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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Sadly their enclosure isn't open source. I asked the support for technical details and apparently they are not allowed to share them. It's a bit weird that their open hardware policy doesn't extend to all their stuff.
As I said in the other thread, any license that bans "1:1 clones" would, by the very definition Prusa endorsed[1], not be open source.
I'm sympathetic to wanting a more "copyleft" or "AGPL like" open hardware licence, even the CERN-OHL-S could be improved, but none of those points advocate that.
They also want to ban "nearly exact 1:1 clones", which I feel is going to be impossible to define. How many changes is going to be enough to no longer be near?
I think the intent is, like patents, to prevent someone else from undercutting your price and reaping reward for your investment in innovation but at the same time saying if you make a significant contribution to the greater good then you can immediately apply it to the current state of the art.
You can benefit from our innovation but only if it's in addition to your own innovation.
I kind of like that because unlike patents which stifle innovation, it encourages acceleration of innovation.
Patents encourage publication of inventions, either as part of an application for a patent or as a defensive publication to prevent others from getting a patent. They allow (UK, not sure about other jurisdictions) research, can always be licensed. So is it just the monopoly length that is stifling?
The main alternative regime seems to be industrial secrets, are they less stifling?
Industrial secrets might be less stifling, because reverse engineering is usually faster than waiting 20 years for a patent to expire.
Then of course there is the option of embracing open source across industry by recognizing as a culture that widespread innovation grows the economy faster than restricted innovation.
You can buy Prusa MK3 kits from Aliexpress for half the price of the original. I bought a kit from Prusa and one knockoff from Aliexpress. Parts wise they are 100% the same and perform the exact same way. Do I feel bad about it? Kind of. The Chinese seller certainly did not put R&D into any of it. And being in China makes sourcing much easier.
Yeah, I've bought a knockoff on Aliexpress too, but mine was not a 100% clone. I bought a kit that came with the Bear upgrade and didn't come with the parts that would be replaced during the Bear upgrade. Those are the ones I think are hard to define without being vague. My worry is that by adding vague and all-encompassing restrictions, the license will no longer be free.
It wasn't clear at first that the concern is hardware licensing. The GPL isn't great for hardware, but I can't tell if they're objecting to it for software.
Either way, bringing back advertising clauses is a bad idea.
I’m torn because I believe in IP rights but I also remember all the 3d printing “new paradigm” gurus telling me about the new world they were ushering in where 3d printers would replicate themselves. In a sense that is happening but via detour through a Chinese factory.
The thing is, there is a solid community-positive reason to allow 1:1 clones. Or there should be.
What it should be encouraging is the formation of new companies whose only product is the clone; they don't have the product development overhead when they're setting out their stall. Those companies can then use the cloned design as a cashflow springboard for their own designs as a second phase. There is nothing wrong with that as a business model.
However, that's not what we see. What we see is clones being denigrated as valueless rip-offs, so people who might otherwise get into business by that route are dissuaded from doing so.
That attitude is absolutely reinforced by blog posts like this. Play stupid games, get stupid prizes.
Open source hardware is a great idea, but most of the executions have been pretty shoddy with stuff like proprietary parts still being used, bad documentation, and worst of all some companies just releasing products with no actual sourcing at all.
I've been very happy with ZSA for example, and they've done it right in my opinion.
Hopefully more companies work on making their stuff open standards with strong centralized production for those that don't want to build it themselves rather than arbiters of what can and cannot be reproduced by 3rd parties.
Proprietary parts aren't necessarily bad, it just depends on why they're proprietary - if it's just to go-to-market faster, it's fair to criticize the decision, but often there are legitimate downsides that would result in less-than-ideal compromises in terms of performance or features. Hopefully such companies doing this are transparent and will answer inquiries into why they made these parts decisions.
> Think the weird random chips apple uses more than the fact that 90% of CPUs on market aren't totally open; one is still clearly more accessible.
The random chips are their competitive advantage - Intel chips are notoriously power-inefficient, and AMD chips are still x86 which is an inefficient architecture. The only difference is that you can't build your own M2 computer, which isn't exactly moving any goalposts besides Apple opening themselves up to the grueling, low-margin work of setting up logistics for their different SKUs of chips, working with board partners to define specifications, and dealing with supporting the utterly random hardware people plug into their PCIe lanes (Macs 'work' in that Apple has rigorous test cases for 99% of scenarios; Windows had so many driver problems throughout Windows 7, 8, and 10 because MSFT to maintain backwards compatibility for components from 2002; this is why W11 has mostly dropped official support for older CPUs).
Intel is x86(_64) as well, mostly (rumors of plans to make an ARM competitor to Nvida and Apple).
And yes, not being able to make your own M2 computer does make the chip less open.
Open-ness is a scale, and if you're going to call something "open-source hardware" you should be able to source the hardware entirely yourself. Not being able to do that is closed hardware.
ZSA has some openness in their software, but their hardware (and it is a hardware company) is closed.
That's part of the reason why my ZSA gear is gathering dust in silence, but my Prusa gear runs 24 hours a day and everyone who will listen knows about it.
ZSA configurator so much better than QMK configuration, it's not even a remote comparison.
I happily pay money to companies who provide a lot of additional value on top of open source offering. I have moonlander, zsa platform, ergodox ez. When ZSA (inevitably, as for me) will release concave moonlander, I'm going to buy it too...
This seems to be an announcement that Prusa is abandoning open-source hardware; they're only going to release the "electronic plans" of MK4 under a license that prohibits "the production of nearly exact 1:1 clones for commercial purposes" and also does not permit the production of "parts that can be considered consumables"¹, which clearly cannot be open source, and they plan to move all their products to such a license.
They also seem to be announcing that they are going to lie about it by falsely claiming that it is open source.
Hopefully this is an April Fool's joke.
______
¹ They say it would permit the production of such parts "after the verification by the licensor", which is to say that it would permit the production of such parts at the licensor's pleasure. This is similar to the situation with copyright, where you can make copies of the work if the copyright owner approves of it, but it is not at all clear that heater blocks and printing plates are subject to copyright.
Now it is kind of funny to think about all the discussions that happened last week when the main advantage of Prusa over Bambu Lab X1C was quoted as them "being open source" and the absolutely crazy pricing was just "supporting/sponsoring Prusa's work since there are many clones thanks to their open source model". The tables turned, or they would have been turned if Prusa did either a huge change in their pricing or brought a completely new printer with features that would actually be worth the price tag.
