When I started in 3D printing, you had 2 options. A $20k professional grade 3D printer, and $800 worth of parts and a crappy product in the end. But as the home 3D printing market progressed, eventually people started comparing what these home kit machines were against the professional machines, and for the most part, it wasn’t looking good for the professional machines at all. Home 3D printers caught up quickly and professional 3D printers didn’t keep pace.
But had professional 3D printers developed as rapidly as prosumer 3D printers did, including the race to the bottom in price, I do believe the X1 Carbon is what we’d have ended up with. Of course that isn’t possible in real life because the prosumer market was made possible by an enthusasim for open source and a whole community of people working together to make it happen, as mentioned in this video. And the race to the bottom in price would have to be in percentage. But that’s not the point. It’s like BambuLabs came from an alternate timeline where professional 3D printers did keep the pace, and just brought itself into our reality..
But every rose has it’s thorns. And I didn’t want to take up time in the video complaining about things that really don’t matter, compared to the bigger picture of how awesome this machine is. So that’s what the blog is for. Here’s a list of things that either we as the community or BambuLab could work on to polish this amazing machine:
- Start on the 3D view, instead of the “start project” page.
- When importing a 3MF it assumes it’s a project file, asking you to discard your changed settings, then it goes “oops, this isn’t a project file, we’ll just put those settings back”, which is fine, but when importing a 3MF it should confirm it’s a project file, and not just assume it is.
- Download timelapse files to the slicer, and let me preview them and save them from there so I don’t have to do the SD card shuffle to get them (though I love that I can make time lapses so quickly)
- Keep past files on the SD card instead of deleting them
- Ability to queue prints while it’s printing
- Load/Unload for single filament machines (I understand this is different with the AMS)
- It’s noisy, even on the quite mode
There’s probably more, and maybe you have some ideas. But in truth they should probably be added to their GitHub issue tracker, and not here.
