this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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I use a pretty much stock Qidi X-Plus.
Looks like a sweet printer. I was thinking of buying a Bambu for the holidays, but this looks like a better deal.
I am given to understand that the Bambu is a significantly more capable printer, but for what I paid for the Qidi a couple of years ago I have been very pleased with it just far. If the spectrum goes from 0 to 10, where 0 is receiving an unsorted box of exploded parts and wires, and 10 is a sealed black box built by magic pixies from space, the X-Plus is a solid 7. I didn't really have to do anything to it to get it working well or keep it going, although I did make some minor quality of life mods and I shoved a Raspberry Pi and one of its little camera modules into it so I can remote view what's going on in there and hit the kill switch over the wire if necessary.
If you're into the Bambu's main party trick, Qidi actually do make a model or two with dual extruders so you can do multi-color or multi-material prints. But mine isn't one of those. The Bambu machines (except maybe their little A1 Mini) are probably all noticeably faster than the Qidi as well. But the Qidi costs, like, a quarter as much as an X1 carbon, and half as much as a P1P.
Interesting. I saw the Qidi X-Plus 3 advertises 600mm/s vs Bambu P1S 500mm/s. And the P1S doesn't offer a heated chamber. Have you noticed a difference in quality from the heated chamber?
I haven't yet been convinced of the bambu cool-aid mainly because of closed software. Klipper support is a big value prop. Who knows how long bambu will support OS versions and what happens if they start charging for cloud. It's a young company, so not a lot of confidence yet.
The chamber is not heated per se, but if you cap it off with the included lid the bed heater can raise the internal temperature quite a bit. There is no PID for the chamber temp, though. It just winds up being whatever it is due to the waste heat feom the bed and extruder. You can't actually control it.
That said, I have printed ABS with it no problem. I have a roll of PA-CF, but haven't unwrapped it yet because I'm still chicken.
I'm replying aside my original reply because I missed a detail here. My printer is the OG X-Plus, and does not share the same feature set as their current generation 3 models. My PLA print speed is 60-100 mm/sec depending on my needs and it's not capable of going much faster than that. The OG X-Plus is a traditional gantry printer and is not a CoreXY setup like their newer machines. It also does not run Klipper, but that has not been an issue for me yet. (And you can manually control the machine via serial, with the pins hidden in the mainboard under the bottom deck plate. You can run it with OctoPrint or Kipper on an external Pi or other microcontroller board. I have a Pi hooked up to mine but I only use Octoprint for monitoring since the Qidi fork of Cura slicer can remote start/stop the printer natively as well as upload Gcode to it.)
The new models appear to be a little more comparable to the Bambus in terms of technology and speed -- minus the filament exchanger system, which I personally think is dumb.
Don't get me wrong, I like the multiple color print idea. But if I ever do that I will definitely get a dual or multi-extruder machine instead. The Bambu AMS wastes an absurd amount of filament on material change, and in highly detailed or sub-optimized prints can turn out to spend more weight in filament purging and pooping out the excess from color changes than actually winds up in the finished model.