Bambu Lab P1S

Upgraded yesterday from my heavily modified CR6-SE and wow! 

The speed and quality are something else. In fact, that was my first thought after printing the scraper; my last printer would have struggled with that quality and could never have handled that speed. Unless I was making a business out of it, I never would have tuned that 3D printer enough to pull off that quality. And now it is just automatic. My old 3D prints "look" like 3D prints. Even at a bit of a distance. The scraper ONLY looks like a 3D print when you get up close.

Then there is the quality of life improvements. The rather solid integration between the hardware and software is also incredible. In the past I needed a PC running Octoprint and often needed another PC running to control it in addition to sometimes just needing to use the printer itself, directly. I was VERY skeptical about using the Bambu Handy app. I'm not sure how often I will print a model remotely. That feels like a gimmick to me at the moment. The control and management on the other hand mean that once a print job has gone to the printer, I can shut down everything but the printer and just let my phone handle it for me.

Problems? Mainly the ease of use. Everything here is so automatic and well tailored you would think we are much further along with 3D printers than we actually are. A quick look at the Reddit for these printers though, and you'll know that we aren't. Many questions abound on topics most of us would have learned quickly with an Ender series printer. People not knowing how to deal with clogs or replace basic maintenance parts. People not drying filaments and so on. And while I'm sure Ender based sub-reddits have much of the same, you would expect it there. 

With printers like the P1S, you can go hundreds of hours in some cases without a real problem to solve. And the problems can be a bit more expensive to solve because of the tighter control Bambu has over the ecosystem. They aren't as controlling as Apple, but push more than, say, Creality.

I also understand the annoyance the around the lack of things like open source firmware and hardware interoperability. 

That being said, I only modified my CR6 because it was lacking out of the box. In reality, I shouldn't have bought the CR6-SE. You should buy a product for the price and features it has as sold. You can't guarantee anything else. This isn't how much the 3D printer industry evolved though, so a lot of people feel strongly on this and that is fine. For me, the P1S exceeds my expectations out of the box. As such, I'm not so concerned about those points. 

In the end, I'm torn. I want to say that this is a perfect beginners 3D printer, but it isn't. You really need that exposure to something cheaper first to get the experience to know how to maintain this and to appreciate what it does. It is a perfect second printer for an enthusiast though. 

And while the software is great, it has some blind spots. One example was, a print I started this morning. I used the Bambu Handy app to unload filament. Changed the filament in the app from PETG to PLA and loaded. Then I sliced a model and printed. The model was still using my last settings and started the print with the PETG filament settings. It was a simple/stupid mistake, but the app could have caught it. If it thinks I have the wrong printer or build plate selected it tells me before allowing me to print. I see no reason why filament should be any different. Bad filament settings are just as (if not more) likely to bork a print than the wrong build plate. 

Luckily, that print is more or less looking fine. I dropped the temp mid-print and the lower layers are glossier and stringier than they probably should be. But, once again... if I was a noob to 3D printing... I might not have known what to do, noticed or even thought to fix this.