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Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate

drewdevault.com

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Re: Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate

#131

Post by kiba »

riddley wrote: post #109
TheCleric wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m 100% in favor of money not always being the primary purpose of a business. That being said, you still have to be profitable (if even by a penny), or the business will cease to exist at some point. I hope there is enough of a niche for what Prusa wants to continue to do, but I’m not sure.

I'm not sure either, but AFAIK they've expanded every year. They seem to be doing fine.

They will be doing fine until suddenly they're not doing fine. There's a delayed effect that you see from your business decisions because it might take years to play out. It's best to get ahead of problems before they become problems.

I think Prusa should step up their again and realize that open source isn't really the problem. Everybody gets cloned, closed source or not. It's the nature of the beast.

Re: Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate

#132

Post by flutas »

tjoff wrote: post #75
commandar wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prusa was better positioned than anyone else in the market to do exactly what Bambu did, but actively chose not to out of a combination of stubborness and hubris. Prusa had an established reputation for relatively low hassle, premium machines. There legitimately isn't much in the Bambu machines that didn't already exist in some form in the high end hobbyist space. What Bambu did was take the best of what was out ther…

What are the fundamental design flaws of XL? I haven't looked into it in detail but the design appears from a glance to be really good. If you ignore the cost, which is really hard to do in this case. But that is also somewhat justified by them targeting businesses. It just means they are lagging (which is evident by how delayed mk4 was, if it had been on time mk5 would be imminent by now). I do feel that the XL is a…

The toolchanger on the XL has a problem where the tool heads don't like up properly/accurately all the time.

Current community solutions are slamming the toolhead into a printed block after every toolhead swap.

A lot of experienced YouTubers have also had problems with the machine:

https://www.reddit.com/r/prusa3d/comments/17samr9/the_5_tool...

Re: Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate

#133

Post by swells34 »

lawn wrote: post #127
swells34 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, you have a quote right above that line stating it is the firmware that is non-free; hardware isn't mentioned. You might want to edit your original post so it is consistent with what you are trying to communicate.

Ah, my bad. Unfortunately I can no longer edit the comment...

No worries, the edit cutoff has bit me before as well. But just to clarify, you do mean that the hardware is closed source, and the firmware is not? I did see some licensing stuff on prusa's GitHub, looks like they have non-commercial licensing for their graphics package.

Re: Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate

#134

Post by TimMeade »

Palomides wrote: post #40
rjbwork wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I got into 3d printing a few years ago to start a side business for a niche hobby, got a nicer Creality CR-10S, I think it was. Endless hours tinkering with the thing, and still could only get nice solid prints like half the time. I just don't have the patience to deal w/ stuff like that anymore as I've gotten older. I just want something that works OOTB. I think in the next few years if I get back into it I'll…

I'm curious why you didn't buy a prusa? was price the only factor? It's sad to me that these low end machines have made so many people think that 3d printing is very finicky and tedious.

For me it was obvious that there was a massive "Learning" curve. I needed to be sure this was viable for what i wanted to do. So i went with the $400 Ender 3 S1Pro. But ended up with new hotends new most everything. I didn't think there was a large difference between it and the Prusa. I intended to move up to the Prusa but the bambu lab printers came out before. Very lucky on my part.

The creality K1 Max was because i needed a bigger bed. I had an anycubic max in between and it was worse than the Ender. I never got it reliable. The K1 Max at least does get used. I just throw away a lot of filament from failures. The ones that complete are very nice.

Re: Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate

#135

Post by swells34 »

kiba wrote: post #130
swells34 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have maybe a few hundred prints on Bambu Labs printers, and I've had fewer than 20 failures, pretty much all from bad design choices on my part. They have been quick, reliable workhorses that just spit out the parts I need. I did have an issue with one of them having a warped bed, which caused bad adhesion on several prints, but I contacted support, they walked me through some debugging, then just sent me a new one…

Nope. All my issue with X1C is the AMS stuff. I will be replacing it eventually once there's a viable open source product or make enough money to fund open hardware projects.