I'm pretty sure it isn't but it is devilishly clever to drop news like this on a date like this.
But as to their decision: It's tough -- obviously we all want to support Reprap movement, Prusa, Ultimaker, etc. and the original innovators in this space of desktop 3d printers, but this is the way things happen, when you've optimized your technique and product the Chinese tend to come and kill you with their high volume low margin approach. Can you really blame them for doing what they're doing? It was probably an existential decision for them.
as they sort of point out, bowyer and (unmentioned) vik olliver are the original innovators in this space of desktop 3d printers, but prusa certainly contributed a lot
i don't really blame them for giving up on open-source hardware, even if i wish they wouldn't, but i certainly do blame them for lying about it
Yeah honestly I think they should just patent their innovations and then be quite liberal about granting patent licenses for reasonable fees (and not going after open source projects).
That seems way more achievable legally than a "you can copy it you can't rip it off" license.
I'm sympathetic to their goals. They want to make sure all of the hardware and software is open for their customers to be able to arbitrarily examine and modify, which is laudable and is very much the sort of thing that 3D printer customers care about. But also they're desperately searching for a way to research and design new printers without some other company immediately selling exact clones of their devices. A "here's all the plans, do whatever you like...except making and selling our exact device" license seems like an extremely fair compromise, especially compared to the default choice of "stop being open to make cloning harder."
Comments are right that bans of that sort are pretty much definitionally not "open source," and Prusa would be wrong to use that term if they went down this path. I think, though, that there should definitely be a space for companies that want to preserve their copyright but also be very open with their hardware and software. It'd just need a different word.
Indeed, a variety of open source models have been able to co-exist:
There's the sqlite3 type of "it's all open source but you can't contribute to the code"; the conventional community-led copyleft GNU type of open source that gave us Linux; the company-led which creates things like Docker and k8s; and there is dual-licensing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing).
I don't think this has a lot to do with the open source spirit but the fact that competitors like Bambulab are eating their lunch. That seems to rub them the wrong way.
I also see a lot of FUD from the Prusa community regarding that particular brand, where you can't claim it's a 1:1 Prusa clone. Even the remarks from Josef Prusa about speed or noise are targeted to the X1C or P1P printers while if you want to talk about clones and copying there are brands out there that fits the bill better e.g. Sovol 06.
The part where you can only sell "consumables" that must be verified by Prusa also has zero to do with open source or freedom.
I think their main problem is that regarding the i3 design, they are pretty much the only-ones contributing to improvements, I mean - when was the last time the community (or another manufacturer) actually contributed anything useful to the core HW and electronics design? The 3d printing space has massively changed in the last 10 years, where initially a lot of the HW improvements came from the hobbyist RepRap community. Now they come from a single company which stems from that community, and which is spending money on R&D.
On top of that, people still building an i3-design printer from scratch is rare, the hobbyist design community has moved on to the Vorons, which means pretty much all printers with this design are from companies with zero community interaction, profiting from the Prusa investments. So I get why they're not happy.
The only real comparison you have with Prusa is the much less popular RatRig - which is still an opensource design afaik, but I'm not aware of any clones of those.
> I think their main problem is that regarding the i3 design, they are pretty much the only-ones contributing to improvements, I mean - when was the last time the community (or another manufacturer) actually contributed anything useful to the core HW and electronics design?
There's lots of i3 clones with various changes that are open. But that it exists doesn't mean it'll be incorporated.
I've seen for instance multiple i3 clone designs with multiple extruders -- one with them side by side, another one with two extruders on the X axis.
There's also all sorts of construction alternatives -- wood, laser cut metal frames, etc.
The issue may be that lots of the clones are mostly minor branding/advanced feature changes. Prusa as far as I know doesn't offer an IDEX printer. I'm sure they could take one of the existing designs, but perhaps they just don't want to because it's an unusual, fiddly feature.
This is a good point. The worst thing is that the MK4 is stuck on the i3 design even though there are some nice improvements. It seems like i3 should go the way of the low cost but reliable printer. Not that the MK series should be ended, but it should really just be upgrades and price drops where possible.
There is still a space for a high performance prosumer coreXY printer like the Bambu or the Voron, but Prusa dropped the ball on this with the XL where they could have dominated. The Bambu is just a massive refinement of the FDM printer.
I predict the next big leaps in 3D printing will be:
- Tool changers like the Prusa XL. I would have bought a MK3 sized printer with 2-3 tool heads instantly. Prusa still has a shot here. Printing in multicolours is nice. But frankly I don't care about printing toys in multicolour. I'd rather be able to design in multi materials. Imagine being able to print in PLA, PETG, TPU simultaneously reliably.
- Infinite Z axis. I backed the Creality CR-30. Creality is a shit company and really dropped the ball on this. Eventually with community support and tinkering I got mine to work well. It's no where near the quality of my MK3s, but where appropriate, I can design things to work well on a conveyor belt and not bother with stopping to pull things off. Shove a box at the end, put it on the network and you have a truly automated manufacturing system. I can print 10 of something without pausing. And one failure won't effect the other 9.
- Pellets instead of fillament. Easier to handle, easier to refill and makes recycling filament easier.
> when was the last time the community (or another manufacturer) actually contributed anything useful to the core HW and electronics design?
E3D has driven the majority of hotend innovation, not Prusa. Ultimaker's Cura and PrusaSlicer cross pollinate regularly. Grégoire Saunier created the Bear frame. Numerous other nonprofessionals are creating small and not-so-small improvements which haven't become well known.
But yes, the bedflinger FDM architecture is mature. Innovation is incremental now, not radical.
I'm more into let's move our hardware designs to CERN-OHL-S licensing and persue violators in the court of law the same way proprietary copyright holders do.
In many jurisdictions violating copyright is a felony, it is prosecuted viciously with fines up to 100k$ per infringement and jail time and in the civil courts with extraordinary damages.
How can Prusa go forward with that? I don't know. I know though from a handful of interactions with them that they acknowledge the catalytic role open-source software and hardware can have.
I think this is really missing a big part of the picture. I didn't buy two mk3s+s because Prusa has tech that nobody else has, or because their design is fundamentally superior to anything else. I bought them because Prusa has an outstanding and justified reputation for building selling reliable machines and standing behind them with proven expertise.
