3DPrinting

Prusa has been a part of the community and active contributors since the very beginning with Adrian Bowyer's open source university project (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RepRap) That is why the entire hobby exists. If it wasn't for proprietary companies like Stratasys, we probably would have seen the hobby start in the 90's instead of the mid 00's. Exploitation through digital theft of ownership is terrible for everyone.

I bought a Prusa. I wouldn't accept a free Bambu printer if you paid me. If I have a choice to own a product, versus renting a product at full retail price when the product is not for sale, I think it is an easy decision. You can own or be owned. I am not for sale.

I really like the open nature of Prusa. I won’t tolerate a printer that requires a propriety web service to use like Bambu. I have a Prusa Mini, MK3S, and now the XL, and I am happy about how easy they are to operate and maintain. Every printer is a winner and only gets better with every release. I’m a customer for life.

That said, the cost is a little higher than I’d like and the technology is often a little behind (a bit like my Apple products) but the reliability is so good that it’s completely worth it.

I bought Prusa.
I hope to be able to still use the machine in 10 years.
I'm much less confident that BambuLabs machines will be able to do that, than Prusas. This is because of multiple reasons:

• There are design decisions of Bambu that I do not trust (bushings on the x-axis on p1 and x1 machines), which track with the decisions of DJI which I didn't like and where many of Bambus people came from.
• I much prefer to support a comparatively independent european maker than a chinese-bank backed one.
• I do trust Prusa much more to offer long-term support than Bambu
• I prefer to support Open Source, and I do think Bambu is still violating licenses (which imho should not be supported/accepted)
• I do not like Bambus AMS design. Their reliability costs quite a lot of filament.

But Bambu has Prusa beat on price for similar performance. By a significant margin.

And to further your question, I'm not sure Bambus Printers have that much more "simplicity" in use than Prusas. Especially if you buy pre-built. Both are rather plug and play.

In short: I fear / believe that Bambu is exactly the kind of company that ruins products. Underbid your competition, cut costs at the customers expense. Why provide updates to your old products when you make a new gen? Why use a part that lasts longer than the required period for repairs? etc.
The fact that they started regular sales this year (I Believe before was pre-order?! would have to check) and already have 3 different platforms out (X, P and A) is quite a lot of fragmentation. Maybe they designed for that from the start, but... we'll see. AMS and AMS lite also seem quite different.
They may even be the worst kind, that underbids the competition and takes development costs as losses to destroy the competition until you are an effective monopoly, at which point you can fuck everything up way more (increase prices, cut quality / development etc)
In Fairness, they may also not be. They may also have excellent long-term reliability and support. Maybe in 5 years P1 and X1 still get feature updates. Maybe the design decisions turn out to be outstanding.

One major con for Bambu is that the firmware is not open source (at least, last I checked). This puts you in a walled garden of sorts. It also can make you vulnerable, for example earlier this year a bug caused printers connected to Bambu's cloud to start prints that weren't request. You can imagine how bad that is.

This being said, I plan on my next printer upgrade being to a Bambu. I've gotten tired of the calibration game and Bambu does that well.

Personally I don't think Prusa is really as far behind as some people claim. A lot of printers on the market are still single material bed slingers, and it's not like Prusa doesn't have a Core XY, it's just a large and expensive machine (Prusa XL).

Considering they have been in the market a long time and their printers are known to be reliable workhorses, I went with the Mk4.

What do you mean by complexity? An i3 style cartesian peinter will have fewer motors, shorter belt paths, fewer bearings and what have you, etc.

A CoreXY printer will be able to move faster than a cartesian peinter and will accelerate a ton faster too. That said, if you really want to cut print times you need a larger nozzle and thicker extrusion widths.

Prusas are generally reliable workhorses. Bambu is newer on the screen, but fairly well liked. Personally, I'm not sure how I feel about some of the cloud infrastructure and closed source components.

I'm not sure if you've considered Vorons. If not, take a quick look at the trident and/or the 2.4. The build will be fairly involved, but you will have a super solid base that has a lot of community support.

I recently agonized over this decision a bit and went with a Bambu. When it comes down to it, the prusa printers are just really hard to justify given that you are paying more money for fewer features even if you assemble it yourself.

I agree with what others have said that the reliability and longevity of Bambu printers is a concern, but frankly if I’m still into printing in a number of years and Bambu starts to really enshitify, I’ll build a Voron or get something even better that hasn’t come out yet.

Get the Creality K1 max instead of either. No dated design like in Prusa. And it's open enough and easily hackable to repair and modify as needed.

I get all the arguments for Prusa, but right now there's no excuse for how far behind they are in the industry. I would not invest in their machines until they do some catching up. What you get from them does not justify the price. They got complacent.

While Creality is not as open as Prusa it's not as closed down as Bambu. Their parts tend to be more off the shelf and readily available, and they are also cloned by lots of other manufacturers.

The machine will be repairable and have lots of community support for many years to come.

I bought a Bambu P1S with AMS for Black Friday - something like eur 100 off and a couple of free spools of filament on top of the 3 250g samples they pack in the box. I've only had it about 4 days but it's pretty decent. It's a little loud, but it's fast and enclosed so potentially I could use it with more exotic stuff than PLA. My old printer is an Ender 3 Pro with upgraded board & BL Touch and I reckon this new one is 4x as fast. It's incredibly easy to use - autolevelling, Core XY, filament loading. Only downside is it poops filament out the back and so I reckon I'll have to 3d print a poop slide to bring it around and to the front. The Bambu slicer is a fork of Prusa Slicer - I wish it wasn't so egregiously different graphically but if you've used Prusa Slicer then it's more or less the same except for how prints are sent to the printer.

I've not used a Prusa to compare. People say they're workhorses but I wonder if the Prusa Mk 4 was rushed out judging by some people's comments about the firmware.

The Prusa would be a lot more like your Ender. But like your Ender, they aren't exactly plug and play. That said, they are tried and true work horses. And as another commenter mentioned, very open. Bambu, on the other hand, ships ready to print and from what I hear is reliable and simple. Unfortunately it is much more closed, and you are at the whim of a company that could just decide to kill your printer one day, or take away features with a firmware update.