TL;DR: Very happy with my purchase, impressed so far. Will update when the print finishes.

I was using and Ender 3 v3 KE before and I see now the difference, and understand people saying if you just want plug n play - go Bambu.

I can’t speak to the print quality yet, (although the progress looks good) but the smarts built into this thing are really impressive. First setup it goes through a 15minute calibration mode - it checks and compensates for its location by performing speed travel changes and vibration testing to adjust its settings - the aim being to minimise the effects of its travel and bed direction changes based on what its sitting on.

It even has a little wiper blade thing (that’s actually very aggressive) which catches and removes extrusion waste during heating and filament changes etc. I suspect I’ll be buying an AMS for it when the sales come around. The filament changes seem like they might be a bit more time consuming than the ender, it took a lot of “retries” telling it to feed more filament in, for the filament to reach extrusion. The ender doesn’t have a PTFE feed tube so I am accustomed to just forcing more filament through the print head manually - which is the source of my impatience but that is trivial at most. Once the extrusion was working - it then did a flow calibration on its own. Checking temps and extrusion force I presume. One more thing built in that you don’t have to think about

I didn’t realise it came with a lil camera built in. I wasn’t too fussed but it’s a nice touch.

The machine beep sound is obnoxious so i turned that off straight away, but handy for getting attention over a noisy workshop I can imagine.

I was a bit dubious about moving away from Orca as I had become familiar with the settings etc, but this UI is almost the same and seems as intuitive as the rest. Haven’t tried any significant modifications to the model in Bambu but it looks like it’s going to be just about the same.

Overall I’m blown away by the polish and functionality it offers, and the ease I’ve had setting it up. Bambu Product Managers must be good at their jobs and if they’re not experienced enthusiasts, they must actually go out and speak to a lot of their customers as this is a great product.

Appreciate everyone who’s posted before me, and shared their thoughts on printers when others have asked for advice - reading through that content has led me to this purchase which I’m very pleased with already.

Happy printing team!