Those are not things you can clone – not cheaply, anyway. That's the deal with any premium brand that has earned its reputation. There will always be imitators, and there will always be people who scoff and call you a rip-off because the cost of your product is greater than the sum of its parts. You ignore that, because you're better than that.
To me, being aggressively open source is a line in the sand on this point. It's saying "Go ahead: clone us. We don't care. Clones are not a threat, because the design is not what you're paying extra for."
Conversely, backpedaling on that position seems like a mistake. It's switching to a different strategy where you're instead saying "Actually, our IP is the only thing that differentiates us, and otherwise, we're the same as any other manufacturer." That's a dangerous game to play, and you only want to play it if you can ensure that you're going to be ahead of the curve on innovation.
And, well, much as I love Prusa… they're not ahead of that curve right now. Their value is that they have great QA and great support, and it seems to me that their stance should reflect that.
I don't think they would be writing this blog post if their "go ahead: clone us" strategy was working as well you imply it should. Mass market products live and die by the average customer, and the average person in need of a 3D printer will see a Prusa clone for half the price, and buy that instead of the original. Most people can't afford to spend double just on principle, even if they wanted to. And not everyone even cares for such principles in the first place.
I don't claim to know anything about Prusa's financials or technology, but if they are not technologically ahead of the curve as you say – could it be because they're starved for resources to do R&D, because they're losing too many customers to rip-offs?
I'm of course no more privy to their internal knowledge than you are, but it's hard to see how this will help the situation. The segment of the market that can't afford or can't justify Prusa's prices is not going to go upmarket because of a lack of clones. There are already a ton of cheap 3D printers on the market which on paper sound as good or better than Prusa's products. Reviewers are by and large numb to setup and support pain, and tend to discount those factors when talking about budget printers. Consumers go to Prusa because of their reputation. So whether or not there are exact Prusa clones seems pretty irrelevant, because the information a buyer needs to learn to understand Prusa's value will apply whether the clones are there or not.
I don't think it's just ripoffs, or maybe even at all. I am looking to buy my first 3D printer and was looking at Prusa but have decides against it. It is just that Prusa is very expensive when you compare it to Bambu Lab, Anker, and Elegoo with features and price in mind. I don't think any of these are clones.
I own a Prusa i3 and a Bambu Lab X1C. I'd say the support is very comparable. The reliability has been better on the X1C. And the X1C is a better printer overall.
> I don't think they would be writing this blog post if their "go ahead:
> clone us" strategy was working as well you imply
I think a bit more context might be helpful.
When the MK4 was launched I went online to see what people were saying about it. I came across a few youtube videos and blog postings that lambast Prusa, pointing out that they are not cutting edge, accusing Josef Prusa of wanting to dominate the low cost market and then not being able to agree with themselves if Prusa copies too much or too little of what other people have come up with.
I think the blog posting has to be seen as a response to this criticism. Not that their business model isn't working. Because so far, it has worked great. I ordered a new MK4 as soon as it became available, knowing full well that there are cheaper printers and more ambitious printers out there. But I want a Prusa because I know it will _work_. And if it doesn't work, Prusa will stand by their product and help you make it work.
To me that's actually worth paying more for. If at the same time I can support open source, the choice isn't really hard. I'm not a 3D printing enthusiast. I don't care if the filament sensor isn't the most clever solution there is. I only care that it actually works. I need a 3D printer that I can fire up and which will print what I've designed with a minimum of hassle. I don't want to dick around with my 3D printer. I want a reasonably priced product that works, and if it doesn't, a company behind it that will fix things.
When watching the critics two things struck me. The first was that they are 3D printing enthusiasts. They care about the technology and who came up with what idea more than they care about understanding the product. The second was that they do not understand product engineering. Engineering a product isn't about what ticks boxes on paper - it is about produces a good product. Novelty is cool, but novelty that doesn't improve the product is pointless waste.
If you look at a Prusa i3 Mk3 it looks flimsy and mechanically dodgy. Especially when I compare it to my Makergear M2, which is built like a tank. My first reaction when I used a Prusa i3 Mk3 was "this printer works unreasonably well". I hadn't expect it to outperform my M2, which consists of a much better frame, quality linear rails and the stiffest extruder gantry I have seen on any printer.
But the thing is, my Makergear M2 is a bad purchase. The company behind dropped the ball on all the important details. From the build plate, which is an afterthought that doesn't even come with a working mechanism for affixing it to the XY-carriage, the lack of effort that went into the firmware, the poor stepper controllers, to the Z-axis adjustment which is a laughably bad design.
Worse yet, after spending 2-3 times as much money buying an M2, the company kind of abandoned it. Without ever refining it to where it is a proper product. Am I ever going to buy another Makergear product? Of course not. The value for money is atrocious. You have to be a 3d printing enthusiast to fix the product so it works half way decent. They have come up with a few upgrades, but they haven't addressed many of the things you have to deal with every day.
After the first time I tried a Prusa i3 Mk3 we bought several of them at my previous job. The Makerspace I'm a member of has a whole fleet of them. And at every single prototyping company I've been at, there is usually a printer farm consisting of lots of Prusa printers. Not because they can't afford "better" but because it is what the engineers prefer to use. Because they work.
When companies that make tons of money and can afford to buy any 3D printer they want still choose to buy a bunch of Prusa printers, it is worth asking why this is.
You don't always need to be ahead of the curve to serve your customers. You just need to make a better product and provide better suppo...
Have you tried the Bambu X1-Carbon? I've had mine since the Kickstarter release and consider it both a workhorse and innovative. It's hard to imagine replacing it with something like the MK4.
Prusa printers generally work reliably. And they're expensive - epople are willing to pay for that reliability.
However, Prusa has been selling essentially 2017 technology for too long. Many customers are OK with this because 3D printing got to a decent point in 2017 and they don't need new frills. However, I think the inherent speed limit of the bed slinger design is going to start causing problems for them. Eventually people who just want a workhorse printer will also realize it's nice when the printer takes 60% of the time to produce the same output. Prusa hasn't demonstrated an ability to keep up with where the industry is going.
