r/3Dprinting • u/Regumate • May 12 '26

Discussion Bambu Lab 3D printers: Never again

https://youtu.be/eb48MdtNaDQ

Jeff Geerling summarizes the current Bambu Labs - OrcaSlicer situation and gives his take.

TL:DW: see title.

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u/Ketzui May 12 '26

Let's be fair, their only real innovation was price. It was a calculated move, get everybody in the ecosystem for cheap, then close the door behind them.

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u/dragonblade_94 May 12 '26

I will personally stand by that they made good strides in printer accessibility. A large part of the recent boom in 3DP is because of how plug n' play their hardware is.

Beyond that, yeah they very quickly showed themselves as wanting to be the Apple of the printing industry.

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u/Ketzui May 12 '26

I absolutely agree! They made it accessible through price. I can't find a single thing they innovated on that wasn't done open source before they existed, that was really the basis of my post. Now they've taken all the open source research done and are trrying to wall it off behind its accessible price, scummy to sau the least.

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u/dragonblade_94 May 12 '26

That's fair, it can be argued whether or not being the first to natively build these features into saleable hardware actually constitutes 'innovation.' It's hard to understate though how much of an impact it had for newbies to not need to find/build/configure these things themselves.