I know I’m a bit late with my coverage of the Core One, so you probably already got the gist of what people think about the machine. But because I now had a little extra time to use the Core One, I get to cover the things that might have been missed in the first round of content. I also happen to have an X1C at hand, and because you can’t really talk about the Core One without also talking about the X1C I’ll be comparing the two, and there are actually quite a few places where Prusa is clearly trying to one-up the Bambu competitor. And it manages to do so except for one rather important aspect that gets people to actually buy them.
My first impression of the Core One was “Oh, that’s basically a MK4S with a CoreXY motion system”. And yes, that’s pretty much exactly what it is. It uses the same toolhead, the same bed, and the same electronics platform, but now is fully enclosed and as you would expect, prints a bit faster. This time not just from being able to do larger layer heights, it still has a high-flow nozzle, but also from physically being able to move faster. With comparable settings, the Core One often lands on exactly the same print times as the X1C. In some cases, the Bambu machine is still about 20% faster, but it does so at the expense of temperature control.
PLA prints matte when the hotend can’t quite deliver heat fast enough into the filament to fully heat it up, and with this cone printing fastest at the bottom and slower up top as the printer tries to keep it from overheating, the Core One produces a consistently glossy part, while the X1C starts out underheated at its fastest speed and fully glossy up top. This might give the Core One an edge in part strength, but I haven’t specifically tested for this.
Now: Print volume. On paper, the Bambu has a larger print area, but in practice, it uses the front 20mm of its bed for calibration patterns, and the front left corner is also occupied by the filament cutter. So in practice, the usable bed size is identical between the two, but the print height is being one-upped from a usable 250mm on the X1C to 270mm on the Core One. That’s nice to have, but I almost only print flat parts, so for me, area is more important.
Once you add on the MMU on the Prusa or the AMS on the Bambu, that’s where you’ll start seeing a difference, because the Prusa will print a prime tower on the bed for purging the hotend between colors or materials, so you’ll have to fit that in with your print. The Bambu has its poop chute out the back, so it can use the full bed area for multi-color printing.
Speaking of the backside, this is where the one-upping continues. So even back with the old Ultimakers, it was annoying to have the filament spool on the back, and you would have to do the blind reacharound to change filament or spin the printer around on a lazy susan or something. The Core One bumps the side panels in and puts the spool there. That is space that is not being used in a CoreXY anyway, so might as well put the spool there. And this is super convenient.
For the actual CoreXY mechanism, the Core One has thicker 10mm rods on the side instead of the 8mm rods that X1C uses, and the X-axis on the Core One uses a standard linear rail, similar to the original Voron design instead of the custom carbon fiber rods. But both setups work.
The panels on the Core One are steel and polycarbonate, instead of aluminum and glass, so the steel feels more solid, but the polycarbonate feels a bit hackier, and we’ll circle back to this in a bit, but these two material choices also help with temperature retention inside the enclosure.
While the Core One does not have an active chamber heater, it uses the heated bed and its chamber fans to create a temperature-regulated build chamber, which is important if you want to print ABS, ASA, and polycarbonate. Prusa says the Core One goes up to 55°C, and I guess if your room temperature is high enough, it might do that, but in my rather cool basement studio, the printer paused for about half an hour to get the chamber to 40°C before starting my ABS print, and 40°C is the default minimum starting temperature in Prusa Slicer for most high-temperature filaments. Low-temp filaments like PLA instead have a nominal or maximum temperature, and the Core One will use the chamber fans to keep the air temperature inside the machine below that.
The Core One eventually reached about 50°C after a couple of layers of ABS, and it managed to produce the most accurate part when compared to the X1C (chamber reached ~40°C max) and the XL (48°C) – or the MK4S, which has no enclosure.
Printing with ABS or ASA was kinda fading into obscurity because it was such a pain, but this preheating routine, and especially the fact that it’s just something that happens automatically, is making these materials a much easier option again.