I'm a Prusa user, I assembled several printers for myself and my friends for a few years now, and I follow many Prusa user groups. Many Prusa users are actively mean against the company, think the printers are overpriced and actively try to get cheap clones. Not all people are like that, but a very large percentage are like this, and don't recognize the value that Prusa put on the table. So, yes, I believe that when doing products like that, that can be fully copied by other vendors, their past business model was really a danger. Anyway it's a shame that they can't continue like in the past.
i think the average customer buys an ender 3 / ender 3 clone. which you can make the case is derivative of a prusa if you go back far enough, but not to the point where the openness status of prusa matters to that argument.
Being a resident of the same neighborhood as Prusa headquarters, having friends who work there and having met Josef Prusa himself, for the first time when he was simply organizing "build your own 3d printer" workshops in a basement in Smichov, here is my take:
Josef Prusa is a fantastic salesman, and he has built his company into a large, formidable, and profitable one, thanks mostly to his core team of competent businesspeople to whom he gives no credit. But you see his name everywhere. In fact the company logo has his name twice. I mean, WTAF? Whose ego is so fragile that he has to put his name in the company logo twice?
The Prusa corporation scams its employees and the taxpayers of the Czech Republic by having everyone on a "double contract" where employees are given a minimum wage full employment and taxed on that, with their extra hours being paid on top. It is totally sleazy and unethical.
Employees have coin-operated coffee machines, The owner drives a disgustingly expensive Audi.
Prusa has been surfing on their brand recognition and slavish brand loyalty for years, and now the chickens have come home to roost. The Bambulab printers are at least 4 years ahead of the competition, everyone knows it, and no one with any sense will buy Prusa printers for more money and far fewer features.
Prusa printers have simply not innovated at all, and their respect for their customers is absolutely zero.
I have absolutely no sympathy for the ego-driven, absolute profit-maximizing Prusa company. Their luck is running out now, and finally we are seeing innovation again. The innovation is coming from everywhere but Prusa.
Thank you for this information.
FWIW: This does not seem to be an isolated opinion. I have read (vague) YouTube comments recently, that point in a similar direction.
Well I do wonder what their actual market share is these days since despite all the reliability and support they offer, their machines are still like 300% the cost of an equivalent Creality printer that does the same thing just as well.
I bought an Ender 3 quite cheaply (less than €150). I've spent countless hours, fiddling, upgrading, repairing obvious small flaws until it printed really well.
Granted, I leaned a LOT about all things relating 3D printing during this journey. But, there was a lot of frustration, time spent, and even a good amount of money.
I don't regret it the slightest, I learned important skills.
But, we bought a Prusa MK3.5 at my work, and, it just worked, since day one (came pre assembled). No fiddling, no slicer tunning, nothing. We just asked it to print, and done.
So, don't think a 5x cheaper print is equivalent to a Prusa, it's just not.
I've bought the 3 Pro a while back as well, and only did the recommended upgrades at the start (bed springs, metal extruder, filament guide) and it's been printing flawlessly since. I haven't needed to even level the bed at all (though I'll need to replace it soon as it's all worn out by now lol).
But the old Ender 3 is infamous for being hit and miss in setup, the point is that they now have the V2 and other lines which apparently just work out of the box because they're almost fully assembled, much like the old Prusas. Their head start in that area is gone.
very similar to my own experiment on Ender 3 and also to the tons of posts on reddit
Actually, the ender experience is more a lego experience when you have to buy tons of add ons, upgrades, days to learn systems & paramters in slicers & firmwares.
Also think about the Ender 3 burning PSU trend 4 years ago.
times to times, another comment pop on reddit such as "i own 12 ender 3 and sell my production, never did a single upgrade, printing at 50mm and it works like a charm since day one" but it's not majority
From earlier videos and blogs, the rationale behind this move was a little more clear: by publishing complete gerbers for the electronics, they find themselves competing for parts on the BOM with other companies that are trying to manufacture Prusa's design. By opening the design documents, they create a situation where the parts shortage raises the price for everyone involved.
I do not love nor support this approach, but there is a certain market reality behind the rationale.
They directly wrote about the problem, it's not the entire market they are moving, just the market for the specific parts they are attempting to buy. They hired brokers to source some key components and later found out that the two brokers they hired were bidding against each other (due to lack of coordination) and as a result were driving up their own pricing.
Someone coming into a small market and scooping up 10k parts can absolutely move the needle on the pricing, and it already happened to Prusa (if self-inflicted). This isn't a theoretical.
Hmmm. I can easily see Prusa accidentally bidding against their own sourcing and driving up prices like that, but mostly because some of their component choices were unusual compared to the rest of the market. For example, pretty much all of the cheap i3-inspired 3D printers coming out of China switched to 32-bit controller boards years ago, but Prusa stuck with the Atmega 2560 until basically last week. That's kind of a niche part and the entire Atmega range was in short supply globally for a good while during the pandemic. With the way supply chains have been, they could easily have ended up being a huge chunk of the market trying to buy that or similarly unusual parts through brokers at some points.
They made this comment in a video blog regarding the XL, which is using an STM32, several variants of which have been in extremely short supply. I'd presume that might be the specific part they were talking about.
Also, they have been using 32bit controllers for all new FDM printers since the release of the Prusa Mini in 2019. That now includes the XL and the Mk4.
Supply chain competition is something I hadn’t thought about, and it’s an interesting point. I wonder how the clone manufacturers themselves are getting around that.
A mechanical engineer friend of mine recently released an open source high precision DIY-friendly 3D printer[0], the assembly manual[1] alone is a thing of beauty.
I'm always surprised that 3D printing isn't making faster progress. The print quality of these cheap(ish) FDM printers is tbh not good. But it's been like this for nearly a decade now.
Have we really reached the global maximum in performance for this price point? I refuse to believe that, since coming here has basically been just local hill climbing since FDM was cheap enough for home use.
But where is the innovation? Where are the alternatives?
Is there simply not enough money in cheap 3D printing to justify investment?
I think limiting to FDM printers is a mistake these days, as resin printers have exploded in visual fidelity and the MSLA (using pixels on a monochrome LCD to mask light to print the whole layer simultaneously by curing a UV sensitive resin) printers make hands down better looking prints. If you need functional parts as well there are advances in engineering resins designed for that (although they’re still very pricy compared to PLA).
For art pieces I often print using a mixture of the two then join them together, such as a bust with the head, I’ll make the head in resin and the body in FDM.
The printers are dead simple to use too compared to all the hassle of FDM printing. Very few moving parts means very few opportunities for the myriad mistakes that seem inherent in FDM printing.
