I don’t think I need to say it, but yeah, Bambu has won. They’ve got an option that you don’t need to think twice about getting in every segment now: From the A1 Mini that is competing even with no-name machines on price, the P1S as the ‘just get this one’ option, and now the H2D as a do-it-all high-end solution. I haven’t been covering them on this channel as much as I probably should have, so with all the attention the H2D has been getting, I think it’s time for me to explore why that’s and to clarify a couple of things.
And no, it’s not because Prusa has been paying me off. I do think it’s great that a lot of you have a keen eye for that sort of stuff, because, yes, it’s becoming harder and harder to tell how much manufacturers were able to pressure specific media outlets in how they report on products,*cough* Nvidia *cough*.
I’ve always been transparent about what parts of my videos are sponsored and paid for, but I know not every channel is that clear about it. I also only accept sponsorship for things I think are genuinely worth using, so as an example, here’s what a sponsor spot looks like on my channel:
At the bottom, in this case, it says “this segment is sponsored by VoxelPLA”, then I give you some details on what they make, so VoxelPLA make high-speed-capable PLA+ and PETG+ filaments, and soon they will also expand their lineup with new cool colors and engineering-focused materials. So that’s good, but then you’d also need to know what makes VoxelPLA stand out. Well, companies will always have talking points they send over, that’s why every single Hello Fresh ad spot sounds exactly the same. I do have to make sure those points are truthful, or I’m not going to include them; VoxelPLA mentioned that their filaments are engineered for reliability and strength – which I can confirm, they’ve been working really well for me, and they’re also using them exclusively in their own printfarm in southern California; and then the fact that they are super affordable, $16.99 for a full 1kg spool, plus bulk discounts, and free shipping over $75 in the US. And yeah, that’s a genuinely good deal for filament that you can rely on to be consistently good every time you buy it. And towards the end of a sponsor spot, some brands will also have a coupon code for extra incentive and tracking, but for VoxelPLA, you just go to voxelpla.com and everyone gets the best deal they have.
So that’s a brand integration. The good thing is, I only want to work with companies that I think make a good product, and if they don’t, that means I won’t have to bend over backwards to make them happy.
This was also not about Bambu Lab, and their company blueprint, DJI, being Chinese companies, and obviously not manufacturing their product locally here in Europe. What I care about is a product doing the job it’s supposed to do and ideally, offering good value to you while it does so. Some secondary factors derive from where a product is from, but the pure fact alone of where in the world something is being made, to me, by itself, doesn’t change whether a product is good or bad.
The main reason I was cautious about Bambu was that my idea of the best way forward for 3D printing, as I understood it, was very different from the direction many manufacturers, especially Bambu Lab, were pushing towards.
When I started out, it was not 3D printing yet; it was RepRap. It was a project that enabled people to build their own printers because a patent had run out that, so far, had kept any competitors of Stratasys from making filament-based printers, at least without having to pay massive licensing fees.
Suddenly, people were building printers and experimenting with the tech and sharing what they found, and as a result, everyone was able to build better printers because of it. And companies were able to sell you components that made building them more accessible. Open source was the thing that made that rapid development of rapid prototyping possible at all.
That was ten years ago, and as printers moved from being a project you have to build yourself to something you just buy off the shelf, it was becoming more and more clear that respecting the original open-source licenses of hardware and software that others had developed and shared, and that companies were now basing their products on, started being treated more like an optional gesture of good will.
And over time, printers and components being compatible with open standards was seemingly becoming less and less important for the people buying them. So that trend away from having printers that were basically modular systems, kinda like desktop computers, and accessible for tinkering and repair by their users, over towards manufacturer-proprietary and highly integrated systems was already in full swing.
Bambu was not the first company to stray from that principle of sharing everything freely. In fact, Anycubic, Creality, and similar companies were already setting that path and getting people used to it. Right now, I think only Lulzbot is still sharing everything about their machines – though not as much as they used to – Prusa and E3D have already way dialed back how much about their products they share, and most companies are moving towards patenting as much as possible about their designs, perhaps as a means to stifle competition, but definitely to at least have a defensive patent pool when someone else comes after them for an infringement.
Talking to folks who work for 3D printer manufacturers, a significant amount of their development time is now being spent on trying to work around solutions that have already been patented, to make sure your company won’t be sued into oblivion in the future, or to simply save on licensing costs that they’d have to pass on to consumers.
This is what I tried to steer the 3D printing space away from, but honestly, it was pretty stupid of me to assume that I’d be able to have any meaningful impact on the 3D printing industry as a whole. What we’ve got now is simply the inevitable outcome that the market and patent systems are set up to achieve.
Bambu Lab was founded by folks who brought along a lot of experience from DJI, and they understand, probably better than anyone else in the 3D printing space, what they need to do to build a successful company. First, accept that there is a specific outcome that market and patent systems reward, and actively work towards putting yourself in a spot that aligns with that outcome. You’re a business, that’s your job, and secondly, give consumers what they want.
