybe 2 prints so far.
That said, I am just an sample of one and the only reason why I bought it because my business need seems more pressing than waiting for Prusa to deliver the MMU3 kits.
I have maybe a few hundred prints on Bambu Labs printers, and I've had fewer than 20 failures, pretty much all from bad design choices on my part. They have been quick, reliable workhorses that just spit out the parts I need.
I did have an issue with one of them having a warped bed, which caused bad adhesion on several prints, but I contacted support, they walked me through some debugging, then just sent me a new one. It seems that early on they had a manufacturer that was putting out warped beds that weren't caught in QC, but they've dropped the manufacturer. Maybe you got one of these warped beds as well? You can diagnose that with a straightedge, a ruler, and a flashlight.
Oh interesting, my AMS has worked flawlessly. This is interesting because I've tried many multimaterial solutions, and other than a Voron with multiple hot ends, none of them worked well at all until the Bambu AMS. It was really wasteful at first, but that was the only negative thing I could say about it. Maybe Bambu Labs has more QC problems than I thought. My experiences were all so simply and directly positive (across 4 of their printers now), I kind of expected that to just be the norm.
If you read the article the contents are pretty much 1) Prusa screwed themselves. 2) The chinese products are materially better and cheaper in every way.
If you want to print crap out of your 3d printer you're totally allowed, but most people I know print useful and interesting tools and additions to their home that make things easier.
I totally agree. I'm only saying that if you are buying the cheapest 3d printer you can find at BestBuy then you are probably not making interesting and useful tools. I wish I could prove that, it is purely speculation. I just see my own world littered with a bunch of cheap crap that satisfies a "I WANT NOW" reflex and generally does not lead to a flurry of creativity.
For the record, I still believe that a "bicycle for the mind" is the best toy. That's why I've got my kids (7,9,11) using Linux and making music with Sonic PI, running Steam on Linux (which works pretty well!) and hopefully much more. It is a constant battle to fight iOS apps with ads and the junk advertised on YouTube, and I'm not sure I'm winning.
Honestly, I think Prusa is floundering for the same reason other equipment makers are floundering.
People bought a ton of goods during the pandemic, because they didn't go out much and now people are going out more and the spend is returning to services, meals and entertainment, so people are spending a lot less on devices.
Higher interest rates are also reducing capital investments across the world.
We are just seeing the cyclical change in spending habits over time.
In a capitalist system, success is often measured as having the most bucks, be it deserved or undeserved, how they got them, or how many people were ripped off on the way doesn't matter.
Measuring the success of open-source projects is more about how they managed to impact the world positively. How they make tasks easier, bring happiness, inspire people, build community, give people more control over their lives, or even save lives, etc. Therefore open source products don't need to compete with closed-source projects, because they have a different measurement of success.
If an open-source engineer figures out a way that pays your bills, then this is even better, but not necessarily required for someone to be a successful open-source hard- or software engineer. It is a failure of the capitalistic system and broadly society if those engineers are not given the chance to continue their good work.
And this is were I disagree, advocating for being more competitive, and giving up your morale rules one by one is "race to the bottom" behavior. This is why there are 1 dollar stores and tons of low quality crab for sale.
You need to be profitable to remain alive as a company. I agree with you we shouldn't race to the bottom, but if there's room for Prusa to compete without compromising value, they should do that.
I don’t really think Prusa is floundering, but I just don’t get their go-to-market strategy or technology roadmap. Klipper is now taking the low-end Chinese printer segment by storm, Vorons are a _way_ better value for money if you value maintainability (although assembly won’t be everyone’s wheelhouse), and the MK4 wasn’t really that innovative.
Bambu is just catering to a different market—they just went and added dozens of little creature comforts and tweaks to their hardware and software to the point where it’s literally point and click, and even the offshoots are good. I’m in the process of switching from SuperSlicer-which caters better to non-Prusa printers-to OrcaSlicer, which is full of nice touches and productivity enhancements like multi-plate projets, and that’s a Bambu Studio clone.
What I’m afraid of with Bambu is long-term maintainability of their printers. I can replace belts, gears, extruders, etc., the works for most of my printers (I just re-printed a broken X-axis assembly for my 8-year-old Prusa clone), but am really unsure I’d be able to maintain a Bambu four years down the road.
Sorry this article is incorrect as it gets. Bambu could have done the same thing with Cura or any other slicer program and Cura and Prusa are built on other open source projects so to say if they kept the doors closed it would have helped is not honoring all of the engineering efforts that came before the big names capitalized on it. What has actually happened is that Bambu figured out the market isn’t people that like to tinker with their 3d printer - the market is people want to print things to tinker with. They focused on their market and made a ton of small features that add up to a user experience that is nearly as simple as it can be allowing you to do something as easy as print from your phone. While Prusa finds more places to put PRUSA BY PRUSA ORIGINAL PRUSA on their machines that look like 3d printed hacker machines Bambu made their machines simple with a minimalist design that actually looks good enough to show your friends without them wondering how long you looked at the matrix to get it running.
The article does nothing to back up the claim in the title, that Prusa is actually floundering. Presumably if somone writes a post tomorrow about how the Hare programming language is floundering, and that ends up trending in various forums with the language dying being taken as matter of fact, then Drew would have liked whoever wrote it to have done a bit more research.
I wonder how Ultimaker fits into this picture. They were an early pioneer in 3D printing, had all of their stuff open source and most of it still IIRC, but pivoted from the consumer market to more business users, with a bunch of services on top.
Was that the right move? Their current printers are priced out of consumer range though, which is a pity.
Sounds like Prusa made the mistake of thinking a product is a business, and that's it. I wouldn't count out Prusa, though. They've built a very strong brand, and there's still room to pivot or innovate. Even if they don't, I'm sure they can limp along at a smaller size for a while.
One thing I learned from 3D printing is that it doesn't take a genius to assemble a working robot. I don't think closed-source software and hardware is really a moat here? It's timing belts and lead screws on a frame.
What a nightmare. Grimly funny to see 3d printers getting pressured to take up all the 2d printer business models everyone hates (service contracts, proprietary consumables, cloud management software, etc.).