Resin printers aren’t ‘dead simple’, as you’re dealing with fairly nasty chemicals in liquid form, and have to deal with cleaning/curing steps that aren’t needed with FDM.
The results can be nice, but they may not be the best choice for many users.
While sla has some advantages over fdm, I definitely would not call it less hassle. Handling liquid resin is more hassle than spools of filament, and sla prints need cleaning and curing steps while fdm prints can be usable straight out of printer. Finally multi-material fdm allows you to use soluable supports, making post-processing again easier.
The problem isn't toxicity, the problem is that they cure under your skin if you get them on you.
Your immune system starts recognizing it as a foreign body and suddenly you develop an allergy against the resin which can result in quite severe symptoms.
Yes. I think the dangers of resin printing are undersold. The SDSes you got are bare bones. They off gas a lot of VOCs, and you have a lifetime epoxy sensitivity which only gets worse. You see it in people who work with regular epoxies. That said, they're not acutely dangerous unless you accidentally cure some on your skin.
> I'm always surprised that 3D printing isn't making faster progress.
I don't own a 3D printer, but I wonder why pellet extruders are not a standard for feeding these FDM machines. This apparent lack of interest has an effect on the price of the excessively overpriced and seemingly amateurish pellet extruders that seem to exist at the moment (of which there seem to be only two or three models?).
We are talking about a significant price difference in the cost of consumables in pellet form, humidity of the material and mixing control, and the ability to reuse material from failed prints or everyday items, among the first things that cross my mind.
it's been like this for nearly a decade as you said, and the common extruder usually doesn't even include an acceleration sensor.
I think 3D printers are close to the useful maximum. Most problems they have left are expensive to solve.
* One problem is rigidity/vibration. This is solved by lots of rigid mass, which isn't consumer friendly. It makes for a big, heavy, expensive machine.
* Another problem is the lack of feedback. This is solved by having accurate sensing of positioning. This costs money.
* Another problem is temperature management. This requires an enclosure and parts that don't mind the heat. This takes space and costs money.
* Another problem is extrusion consistency. This either requires very accurately manufactured plastic as an input, or excellent sensing of what's going into the extruder. This also costs money.
And most of these are polish on top. Like you can drop $700 on a very decent printer, or you could spend $5000 on one that mostly does the same thing, except is less fiddly because it's got a lot more steel and sensors in it. That makes sense if you're running a business, not so much if you rarely want to make stuff out of plastic.
Some of these are being slowly addressed in quite unorthodox ways. Eg, some sensing issues are being addressed with fancy motor drivers that can tell when the motor has gotten stuck.
There's also that resin gets way better precision and fixes many of these issues for way cheaper. It's got its own downsides of course, but it does mean that the amount of people who really need a very solid FDM printer is smaller than you might think.
I bought a MK3S+&Enclosure this year instead of 5 clones.
I'll be buying a MK4 and an XL, again instead of 15 chinesium clone machines.
Free Openness, reliability, trustworthiness - that's what I paid a multiple for.
Joseph puts his name on every machine, every spool of filament. I trust that if and when something goes wrong, it's his neck on the line to make it right.
I welcome a newer, stronger, toothier approach to Free and Open hardware and software.
If that means a patent trust, or a consortium for enforcement, or whatever collaboration between large players can become, it would be great if this could be the catalyst.
I don't think comparing 3d printing and 2d printing is fair. Not the least because if the 3d printing industry completely halts progress it'll be meet by the crashing regression of the 2d printing industry in about six months.
Ok, then the way I can get into my car 100 times in a row and drive without issue. Or I can toast 100 pieces of bread without issue. Or an elevator can work 100 times in a row without issue.
You know, a pretty low bar for a product to be considered functional.
Yes and no. I have a Prusa Mk3 that I've had for years and upgraded to the MK3s.
The machine was flawless from day one even in the hands of a complete novice like me. The upgrade was also flawless.
This times I've had bad prints? I changed filaments without understanding how it behaves. I printed things without understanding how to prepare the print, and it fell over. Attempting to print flexibles.
These issues may or may not plague you depending on your use case. I mostly print mechanical parts that I design myself. And I use limited types of filaments for prototyping. So can I get 100 out of 100 successful prints? Yes, that's quite achievable.
My own experience, I bought a Ender 3 Pro for ~$100 about a year ago and I've been very impressed with it. Aside from some instances where I didn't have the bed correctly distanced from the nozzle, I've yet to have a build fail. Granted I've printed rather simple things, I think my longest build has been about 8 hours. I've been very pleased with its ease of use.
we all know that 2D printers are not able to indefinitely work "easily without issue", they all have issues that crop up at some point or another.
3D printers are the same. it's a mechanical thing which involves heat and lubrication and motors. It's never going to be "without issue".
3D Printers are a lot better than they used to be though - if you buy a good one it will be immediately useful and require minimal maintenance. Those are the things Prusa is good at.
Yes and no. They may both be called "printers" but they are entirely different things. 3D printers have more in common with CNC machines than with office printers.
They are certainly useful machines, I was skeptical at first but I finally got one and found many uses for it. Some are more reliable than others, but you still have to think of them as tools like you find in a workshop, or a sewing machine, and that need some skill and involvement to operate. They are also best used as such. The biggest value in 3D printers is to make things that don't exist to fit your specific needs, they are no replacement for mass production, in the same way people usually don't use an office printer to print a book they can find at a local bookstore, and this is will never be one click easy, just as writing a book is not easy.
Not Prusa anyway. I spent weeks building it from the kit. I spent days calibrating it. I printed few parts. Never got perfect first layer, but it works more or less. Then I updated firmware month later and tried to recalibrate it. It crushed printing head into the table. I'm afraid to turn it on now. It's going to take another few days to remember what's it's all about, to read all the manuals and watch all the videos, to grease rods and so on. May be I'll do it one day.
I guess that some "industrial"-grade printers like Ultimaker should be better in that regard, but I'm not sure about that.
Not every 2D printer is good either. I have Epson printer which refused to print stuff after few months of downtime. I managed to recover it by doing some "cleaning nozzle" procedure, but I don't think it was guaranteed to work. Though it was my failure because I was hooked on this promise "buy ink not proprietary cartridge with chip". I'd better buy ordinary HP laser jet with proprietary cartridge instead, those inkjet printers are not well suited for my use-case (printing few pages once a year).