Oh interesting, my AMS has worked flawlessly. This is interesting because I've tried many multimaterial solutions, and other than a Voron with multiple hot ends, none of them worked well at all until the Bambu AMS. It was really wasteful at first, but that was the only negative thing I could say about it. Maybe Bambu Labs has more QC problems than I thought. My experiences were all so simply and directly positive (across 4 of their printers now), I kind of expected that to just be the norm.

Re: Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate

#136

Post by slau »

commandar wrote: post #79
slau wrote: post #35

I think Prusa has had a couple of missteps of late, but they’re not in the gutter yet. On the XL: the 0.6mm makes sense with the build volume, to significantly improve print times, but seems to really not work well with the 5 toolhead models, and introduces massive amounts of zits, stringing, cross-contamination, etc. On the Mk4: at the price point, it’s maybe missing a few features to really hold up against the X1C,…

>On the XL: the 0.6mm makes sense with the build volume, to significantly improve print times, but seems to really not work well with the 5 toolhead models, and introduces massive amounts of zits, stringing, cross-contamination, etc. More fundamentally, the XL uses an open frame design specifically because Jo wanted to prioritize being able to easily see and remove prints. The entire gantry sits on a cantilevered ope…

I didn’t know about this point. Which printer would be closed frame, so I can understand the difference?

From what I’ve been able to observe, the quality of the XL is quite good for single tool head prints, however the quality really nosedives when multiple tool heads are introduced, and a bunch of people have been finding tricks to improve things (more wiping, less lifting, insane retractions, etc).

Re: Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate

#137

Post by kiba »

swells34 wrote: post #135
kiba wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. All my issue with X1C is the AMS stuff. I will be replacing it eventually once there's a viable open source product or make enough money to fund open hardware projects.

Oh interesting, my AMS has worked flawlessly. This is interesting because I've tried many multimaterial solutions, and other than a Voron with multiple hot ends, none of them worked well at all until the Bambu AMS. It was really wasteful at first, but that was the only negative thing I could say about it. Maybe Bambu Labs has more QC problems than I thought. My experiences were all so simply and directly positive (ac…

Remember that I am just a sample of one. Experience will differ.

It's hard to say what's the norm without more data.

Re: Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate

#138

Post by sebazzz »

cfeduke wrote: post #64

From experience in the 3D printing space, it's too early to say Bambu out-Prusa'd Prusa, because there hasn't been enough time to know whether the Bambu printers will outlast a Prusa printer. The business model the author is discussing is not unlike the business model for Glowforge, and based on my wife's experience in that industry I'm not sure that business model is working out so well. I've been printing continuou…

Bambu P-series based on an ESP32 aren't really comparable to the A and X series running full Linux-based firmware with full color touch screen.

Re: Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate

#139

Post by Fatnino »

TheCleric wrote: post #83
Palomides wrote: post #6

>Imagine a Prusa where it works out of the box, you can fire up a slicer in your browser which auto-connects to your printer and prints models from a Prusa-operated model repository, paying $10 for a premium model, $1 off the top goes to Prusa, with the same saved payment details which ensure that a fresh spool of Prusa filament arrives at your front door when it auto-detects that your printer is almost out. The prin…

Agreed. I thought they had some good points up until this and immediately thought “I would RUN from a company that did this.” Also do people REALLY pay for models, let alone $10? I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve paid for a model to 3d print. Much easier to find an existing one, hack one, or just make my own.

I can count on no hands the number of times I've paid for an stl.

Re: Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate

#140

Post by sebazzz »

Palomides wrote: post #6

>Imagine a Prusa where it works out of the box, you can fire up a slicer in your browser which auto-connects to your printer and prints models from a Prusa-operated model repository, paying $10 for a premium model, $1 off the top goes to Prusa, with the same saved payment details which ensure that a fresh spool of Prusa filament arrives at your front door when it auto-detects that your printer is almost out. The prin…

Nothing grim about it, it is not "enshittification" but actually offering value in exchange for a fee.
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