An enclosure does have the downside of trapping heat whether you want it or not. On the enclosed Bambu machines, you’re supposed to take off the top panel and leave the door open when you’re printing PLA – because its door switch doesn’t seem to be used, the X1C will yell at you at the start of every print to make sure it has ventilation. The Core One also has a door switch for detecting that, but you can leave it closed even for PLA because it has this sliding grill on top here that you open up for PLA and close for everything else. On my machine, this was quite loose, and just the PTFE tube for the hotend ended up sliding it open from brushing past it, so I tightened the screws a bit, and now it stays in place. In combination with the rear-mounted exhaust fans, this even sort of guides air over the build platform similar to the X1C’s auxiliary side fan, but of course not as directly aimed at the current layer.
Now, all this effort and extra hardware would be pointless if the Core One wasn’t producing good prints or wasn’t doing so reliably. But after a week of throwing everything I could at the machine, I have nothing to report. Anything other than flawless prints would simply not be acceptable these days, and the Core One delivers that. So does the X1C, the XL, and the MK4S. I tried specifically looking for input-shaping artifacts that might pop up from the faster moves, but even there, you’re splitting hairs.
The biggest difference was that PrusaSlicer has the Arachne slicing mode enabled by default, while BambuStudio does not, so the Prusa machines try to reproduce more of the details that are right at the edge of what the nozzle size can handle, while the Bambu just doesn’t try to print them at all. But once you use classic slicing for both, they’re all producing prints that are virtually identical.
If you look really closely, all of the machines have the smallest amount of surface rippling, just in different spots, and none of them are an issue.
Reliability has also been great, I’ve started most of my prints remotely through PrusaConnect straight from the slicer. The loadcell-based bed leveling is as consistent as ever, and most of the time, I only checked on the printer once I got the notification that the print job was done.
Prusa is finally also offering a first-party camera if you need more monitoring. It is a FullHD camera specific to the Core One that magnetically snaps into the front corner of the printer. This is its own WiFi device, and thankfully, they’ve now streamlined the setup process both for the printer itself and for the camera. Both can be set up through the Prusa App, the printer gets a tap on the back onto its NFC area, and the camera reads a QR code that the app shows.
The Core One also still has a wired ethernet jack, and you can of course use the networking features on the local network only without going through their cloud service or requiring an account. Or skip connecting it to a network entirely, it will happily print from a USB drive just the same.
Bambu has recently announced firmware updates that would stop their printers from using files that aren’t signed by either BambuStudio or their BambuConnect application, and would also lock out accessories like the Panda Touch and remove the ability to control your machines through OrcaSlicer or HomeAssistant.
At the same time, their terms of service clearly state that their printers will auto-update and “may” entirely block you from printing if they realize you’re not on the latest firmware. Obviously, that created a bit of a community response, so there’s since been a new blog post saying “well, we’re not actually going to enforce that”, and there’s also been a developer mode announced that would restore much of the functionality that the update would remove, but right now, there’s just a lot of uncertainty about the exact direction that Bambu is pushing towards.
For the Core One, Prusa has explicitly stated that you will always be able to flash whatever firmware you want, be it the Prusa or third-party ones, and they’ll even honor the machine’s warranty if you do so.
But the thing is, everything I talked about up until this point, features, print quality, lock-in, whatever, doesn’t matter when it comes to selling printers. Prusa, as a whole, I think has just become too used to what a good 3D printer is to them, and honestly, so have I. This has been a slow realization process for me over the last couple of weeks. When I look at an i3-style printer, the MK4S in this case, to me, this is the essence of a 3D printer.
I’ve used printers that look like this for over a decade now, and Prusa has been making printers for just as long, but what we “old folk” fail to see is that to a new user, this is an intimidating machine. It has nothing to do with the things that regular people would be familiar with, how should they relate to this and feel like it’s something they can use? If you don’t force yourself to regularly take that step back and really reconsider what people are going to see in your products, you end up making a Prusa XL.
This is my most used printer at the moment because it just does so many things really well. But if you show this to people who are looking to get their first 3D printer and tell them, this is their flagship product, or even if you convince them that this is the best 3D printer in the world, I don’t think the average person would be confident that this is something that he can use, even if it is no different than any other printer.