If you want 100 pieces hassle-free, you should probably use a printing service. The service's pricing accurately reflects the hassle they'll endure on your behalf. (They ain't cheap.)
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadSpecifically:
- 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.
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.
Another reply to Josef Průša - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35404374
I'm sympathetic to wanting a more "copyleft" or "AGPL like" open hardware licence, even the CERN-OHL-S could be improved, but none of those points advocate that.
[1]https://freedomdefined.org/OSHW
You can benefit from our innovation but only if it's in addition to your own innovation.
I kind of like that because unlike patents which stifle innovation, it encourages acceleration of innovation.
The main alternative regime seems to be industrial secrets, are they less stifling?
Then of course there is the option of embracing open source across industry by recognizing as a culture that widespread innovation grows the economy faster than restricted innovation.
Either way, bringing back advertising clauses is a bad idea.
What it should be encouraging is the formation of new companies whose only product is the clone; they don't have the product development overhead when they're setting out their stall. Those companies can then use the cloned design as a cashflow springboard for their own designs as a second phase. There is nothing wrong with that as a business model.
However, that's not what we see. What we see is clones being denigrated as valueless rip-offs, so people who might otherwise get into business by that route are dissuaded from doing so.
That attitude is absolutely reinforced by blog posts like this. Play stupid games, get stupid prizes.
I've been very happy with ZSA for example, and they've done it right in my opinion.
Hopefully more companies work on making their stuff open standards with strong centralized production for those that don't want to build it themselves rather than arbiters of what can and cannot be reproduced by 3rd parties.
Think the weird random chips apple uses more than the fact that 90% of CPUs on market aren't totally open; one is still clearly more accessible.
The random chips are their competitive advantage - Intel chips are notoriously power-inefficient, and AMD chips are still x86 which is an inefficient architecture. The only difference is that you can't build your own M2 computer, which isn't exactly moving any goalposts besides Apple opening themselves up to the grueling, low-margin work of setting up logistics for their different SKUs of chips, working with board partners to define specifications, and dealing with supporting the utterly random hardware people plug into their PCIe lanes (Macs 'work' in that Apple has rigorous test cases for 99% of scenarios; Windows had so many driver problems throughout Windows 7, 8, and 10 because MSFT to maintain backwards compatibility for components from 2002; this is why W11 has mostly dropped official support for older CPUs).
And yes, not being able to make your own M2 computer does make the chip less open.
Open-ness is a scale, and if you're going to call something "open-source hardware" you should be able to source the hardware entirely yourself. Not being able to do that is closed hardware.
EDIT: clarified the "mostly"
That's part of the reason why my ZSA gear is gathering dust in silence, but my Prusa gear runs 24 hours a day and everyone who will listen knows about it.
Principles matter.
I happily pay money to companies who provide a lot of additional value on top of open source offering. I have moonlander, zsa platform, ergodox ez. When ZSA (inevitably, as for me) will release concave moonlander, I'm going to buy it too...
They also seem to be announcing that they are going to lie about it by falsely claiming that it is open source.
Hopefully this is an April Fool's joke.
______
¹ They say it would permit the production of such parts "after the verification by the licensor", which is to say that it would permit the production of such parts at the licensor's pleasure. This is similar to the situation with copyright, where you can make copies of the work if the copyright owner approves of it, but it is not at all clear that heater blocks and printing plates are subject to copyright.
I'm pretty sure it isn't but it is devilishly clever to drop news like this on a date like this.
But as to their decision: It's tough -- obviously we all want to support Reprap movement, Prusa, Ultimaker, etc. and the original innovators in this space of desktop 3d printers, but this is the way things happen, when you've optimized your technique and product the Chinese tend to come and kill you with their high volume low margin approach. Can you really blame them for doing what they're doing? It was probably an existential decision for them.
i don't really blame them for giving up on open-source hardware, even if i wish they wouldn't, but i certainly do blame them for lying about it
That seems way more achievable legally than a "you can copy it you can't rip it off" license.
This was posted on the Prusa blog on March 29th.
Comments are right that bans of that sort are pretty much definitionally not "open source," and Prusa would be wrong to use that term if they went down this path. I think, though, that there should definitely be a space for companies that want to preserve their copyright but also be very open with their hardware and software. It'd just need a different word.
I also see a lot of FUD from the Prusa community regarding that particular brand, where you can't claim it's a 1:1 Prusa clone. Even the remarks from Josef Prusa about speed or noise are targeted to the X1C or P1P printers while if you want to talk about clones and copying there are brands out there that fits the bill better e.g. Sovol 06.
The part where you can only sell "consumables" that must be verified by Prusa also has zero to do with open source or freedom.
On top of that, people still building an i3-design printer from scratch is rare, the hobbyist design community has moved on to the Vorons, which means pretty much all printers with this design are from companies with zero community interaction, profiting from the Prusa investments. So I get why they're not happy.
The only real comparison you have with Prusa is the much less popular RatRig - which is still an opensource design afaik, but I'm not aware of any clones of those.
There's lots of i3 clones with various changes that are open. But that it exists doesn't mean it'll be incorporated.
I've seen for instance multiple i3 clone designs with multiple extruders -- one with them side by side, another one with two extruders on the X axis.
There's also all sorts of construction alternatives -- wood, laser cut metal frames, etc.
The issue may be that lots of the clones are mostly minor branding/advanced feature changes. Prusa as far as I know doesn't offer an IDEX printer. I'm sure they could take one of the existing designs, but perhaps they just don't want to because it's an unusual, fiddly feature.
There is still a space for a high performance prosumer coreXY printer like the Bambu or the Voron, but Prusa dropped the ball on this with the XL where they could have dominated. The Bambu is just a massive refinement of the FDM printer.
I predict the next big leaps in 3D printing will be:
- Tool changers like the Prusa XL. I would have bought a MK3 sized printer with 2-3 tool heads instantly. Prusa still has a shot here. Printing in multicolours is nice. But frankly I don't care about printing toys in multicolour. I'd rather be able to design in multi materials. Imagine being able to print in PLA, PETG, TPU simultaneously reliably.
- Infinite Z axis. I backed the Creality CR-30. Creality is a shit company and really dropped the ball on this. Eventually with community support and tinkering I got mine to work well. It's no where near the quality of my MK3s, but where appropriate, I can design things to work well on a conveyor belt and not bother with stopping to pull things off. Shove a box at the end, put it on the network and you have a truly automated manufacturing system. I can print 10 of something without pausing. And one failure won't effect the other 9.
