The elephant in the room was not addressed, that despite these great open-source advances, closed-sourced Bambu products have taken a big lead in price/performance. It would be nice to hear that Prusa is working on designs to close the gap ... to offset the bad news that the price of the MK4 does not reflect that changed industry reality.
These comments follow Prusa around but nobody seems to go beyond this type of surface level spec sheet take and into the details, especially in a more professional / high performance context. Prusa machines work in a production, factory-like environment and it isn't clear that Bambu or others can do that.
Specifically:
- What is the long term durability like?
--- Do the nozzles leak when using high performance materials? (E3D themselves cannot even ship anything other than Revo that can actually make this claim with the only exception being Prusa factory installed 0.4n V6s)
--- Extruder durability?
- What is the support experience like? We've heard it is patchy relative to Prusa, specifically around spare parts availability.
- How is the lifting / warping problem with the given build surfaces and enclosure? This is a non-trivial problem if you want to use the entire surface for large jobs with advanced materials.
Would be curious to know if you have any insights on these points or using Bambu in a professional context and how they perform.
>What is the long term durability like? --- Do the nozzles leak when using high performance materials? (E3D themselves cannot even ship anything other than Revo that can actually make this claim with the only exception being Prusa factory installed 0.4n V6s) --- Extruder durability?
The Bambu hotend is a fully integrated unit, with the (hardened steel) nozzle, hotend and throat being shrink-fitted together. It is at least as leak-resistant as the Revo. The extruder is broadly derivative of the Bondtech BMG/LGX, with hardened steel hob gears; I would expect it to have similar durability.
>What is the support experience like? We've heard it is patchy relative to Prusa, specifically around spare parts availability.
Bambu have had issues with availability of machines and spares, which is to be expected for a company growing at their speed. As I speak, most parts are available, with a few backordered with ETAs of early April.
>How is the lifting / warping problem with the given build surfaces and enclosure? This is a non-trivial problem if you want to use the entire surface for large jobs with advanced materials.
Auto bed leveling is fast and accurate, with optional confirmation of first layer quality using the LIDAR scanner. Build plate adhesion is what you'd expect from textured PEI. I have seen some complaints of warped beds. It's fully enclosed, which is essential for printing with materials like ABS. The controller's camera provides automatic failed print detection.
Neither Bambu or Prusa make truly industrial machines; if you need high uptime and business-level support, you'd want to buy something from the likes of Makerbot, Zortrax or Raise3D. Of course, you would pay several times more for the privilege. With that said, I see no reason to trust a Bambu machine any less than a Prusa.
Bambu is going to capture the prosumer market. People who want professional reliability will still buy Prusa or any of the "call for pricing" brands. I would be curious to know how much of Prusa's revenue is hobbyists vs professionals/support contracts.
Wouldn't you assume that closed-source products would generally have a competitive advantage against open-source products? Especially for products where most of the contributions to the project are from the company selling it. With closed-source you have to worry less about people simply selling copies of your design without having to have invested in any of the design process. Competitors also can't as easily include your design improvements into their products. And, there's definitely a cost associated with sharing internal designs.
