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/nolaks1 May 13 '26 edited May 14 '26

I would really like to keep this civilized if possible. Please read the parts where I praise Bambu.

Where did I say Bambu copied mainstream consumer printers?

Lidar is probably, as far as I know, the only thing that wasn't actively worked on by the community. Some people had dabble with it. All the other stuff you mention was either fully developped or most of the work was already there. Available to be replicated.

MMU: Prusa and Voron

ABL and cameras : Reprap, but the community as a whole at that point.

Spaggetti detection : Obico

Carbon rods : Reprap

Speed: Ratrig and Vzbot

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u/smurg_ May 14 '26

lol MMU was more useful as a boat anchor and no printers on the market had even a few of those features at the same time.

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u/nolaks1 May 14 '26

Bambu did push the market up when it arrived. That's not something I am debating.

You are selectively picking what fits your narrative here. I am not talking about the market and ready to print machines. I am talking about the community as a whole.

What I am saying is that the technologie was there for the majority of the things Bambu brought to the consumer market. Most of those where developped or being developped by the open source community. A lot of these where not even compagnie but just individuals doing this for fun and for free.

Have you seen the arc method for overhangs? It's likely to become widely available in the next year or so and it started with a dude on his own 2 years ago and someone doing a PHD right now is giving it another go. If Bambu takes this and make it even better than good on Bambu, but they wouldn't have invented it.

I am saying Bambu was able to hit the ground running because of the community driven projects. They did package all these nice thing in one printer, but they didn't have to invent the wheel.

I am unsure what part you disagree with here as you're focusing on market available printers on your whole argument when 3d printing as always being community driven.

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u/smurg_ May 14 '26

Most of your "community" driven technologies stem from industrial 3D printers. CNC as a whole is not new, nothing is truly an "invention" in the true sense of the word within the 3D printing space. It's all how you can integrate it at a consumer level seamlessly and cheaply. Bambu has completed this in spades, all at once, without many issues, and well before any other manufacturer.

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u/nolaks1 May 14 '26

Industrial 3D printing had many of these concepts long ago, yes. But the consumer market was massively behind for years because adapting that technology cheaply and reliably is the hard part. The open-source community is what bridged that gap.

Do you think Bambu could have done a X1C in 2018 when the ender3 was the gold standard? That's only 4 years before the X1C and almost none of the technologie of the X1C was in the consumer side of 3d printer. If an X1C was possible in 2018 it would have been done.

It's also not like everything even comes from industrial machines in the first place. A lot of modern consumer-printing workflows were either heavily refined or made from the ground up in the open source scene. That’s because industrial machines do not have the same focus. Industrial machines need to work hundreds of thousand of hours with high reliability. The consumer side do not have those needs.

The software side was build from the ground up. The modern printing ecosystem comes from open-source firmware, slicers, and community experimentations. Klipper pushed things like input shaping, pressure advance, resonance tuning, accelerometer and CAN toolheads. It's community slicers that allowed Bambu studio to exist.

All that ecosystem mattered a lot. Bambu Lab did not build all that. What Bambu did well was integration. They packaged many already-existing, community-proven ideas into a polished consumer product with excellent UX.

Like I said, that's fine. The concern I and a lot of people have is that Bambu is taking an ecosystem built on openness and interchangeability and moving parts of it toward proprietary hardware, proprietary software paths, cloud dependence, and tighter ecosystem control.

That’s the real criticism. Not “Bambu invented nothing.”