- Pellets instead of fillament. Easier to handle, easier to refill and makes recycling filament easier.
E3D has driven the majority of hotend innovation, not Prusa. Ultimaker's Cura and PrusaSlicer cross pollinate regularly. Grégoire Saunier created the Bear frame. Numerous other nonprofessionals are creating small and not-so-small improvements which haven't become well known.
But yes, the bedflinger FDM architecture is mature. Innovation is incremental now, not radical.
In many jurisdictions violating copyright is a felony, it is prosecuted viciously with fines up to 100k$ per infringement and jail time and in the civil courts with extraordinary damages.
How can Prusa go forward with that? I don't know. I know though from a handful of interactions with them that they acknowledge the catalytic role open-source software and hardware can have.
Those are not things you can clone – not cheaply, anyway. That's the deal with any premium brand that has earned its reputation. There will always be imitators, and there will always be people who scoff and call you a rip-off because the cost of your product is greater than the sum of its parts. You ignore that, because you're better than that.
To me, being aggressively open source is a line in the sand on this point. It's saying "Go ahead: clone us. We don't care. Clones are not a threat, because the design is not what you're paying extra for."
Conversely, backpedaling on that position seems like a mistake. It's switching to a different strategy where you're instead saying "Actually, our IP is the only thing that differentiates us, and otherwise, we're the same as any other manufacturer." That's a dangerous game to play, and you only want to play it if you can ensure that you're going to be ahead of the curve on innovation.
And, well, much as I love Prusa… they're not ahead of that curve right now. Their value is that they have great QA and great support, and it seems to me that their stance should reflect that.
I don't claim to know anything about Prusa's financials or technology, but if they are not technologically ahead of the curve as you say – could it be because they're starved for resources to do R&D, because they're losing too many customers to rip-offs?
I think a bit more context might be helpful.
When the MK4 was launched I went online to see what people were saying about it. I came across a few youtube videos and blog postings that lambast Prusa, pointing out that they are not cutting edge, accusing Josef Prusa of wanting to dominate the low cost market and then not being able to agree with themselves if Prusa copies too much or too little of what other people have come up with.
I think the blog posting has to be seen as a response to this criticism. Not that their business model isn't working. Because so far, it has worked great. I ordered a new MK4 as soon as it became available, knowing full well that there are cheaper printers and more ambitious printers out there. But I want a Prusa because I know it will _work_. And if it doesn't work, Prusa will stand by their product and help you make it work.
To me that's actually worth paying more for. If at the same time I can support open source, the choice isn't really hard. I'm not a 3D printing enthusiast. I don't care if the filament sensor isn't the most clever solution there is. I only care that it actually works. I need a 3D printer that I can fire up and which will print what I've designed with a minimum of hassle. I don't want to dick around with my 3D printer. I want a reasonably priced product that works, and if it doesn't, a company behind it that will fix things.
When watching the critics two things struck me. The first was that they are 3D printing enthusiasts. They care about the technology and who came up with what idea more than they care about understanding the product. The second was that they do not understand product engineering. Engineering a product isn't about what ticks boxes on paper - it is about produces a good product. Novelty is cool, but novelty that doesn't improve the product is pointless waste.
If you look at a Prusa i3 Mk3 it looks flimsy and mechanically dodgy. Especially when I compare it to my Makergear M2, which is built like a tank. My first reaction when I used a Prusa i3 Mk3 was "this printer works unreasonably well". I hadn't expect it to outperform my M2, which consists of a much better frame, quality linear rails and the stiffest extruder gantry I have seen on any printer.
But the thing is, my Makergear M2 is a bad purchase. The company behind dropped the ball on all the important details. From the build plate, which is an afterthought that doesn't even come with a working mechanism for affixing it to the XY-carriage, the lack of effort that went into the firmware, the poor stepper controllers, to the Z-axis adjustment which is a laughably bad design.
Worse yet, after spending 2-3 times as much money buying an M2, the company kind of abandoned it. Without ever refining it to where it is a proper product. Am I ever going to buy another Makergear product? Of course not. The value for money is atrocious. You have to be a 3d printing enthusiast to fix the product so it works half way decent. They have come up with a few upgrades, but they haven't addressed many of the things you have to deal with every day.
After the first time I tried a Prusa i3 Mk3 we bought several of them at my previous job. The Makerspace I'm a member of has a whole fleet of them. And at every single prototyping company I've been at, there is usually a printer farm consisting of lots of Prusa printers. Not because they can't afford "better" but because it is what the engineers prefer to use. Because they work.
When companies that make tons of money and can afford to buy any 3D printer they want still choose to buy a bunch of Prusa printers, it is worth asking why this is.
You don't always need to be ahead of the curve to serve your customers. You just need to make a better product and provide better suppo...
However, Prusa has been selling essentially 2017 technology for too long. Many customers are OK with this because 3D printing got to a decent point in 2017 and they don't need new frills. However, I think the inherent speed limit of the bed slinger design is going to start causing problems for them. Eventually people who just want a workhorse printer will also realize it's nice when the printer takes 60% of the time to produce the same output. Prusa hasn't demonstrated an ability to keep up with where the industry is going.
Josef Prusa is a fantastic salesman, and he has built his company into a large, formidable, and profitable one, thanks mostly to his core team of competent businesspeople to whom he gives no credit. But you see his name everywhere. In fact the company logo has his name twice. I mean, WTAF? Whose ego is so fragile that he has to put his name in the company logo twice?
The Prusa corporation scams its employees and the taxpayers of the Czech Republic by having everyone on a "double contract" where employees are given a minimum wage full employment and taxed on that, with their extra hours being paid on top. It is totally sleazy and unethical.
Employees have coin-operated coffee machines, The owner drives a disgustingly expensive Audi.
Prusa has been surfing on their brand recognition and slavish brand loyalty for years, and now the chickens have come home to roost. The Bambulab printers are at least 4 years ahead of the competition, everyone knows it, and no one with any sense will buy Prusa printers for more money and far fewer features.
Prusa printers have simply not innovated at all, and their respect for their customers is absolutely zero.
I have absolutely no sympathy for the ego-driven, absolute profit-maximizing Prusa company. Their luck is running out now, and finally we are seeing innovation again. The innovation is coming from everywhere but Prusa.
