Right now looking into bang for the buck workhorses with a small footprint/build volume. A description that fit the Prusa mini+ perfectly in the past, but it feels like Prusa is a dinosaur that hasn’t moved with the times.
So who is still buying the Prusa mini+ and why?
Personally: While Prusa has outstanding support, good data protection, and does good things but there is now the Bambu Lab A1 mini.
Prusa mini is at the moment 500€ plus 20€ for a filament sensor (sic., it’s nearly 2024 and that’s an paid upgrade on half a grand printer) and another 7€ for WiFi.
Bambu Lab on the other hand is 320€.
Looking at the specifications, the A1 looks like a clear winner: For maintenance, there are three tasks: 1. cleaning and lubricating the mechanics (both are the same in this respect); 2. cleaning the build surface (both are the same); 3. maintaining the hotend and here Bambu Lab is clearly the better system as you can replace the nozzle in just a few seconds compared to Prusa’s E3D v6 hotend, which requires hot tightening.
The operation is not that different. Both support network, web interface, and automatic bed leveling probed at the nozzle. Bambu Lab has a camera built in, but this requires the printer to be connected to the BambuLab cloud, which may not be possible as the model data is shared with/uploaded to China. I would say this is still a strong point for Prusa as privacy is not an issue with their printers which means they can be easily deployed.
Performance should be close with input shaping enabled, but the A1 mini has the higher flow rate hotend, which means BambuLab is once again the winner (still no highflow at only 28 mm^3/s but twice the flow of a Prusa V6).
The build volume is identical and the footprint is also almost identical, so again no point where Prusa beats BambuLab.
Value? I have already mentioned it. 1.6 Bambulab for the price of 1 Prusa is a clear answer. If Prusa still had the 400€ original launch price and a filament runout sensor included, maybe the answer would be Prusa due to privacy/easier integration. The 200€/printer price difference is so significant that I don’t see who is still buying multiple Prusa mini+.
Btw. is there another printer on the market that just works paired with a small footprint and excellent value?
Personally, a 3D printer that has to be connected to a cloud would be a hard no. Even more so when that cloud is located in China without EU or US oversight.
For what it's worth (annecdotal and n=1 and all that), my Prusa mini has been absolutely flawless for 3 years now. I would buy it again even at a higher price point than the current.
I don't see why a 3D printer in particular would be a concern, unless you're prototyping stuff for a business and worried about proprietary commercial stuff getting out.
But I'm amazed that people in general are willing to connect their systems -- 3D printer or anything else -- to an outside provider's service. It has a considerable number of drawbacks.
It punches a hole in what is normally the front line for home computer security, the firewall/NAT device. Most setups default to not allowing inbound connections. Now you've got some device that is opening connections outwards and could talk to other systems on your network.
It permits the manufacturer of the device to change the terms on which I can use the device. Maybe down the line the manufacturer of your smart TV -- who is not getting any revenue from you after the initial sale of the device -- decides to start inserting ads, say. This sort of thing has been done before. I want the manufacturer's interests to be aligned with mine. Before the product is sold, they have to convince me to buy the thing. Afterwards, those interests could diverge. I don't want the manufacturer to be able to alter the terms on which the product I bought may be used if our interests have diverged.
Even if you want to trust the manufacturer's intent, can they secure their own system against people with more malicious aims? If someone can break into that, they can affect all of the customers, which may make it a tempting target. Russian intelligence attacked Viasat satellite modems, using an exploit that they'd clearly found earlier, when Russia invaded Ukraine to try to disrupt Ukrainian communications. They pushed a firmware update to brick modems. They didn't even just impact systems in Ukraine, but also some outside, like a German offshore wind farm's control system.
If any functionality depends on that manufacturer staying in business and being willing to keep paying for the operating costs, that seems fragile. Many companies do go out of business or decide that the costs of operating a service aren't worth it.
Just being able to track someone's moves across IP adresses has some value; reselling that information helps deanonymize people. Could happen down the line if a company is acquired by a larger company that data-mines its logs.
If you lose Internet connectivity for any reason, you lose local functionality. Home automation stuff is a particularly egregious example -- you don't want your light switches or climate control to stop working if you don't have Internet connectivity to somene's cloud service. But it's true for any number of things.
I agree with all you said, but I think a 3D printer is actually a special type of concern next to generic cyber security and privacy, because it can affect the physical world. It's not unthinkable that the machine can remotely be told to heat up beyond safe levels and as such create a fire risk. Not the type of device that should have an open and active connection to a server somewhere far away in my opinion.
Oh, that's a fair point, yeah, I suppose that anything where only software avoids some kind of catastrophic physical failure does legitimately have its own risks.
To be honest I'm still quite hazy on how Bambu's cloud printing works and what data is sent to them, but just the fact that it exists at all removed the Bambu printers from my consideration instantly and completely. I don't care if it's paranoid. Notwithstanding all the excellent points you made, no one needs to have the capability to see what I'm printing, for any reason, ever. Period. End of story.
My current printers allow me to operate them without any kind of network at all, if I felt like it. I can slice models locally and shuttle the files to them on a USB drive.