And what buyers seem to want right now is not open source everything, it’s getting maximum value out of the money you spend on a 3D printer. That’s something that Bambu is also incredibly good at. Though what’s being left on the wayside in all of this is the option of actually getting involved with the tech, tinkering with it, making improvements, sharing that back, and possibly, seeing your improvement making everyone else’s setup better, too, as other people start implementing it. There is still some printer modding going on, but the involvement has shifted from improving the core platform itself to finding workarounds for things that the manufacturer overlooked.
For me, and I assume for a lot of the other folks who got into 3D printing early, that ability of being part of a larger community and advancing the tech together, collaboratively, was a huge factor for why 3D printing was such an interesting field to dive into. Nowadays, instead of being an active creator, the standard use case is more about being a passive consumer of the tech.
And you know what, that isn’t even a bad thing. Being able to get into 3D printing and using it as a tool for creating other things, without having to tinker with the machine itself, is a huge win for enabling more people to create more complex things on their own, without having to be an expert in every single aspect of what they do. Fantastic small-scale products like the zerømouse by Optimum probably wouldn’t exist if 3D printing was still this massively complex behemoth to get into. I think the pros and cons are actually quite similar to what’s happening with AI vibe coding, but that’s a whole different story.
Back to how Bambu fits into all of this: My initial interactions with Bambu fans were not exactly positive. When they started, there had already been a couple of brand-centric cults in the 3D printing space before, and the type of messages I got regarding Bambu were along those exact same lines. But since then, Bambu’s user base has grown so much that now the community mostly consists of just regular folks, using the machines, just like any other consumer item.
And you know how they say “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”. If you squint a little, it’s almost like Creality, Anycubic, Elegoo, or Flashforge are all making the same Bambu-lookalike printers now, even Prusa has caved and is building what could be described as their version of Bambu’s CoreXY printers.
I was wrong in thinking that trying to cling to that original open-source approach would end up creating the best outcome for everyone. To me, Prusa is the company that aligns the closest with that ideal, and because they make machines that are convenient to use and capable in the things they can do, they’ve always been my go-to option.
I started this YouTube channel because I wanted to provide the resources and knowledge for printer users that I wished had existed when I started, and that hasn’t changed. I still want to contribute to making 3D printing as accessible and frustration-free as possible for everyone involved. But as “3D printing” itself adapts, so do I. I mean, that’s basically what the writing process for this video was: trying to figure out what changed externally and what that means for me internally.
I think, first off, I’m going to have to let go of the idea of wanting to cover everything, and when I do, only being satisfied with my content when I can do so to the fullest extent possible. Like writing the script for a guide and then going into every “if this -> then that” edge case. That might be great for written guides where you can click in and out of specific detail sections, but it’s not the right concept for YouTube.
But I’ve also been going light on reviews because I didn’t really have a clear strategy of how I could cover every possible detail in a video without it becoming a 45-minute-long goliath to produce. I think doing reviews is more important than ever. 3D printers are inherently complex and multi-faceted, so a review is always going to miss some aspects, but that’s why you’ll usually find more than just one person doing a review of any product.
And for a review, I’m going to have to separate out what parts of a product are well-done and benefit you, the user, in the short term, and which aspects I think might cause some issues long-term on a larger scale, for example, things like forced cloud integrations or patenting essential tech.
Then, I’ll be even clearer when a company is involved with content and when they aren’t. Gamer’s Nexus is my current gold standard for how to handle review units provided by manufacturers, and the little pop-up they have at the start of a video when they are featuring a specific product is super clear and unobtrusive. As ever, I want to be as transparent as possible to you about the content you’re watching, and I think what they are doing is worth copying.
And lastly, having it laid out like this means that I can look at products in a more granular way. If a laser cutter does a fantastic job cutting through anything you put in front of it, but is utterly unsafe to use, then that should be pointed out, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s doing an exceedingly good job lasering all the things. Same with Bambu: I might still personally disagree with some specific design or strategic decisions, but if the printer does a good job of what it’s supposed to do and makes sense to buy, then it just makes sense that it’s going to get a recommendation for that. As an aside, that whole area of complexity is something that PC parts reviewers are starting to run into as well – GPUs used to be as simple as more fps = more better, but with upscaling, frame generation, AI feature sets, and the same settings on different GPUs not even getting you the same output anymore, it’s becoming a lot less straightforward to compare different models than just choosing the one that produces the bigger number.
I want the content I put out there to provide value outside of just being entertainment, I don’t want to do “comfy content” as Adam Ragusea explained it. But I also don’t want to be the Louis Rossmann of 3D printing, I think you need to be an incredibly resilient person to keep doing what he does, and I don’t think I’d be able to handle that .
So, I just want to hear from you: What are you looking for in this channel, and in a review? Is it a full technical specs breakdown? Is it a vibe check with the machines and their company ethics? Or is it just trying to objectively benchmark as many things against each other as possible and giving you numerical ratings? It might be a bit of everything. Let me know in the comments below.
As always, thank you for watching, keep on making, and I’ll see you in the next one.
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