I bought an Ender 3 quite cheaply (less than €150). I've spent countless hours, fiddling, upgrading, repairing obvious small flaws until it printed really well.
Granted, I leaned a LOT about all things relating 3D printing during this journey. But, there was a lot of frustration, time spent, and even a good amount of money.
I don't regret it the slightest, I learned important skills.
But, we bought a Prusa MK3.5 at my work, and, it just worked, since day one (came pre assembled). No fiddling, no slicer tunning, nothing. We just asked it to print, and done.
So, don't think a 5x cheaper print is equivalent to a Prusa, it's just not.
But the old Ender 3 is infamous for being hit and miss in setup, the point is that they now have the V2 and other lines which apparently just work out of the box because they're almost fully assembled, much like the old Prusas. Their head start in that area is gone.
I do not love nor support this approach, but there is a certain market reality behind the rationale.
It is also hard to believe that the semiconductor market would be affected significantly by the - in comparison tiny - 3D printing companies.
Someone coming into a small market and scooping up 10k parts can absolutely move the needle on the pricing, and it already happened to Prusa (if self-inflicted). This isn't a theoretical.
Also, they have been using 32bit controllers for all new FDM printers since the release of the Prusa Mini in 2019. That now includes the XL and the Mk4.
[0]: https://www.printables.com/model/378252-i-3030-fdm-3d-printe...
[1]: https://files.printables.com/media/prints/378252/other_files...
Also it recently started allowing models that aren't CC or open source, at the same time as adding blue checkmark brand accounts.
A lot of open source code is hosted on github, which isn't open source either.
It isn't really an issue, I was just correcting bmsleight_. It would be nice to have an open source model repository though.
But where is the innovation? Where are the alternatives?
Is there simply not enough money in cheap 3D printing to justify investment?
With Voron/Bambu lab/Prusa XL, the next-gen is arriving right now. Let's see...
For art pieces I often print using a mixture of the two then join them together, such as a bust with the head, I’ll make the head in resin and the body in FDM.
The printers are dead simple to use too compared to all the hassle of FDM printing. Very few moving parts means very few opportunities for the myriad mistakes that seem inherent in FDM printing.
The results can be nice, but they may not be the best choice for many users.
Your immune system starts recognizing it as a foreign body and suddenly you develop an allergy against the resin which can result in quite severe symptoms.
I don't own a 3D printer, but I wonder why pellet extruders are not a standard for feeding these FDM machines. This apparent lack of interest has an effect on the price of the excessively overpriced and seemingly amateurish pellet extruders that seem to exist at the moment (of which there seem to be only two or three models?).
We are talking about a significant price difference in the cost of consumables in pellet form, humidity of the material and mixing control, and the ability to reuse material from failed prints or everyday items, among the first things that cross my mind.
it's been like this for nearly a decade as you said, and the common extruder usually doesn't even include an acceleration sensor.
* One problem is rigidity/vibration. This is solved by lots of rigid mass, which isn't consumer friendly. It makes for a big, heavy, expensive machine.
* Another problem is the lack of feedback. This is solved by having accurate sensing of positioning. This costs money.
* Another problem is temperature management. This requires an enclosure and parts that don't mind the heat. This takes space and costs money.
* Another problem is extrusion consistency. This either requires very accurately manufactured plastic as an input, or excellent sensing of what's going into the extruder. This also costs money.
And most of these are polish on top. Like you can drop $700 on a very decent printer, or you could spend $5000 on one that mostly does the same thing, except is less fiddly because it's got a lot more steel and sensors in it. That makes sense if you're running a business, not so much if you rarely want to make stuff out of plastic.
Some of these are being slowly addressed in quite unorthodox ways. Eg, some sensing issues are being addressed with fancy motor drivers that can tell when the motor has gotten stuck.
There's also that resin gets way better precision and fixes many of these issues for way cheaper. It's got its own downsides of course, but it does mean that the amount of people who really need a very solid FDM printer is smaller than you might think.
It sounds like Prusa doesn't understand that central premise, or is coming to terms with how hostile open source is to traditional business models.
Also it was imported by copying the modified source instead of proper git fork with history and all the contributors that made it possible.
Since i3 was designed, there were always parts that weren't open (like the pictured PCB heated bed) so nothing really changes.
Free Openness, reliability, trustworthiness - that's what I paid a multiple for.
Joseph puts his name on every machine, every spool of filament. I trust that if and when something goes wrong, it's his neck on the line to make it right.
I welcome a newer, stronger, toothier approach to Free and Open hardware and software.
If that means a patent trust, or a consortium for enforcement, or whatever collaboration between large players can become, it would be great if this could be the catalyst.
You know, a pretty low bar for a product to be considered functional.
The machine was flawless from day one even in the hands of a complete novice like me. The upgrade was also flawless.
This times I've had bad prints? I changed filaments without understanding how it behaves. I printed things without understanding how to prepare the print, and it fell over. Attempting to print flexibles.
These issues may or may not plague you depending on your use case. I mostly print mechanical parts that I design myself. And I use limited types of filaments for prototyping. So can I get 100 out of 100 successful prints? Yes, that's quite achievable.
3D printers are the same. it's a mechanical thing which involves heat and lubrication and motors. It's never going to be "without issue".
3D Printers are a lot better than they used to be though - if you buy a good one it will be immediately useful and require minimal maintenance. Those are the things Prusa is good at.
They are certainly useful machines, I was skeptical at first but I finally got one and found many uses for it. Some are more reliable than others, but you still have to think of them as tools like you find in a workshop, or a sewing machine, and that need some skill and involvement to operate. They are also best used as such. The biggest value in 3D printers is to make things that don't exist to fit your specific needs, they are no replacement for mass production, in the same way people usually don't use an office printer to print a book they can find at a local bookstore, and this is will never be one click easy, just as writing a book is not easy.
I guess that some "industrial"-grade printers like Ultimaker should be better in that regard, but I'm not sure about that.
Not every 2D printer is good either. I have Epson printer which refused to print stuff after few months of downtime. I managed to recover it by doing some "cleaning nozzle" procedure, but I don't think it was guaranteed to work. Though it was my failure because I was hooked on this promise "buy ink not proprietary cartridge with chip". I'd better buy ordinary HP laser jet with proprietary cartridge instead, those inkjet printers are not well suited for my use-case (printing few pages once a year).