Tony
Staff member
I have been into 3D printing for quite a while now with my little Ender 3 Pro. I have upgraded the main board, added a touch screen and of course auto bed leveling, but it always gave me headaches. No matter how many times I manually setup the bed, it would work for a bit and then even the auto bed leveling would mess up and either dig into the bed, or have too large of a gap which caused adhesion issues. Finally after I needed to print something and the ender failed 3 times in a row no matter what I did, I tossed (literally, shouldn't have) the Ender in the closet and that was the end of my 3D printing.
But I still needed to print parts here and there... So I did what any mildly insane person would do....
I purchased one of the most high end printers you can get that was not a "Pro" unit. Those are over $20K and yea, NOPE! I ended up purchasing the Bambu Lab X1 Carbon and OMG I didn't know these things could just WORK! First print, flawless, second print, flawless and it just kept going. I have had some failures, but it's been because I needed to wash the build plate or I had my settings wrong with under extrusion or something and some small tweaks and it was once again flawless.
Take today for example, I did my first print since moving into the new office and the 9.5 hour print failed after 1.5 hours because the piece broke loose from the bed. I washed the bed and I have 5 minutes left on the print. It's just a Vesa mount to put on the back of my monitor to hold my Dell Wyse 5070 client that I use for work. But it's a file from Thingaverse and they had the walls a little thick, so I changed some settings, selected my filament and yea, it just printed.
The biggest difference (other than the X1C doesn't hardly fail) is the speed. Holy cow is this thing fast compared to entry level printers. The first time I saw this thing print I thought it was on the highest setting. Nope!!! It has two settings faster than the stock setting and it can print fast. I don't try it because it does great the way it is stock, and going faster causes Z lines. But man, you put in a file, slice it in Bambu Studio and send it.
And yes, I also got the AMS so I can print 4 colors at once. You can add up to 4 of these AMS units giving you a max of 16 colors you can print at a time but I doubt I will ever do that. Multi color prints take forever due to the purge process. If I was forced to chose on the best multicolor printer, I would have to say that Prusa has this one beat since it uses multiple heads rather than a single head. This one can waste a lot of filament with the purge profile it has.
All in all though, spending a bit extra on a printer makes ALL the difference if you keep having issues with a worn out printer.
And yes, I thought about upgrading the Ender 3 Pro with linear rails and a more solid bed, but by the time I did that I would have to dump another $300 into it and for that money, you can get the Bambu A1, or for even cheaper, the A1 Mini and those also accept the AMS Lite so you can still do 4 color printing. The A1 Mini is $199 by itself. Talk about a steal!
But I still needed to print parts here and there... So I did what any mildly insane person would do....
I purchased one of the most high end printers you can get that was not a "Pro" unit. Those are over $20K and yea, NOPE! I ended up purchasing the Bambu Lab X1 Carbon and OMG I didn't know these things could just WORK! First print, flawless, second print, flawless and it just kept going. I have had some failures, but it's been because I needed to wash the build plate or I had my settings wrong with under extrusion or something and some small tweaks and it was once again flawless.
Take today for example, I did my first print since moving into the new office and the 9.5 hour print failed after 1.5 hours because the piece broke loose from the bed. I washed the bed and I have 5 minutes left on the print. It's just a Vesa mount to put on the back of my monitor to hold my Dell Wyse 5070 client that I use for work. But it's a file from Thingaverse and they had the walls a little thick, so I changed some settings, selected my filament and yea, it just printed.
The biggest difference (other than the X1C doesn't hardly fail) is the speed. Holy cow is this thing fast compared to entry level printers. The first time I saw this thing print I thought it was on the highest setting. Nope!!! It has two settings faster than the stock setting and it can print fast. I don't try it because it does great the way it is stock, and going faster causes Z lines. But man, you put in a file, slice it in Bambu Studio and send it.
And yes, I also got the AMS so I can print 4 colors at once. You can add up to 4 of these AMS units giving you a max of 16 colors you can print at a time but I doubt I will ever do that. Multi color prints take forever due to the purge process. If I was forced to chose on the best multicolor printer, I would have to say that Prusa has this one beat since it uses multiple heads rather than a single head. This one can waste a lot of filament with the purge profile it has.
All in all though, spending a bit extra on a printer makes ALL the difference if you keep having issues with a worn out printer.
And yes, I thought about upgrading the Ender 3 Pro with linear rails and a more solid bed, but by the time I did that I would have to dump another $300 into it and for that money, you can get the Bambu A1, or for even cheaper, the A1 Mini and those also accept the AMS Lite so you can still do 4 color printing. The A1 Mini is $199 by itself. Talk about a steal!