Which alternatives?

Depends on the niche and application you are interested in.

Though I would caveat my assertion by saying that if the specific form factor of the A1 Mini (which is a nice thing) matters to you, and it well might, there’s probably no alternative for that single machine, to be fair.

But I would still choose something else.

Personally I think the “just works” 3D printer is largely the result of cognitive bias. It’s a machine tool that melts plastic: I don’t think this is the appropriate territory for “just works”. But that’s just me.

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m4rtink 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah - we have 4 printers at the moment, one of them a Prusa MK3S+ & it has been maintenance free so far.

The other printers are basically custom designs by this point & you need to fix things sometimes - like recently erosion of the filament eationg away enough of the idler arm to slip from the forwarding wheel. But I don't mind, because I can easily fix all of that with either 3D printed bits or easily & cheaply available common parts.

I don't mind because I know I can fix ynathing on those printers! No issues like with 2D printers with closed firmware that worksa against you to print secret dots, only accepts locked down blessed overpriced consumables & fails to print if only one color runs low. Not to mention the bloody thing is basically unfixable & any drivers already suck + they will drop support on a whim anyway.

Seriously, would rather fix the 3D printer after every print than to deal with the level of bulshit common on 2D printers - and ot seems to me that Bambu is trying to achieve exactly that!

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ChickeNES 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Seriously, would rather fix the 3D printer after every print than to deal with the level of bulshit common on 2D printers - and ot seems to me that Bambu is trying to achieve exactly that!

This is why hobby printers continue to be a time sink, while my Bambu just works. It's a tool, I shouldn't have to fix it after each use.

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dofm an hour ago | parent [-]

But it's a machine tool and you should be able to modify and improve it. Bambu don't want you to have that flexibility. And when they do break in unusual ways (and they still do), their customer service is not good enough to match their consumer market.

My current machine is a bit of a weirdo. A formerly basic Creality Ender 2 Pro (the cheapest possible small bed model) that I have had for more than four years, which has always been an unusually excellent machine for fine work, and now has a hardened steel nozzle in a faster heating/higher temperature hotend, mesh bed levelling, direct drive extruder, tidier cables (!), Klipper/KlipperScreen, and an even tighter calibration situation.

I am not at all bothered about pushing machine limits, and I am not an electronics or hardware tinkerer at all. Not my mindset. I don't print stuff for the sake of printing, and I'm much more focussed on learning CAD techniques.

The upgrades were done as a systematic plan to teach myself how the basic functions of a typical modern machine work on a much deeper level, so I can teach and help others. (Life plan changes)

And indeed only once I knew I have need of a larger machine anyway — not that I've bought it yet, for life reasons.

It's nice that it's a little faster, prints higher temperature materials better, levels more easily and more precisely, is now super dimensionally accurate, and my modestly-custom Klipper config has let me dabble with support interface layer swaps by smoothing over some of the details of filament changes, which is cool. In many ways it is like having a newer machine.

I still don't feel like a hardware or electronics guy and I'm not a performance tinkerer. The machine is upgraded, prints superbly, and now I just use it when I need to use it.

But what I have internalised is that I should be able to run my printer as long as I want, with what software I want, understand it and fix it if I need to. I absolutely don't want to tinker for the sake of it, but I also don't want to cross fingers and rely on a machine being great from the factory. If fixing it means changing it, that's fine with me.

If you are intending to print things for which quality and precision matters, then there is no substitute for understanding the machine more deeply, and that means a machine that will let you understand it.

This new understanding is really challenging my choice of what I buy for my workshop, because to some extent this window of deeper understanding is closing. There are, by contrast, many "off the shelf" machines that compete with (and outperform) Bambu machines at comparable and lower prices.

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ChickeNES 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

See, my thing is that I am a electronics and hardware tinkerer, and the printer(s) were taking up time I could have been actually tinkering with projects instead of my tools. My X1C still behaves the same as when I bought it, and Bambu continues to sell all the replacement parts needed.

	▲	dofm 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Interesting. I come at this from the other direction. I was your stereotypical guitar-playing, photographer, software nerd; I would never have tried making physical things until I realised I wanted to make photography accessories. (Also some of my experience with expensive machines has been very spendy inkjet printers.) But I also want to teach (adults) and I have therefore developed a tendency to teach myself anything I am interested in at enough of a level that I could teach someone newer to it. There are just too many sketchy things around Bambu for me to take them seriously. I will concede I am using a budget Creality, and that almost none of the alternative players have the strongest reputation for ethics, so it is a narrowed fiel. But I can see myself buying a Snapmaker, a Prusa, or a Sovol, and on the budget fringes the newer Flashforge printers are shockingly good, and for the entry level I don't massively mind what Anycubic are doing with the Kobra X; it's not heavy duty but potentially has some applications. I don't think I'd buy a Creality again. But it's in no way because of my experience with them or with the machine I bought or its upgrades; this experience has been in very significant ways a life-changing one. I just don't think they appear to be better at doing the more closed products than they were at the dirt cheap stuff (industry-changing machines for which they catch undue shit), and they turn over new products too fast. Where I am more challenged is CNC. I definitely don't know how I feel here, because on the one hand I'd like a large-ish MPCNC or scrappy eBay CNC to rough out lap steel guitars and conversion necks; big coarse woodcutting I am bad at by hand. And on the other hand, for the photography stuff in particular, I have definite applications for a Carvera Z1. I guess the answer may be to do both. But the same process of assessment will be involved in this case.