I decided to change out my Ender 3 pro with many upgrades to a Bambu Labs P1S. I chose this after an extensive online search of the available printers at my price range. The P1S had good reviews and the company has been around for a few years now, so hopefully spares should be available for a while, also there are now a few third parties making parts for the printers.
I ordered in on a Tuesday evening via the Bambu UK website, it shipped the next day, collected by DPD, arrived at the local delivery depot on Thursday. I'm thinking delivery Friday or over the weekend, but I was wrong. Tracking from DPD showed an "unexpected delay". Trying to contact DPD is impossible, you will have more luck speaking to the dead!!!! Still not moved on Monday, so raised a "ticket" with Bambu, their reply " shipping delays due to Black Friday sale so wait a week" ???. I replied it's shipped and stuck in transit, once again wait a week and maybe it will move. Tuesday, Wednesday still stuck, so raised and issue via PayPal, and contacted Bambu via PayPal. Still no movement on Saturday so escalated my PayPal issue to a claim against Bambu, lo and behold Monday I received a new tracking number, and it was delivered on Tuesday. The moral of this is that if you order something to be delivered, it's not your responsibility to chase up the courier, it's down to the vendor as you brought the delivery service from them. Anyway, alls well that ends well.
When it arrived, it was very well packaged, but I still made an unboxing video in case it was damaged. It's a nice unboxing experience with everything nicely boxed up and in labelled bags so you know that the bits are for. It took about a half hour to unbox and remove the transit bolts, and another half hour to go through the calibration and set up. Then it's time for the first print, one from the supplied SD card, and I must say I was very impressed as it came out perfect first time, no bed levelling tweaking the filament temps, nothing, just his print and away it goes. This is almost a plug and play printer, and it's FAST, and the quality is very good.
The recormended slicer is Bambu Studio, which is I belive base on the Creality Print slicer, which is different from cura which I've used for the past 5 years. There's plenty of help online and on Youtube so not a issue.
One of the features of the printer is the remote access, and a camera that can be viewes live, via a laptop or phone. Now this may put people off as the remote access is via a Bambu server, so anything you print is uploaded via the Bambu server, so may raise confidentality issues, but you can access the printer via a LAN or just print from the SD card.
I've had the printer for over a week now and have put about a kilo of filament throug it, I've had one failure when the filament snapped, but it was a cheap filament. The quality is very good, and the speed is impressive, also the designers of the printer thought it through and there are some nice touches. But with any printer, the first things you make are a few add-ons. First was a poop chute, to catch and redirect the waste filament from the back of the printer, second was a spool holder to move the spool from the back to the side, both work well.
I'm getting to grips with the slicer, the stock settings for Bambu filament appears pretty good, I've made a couple of custom presets for other filaments, and still tweaking them, namely the temp and speed settings.
Overall, I'm impressed by the printer apart from the delivery issue I had.
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