But this is something that Bambu is doing incredibly well. The moment you see or touch the machine, there are just so many things that you can relate to, that are familiar. The plastic panel and the buttons feel like they’re straight out of an N64. The UI on the screen looks like it’s a phone app. The glass panels probably run off the same production lines that make computer case windows. And when you take it out of the box, the smell even reminds you of unboxing some quirky gadgets on Christmas morning.
It looks and feels just like a regular consumer product. Everything about this is designed to immediately comfort the user and potential buyers, and then when you get to start your first print, it shakes, it makes cool noises, and you get that gratification of “wow, I made it do this, this is crazy”.
And I think Prusa is just about starting to realize how much the emotional connection to a product matters, too, but they’ve got quite a way to go. You take the Core One out of the box, and the first thing you get to do is going to be the most unsatisfying peel of your life.
Please, pre-peel these in the factory!
In the MK4S video, I’ve already talked about how the UI of the printer and in PrusaSlicer are highly functional and packed with features, but come with a distinctly Eastern European simplistic vibe that takes some time to soak up.
I do appreciate the moddability of the Core One. I printed a filter holder for the back fans that take these Ikea Uppatvind particle filters for 5 bucks a pop, and Prusa is also making a GPIO expansion board that you can interface with through g-code, so you can easily tie the printer into other automation stuff if you want to do that. And of course on the Prusa platform, none of the networking functionality is locked down, so you can integrate and control it through tools like Home Assistant.
I think with the Core One, from a technical and functional standpoint, Prusa has finally made that product that eliminates all the easy “yeah, but it doesn’t do this” sort of arguments.
We do have to talk about pricing, and especially US pricing is going to fluctuate, tariffs, of course, but also, all of the Core One units are shipping from Prague. But pretty soon they will start building them in the US and shipping them domestically, so the total cost for getting one in the US is going to come down.
The most surprising thing to me about pricing was that, essentially, the Core One is making the MK4S obsolete. To make it an apples-to-apples comparison, with the enclosure, the Core One ends up being 50€ cheaper than the MK4S, while also being a better printer in every single way you stack things. If you already have one, you can also upgrade a MK4S to a Core One, but you’re paying almost 50% of the price of a full Core One kit, so I just don’t think it’s worth converting a perfectly working printer if you could just sell that and buy a completely new Core One instead.
I tried to figure out prices between the X1C and the Core One, and with adding shipping, imports, and taxes for the US, which most of you are watching from, right now, the assembled Core One is a little more expensive than the X1C, because that’s on sale now right, and that also includes the Buddy Cam to make them more comparable. Regular prices for just the printers with shipping and all get them exactly tied for total cost. But you can also get a kit version of the Core One, which drops the price by 250 bucks, making it significantly cheaper than the X1C. And I think both options make the Core One really good value overall, especially for a product that is engineered and manufactured locally here in Europe, and soon assembled in the US as well. For the kit version that you get to assemble yourself, I’d guess that would take you less than a day if you have never built a 3D printer before, but if you are at all interested in how things work, and you have the time, assembling a Prusa kit usually is a pretty good experience.
Honestly, the Core One was inevitable for Prusa. With the general perception of “if it’s not a CoreXY, it’s not worth getting”, this is the printer that they just had to make. And they managed to engineer a printer that now does everything an X1C does, and even does some things significantly better, like controlling enclosure temperature instead of controlling you. Which one you get or recommend for people is now just down to which of their strengths are more important to you.
I hope I managed to lay out all the important bits for you to make that decision, and if it tips in favor of the Core One, Prusa gave us reviewers affiliate “discount” codes but didn’t actually set up a discount for you, so what I’ll do to try and make up for it, is that for the entire month of February, I’ll use the affiliate commission and donate 50€ to my local dog shelter for every order of a Core One if you use “MadeWithLayers” as a coupon code. I know it’s still not a discount for you, but it’s the least I can do.
As always, thank you to all of you for watching and subscribing, we just made it past half a million subs, and even though that number doesn’t mean much anymore on YouTube, it’s still incredible to think that half a million of you actively decided to see more of this guy please, so thank you. A huge shoutout to everyone who supported me on the way to half a million, through Patreon or YouTube memberships, and as always, keep on making, and I’ll see you in the next one.
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