Bambu Lab recently announced a firmware security update for its printers that would introduce an official “authorization control” system for critical printer operations. The update is presented as a way to mitigate the “risk of remote hacks or printer exposure issues that have happened in the past, and also lower the risk of abnormal traffic or attacks.”
The new firmware will not allow Bambu Lab printers to interface with popular 3rd party software or hardware upgrades such as Orca Slicer or BigTreeTech’s Panda Touch screen. Now, users will need to download “Bambu Connect” to act as a one-way go-between.
It is worse than that. They made it so the printer will refuse to print if it hasn’t installed a new update. They took control over the printer away from their owners and it really looks like this is meant to pave the way to anti-consumer practices such as forcing an always on-online requirement, introducing subscription fees to keep some functionalities that used to be free and/or denying the ability to use third party filaments or parts. The “it is for security” excuse is pretty much a meme at that point. It never is about security and always about screwing over the consumer for more money.
I was looking forward to buying a Bambu printer but now it is off the table for me. I’ve been burned too many times by devices that arbitrarily require to be connected to “the cloud” to function. There is absolutely no good reason why a 3D printer cannot be directly controlled via USB or local network without the need for a connection to the internet for “authentication” (imagine how much more secure that would be!). I’m glad I got to see this before I bought one. Bambu owners should be pissed right now. They just got the rug pulled from under them.
I mean for me they were already off the table with their proprietary bullshit overpriced replacement parts. Yeah sure, it prints more out-of-the-box but once you’re used to a little maintenance other printers even cheap ones just are easier. Trivial maintenance and you can get 3-4 for the price of one Bambu usually, which more than offsets the speed.
What would you recommend?
I was planning on Bambu because of perfect prints without any tuning, heated bed, enclosure, and multi material.
Anything under $2k.
This is what people are doing without any post processing :
There are no noticeable layer lines. It’s almost resin quality.
that is more editing and good lighting.
there are always layer lines.
Depending on you I would recommend
Voron (DIY, will take about a week to build and a week to tune),
Prusa (depends on your preference, assemble yourself or built, depending on required time a mk4s with mmu3, or the core one which will take several months to get to you, and the mmu3 later when it will become compatible)
Qidi (cheap, chinese, will likely work decent after some tuning)
Sovol is another option, decent quality out of the box and their corexy units are stupid fast.