I’m looking to buy an intermediate level printer to upgrade from a MK2, and I’m deciding between a P1S vs a MK4.
I have never considered getting anything other than a Prusa, since I’ve had such good experiences using mine, however I heard that recently they’ve switched away from their open source model(?)
That and being made in the EU was the main differentiating factor for me, however I do hear really good things about Bambu printers.
Does anyone have experience with either?
Edit: Found a lot of the information I was looking for here: https://lemmy.world/post/9500502
How do you like the Qidi? Sorry I’ve been neglecting this group for a while if you’ve been “harping” on them… I saw a couple reviews and they looked interesting
So far so good.
I have two, an “old” original generation X-Plus and a new X-Max 3. I missed out on the 2nd generation.
The X-Max 3 is: enormous, heavy, very capable, and very fast.
It has a couple of things about it I don’t like, but they’re not the end of the world. For instance, it comes with a filament feeding dry box, but the location where it mounts to the printer is astoundingly stupid (on the back, where you can’t easily access it to change filaments). I just feed it from a heated filament dryer box off to the side, connected with about 10" of Capricorn tubing instead. It came with a dumb build plate that’s textured the same on both sides, so I had to buy a flat sided build plate for it. Other than that it needed nothing out of the box except to set the Z offset and let it run its little initialization song-and-dance, and to put filament in it. Oh, and it didn’t come with the internal camera even though Qidi makes one purpose built for it, which is only $40. Seems to me it wouldn’t have broken the bank for them to include that in the box.
Apparently the first batch of the generation 3 models had plastic baseplates and some cooling design issues that caused problems, but Qidi figured it out pretty quickly and rectified these. Going so far as, I understand, sending some owners entirely new printers.
I wrote a whole long post about my X-Max 3 in this community not too long ago. It probably hasn’t fallen off the first page yet.
My old X-Plus was a workhorse and printed many silly things for me. It still works flawlessly and has eaten no parts other than a few nozzles. I still have it, but I put the new printer in its spot and I haven’t figured out what to do with the smaller, older, slower printer yet.