659
Stay safe folks
(thelemmy.club)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 23 May 2026
659 points (99.1% liked)
3DPrinting
22710 readers
221 users here now
3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can learn about and discuss 3D printing and development of 3D printed parts and devices.
The r/functionalprint community is now located at: or !functionalprint@fedia.io
There are CAD communities available at: !cad@lemmy.world or !freecad@lemmy.ml
Rules
-
No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
-
Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
-
No porn (NSFW prints are acceptable but must be marked NSFW)
-
No Ads / Spamming / Guerrilla Marketing
-
Do not create links to reddit
-
If you see an issue please flag it
-
No guns
-
No injury gore posts
If you need an easy way to host pictures, https://catbox.moe/ may be an option. Be ethical about what you post and donate if you are able or use this a lot. It is just an individual hosting content, not a company. The image embedding syntax for Lemmy is ![]()
Moderation policy: Light, mostly invisible
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
I mean... I love prusa and their hardware is really really good, but calling them "pricey" is a just a bit of an understatement. You can buy 4 snapmaker U1s for the price of a Prusa XL (or cover my rent for 5 months...), and there's no appreciable difference in print quality between the machines. The XL uses higher quality components, but not so much that the difference is gonna be relevant to a consumer level (or realistically even to a hobby level) user.
I'm pretty surprised they still sell that one. It was one of the first (or even the first?) multihead printers and therefore of course very expensive, but by now… their Core+ is very much the reasonable one.
(Not the first by at least a decade, but for sure the first one that was available outside of industry (and actually worked))
Presumably they're continuing to sell the XL because INDX isn't available yet (hopefully soon). At the moment it's still one of only 3 available machines (2.5 really; bambu h2c only kinda counts) with nozzle swapping, and it really is an amazingly good machine. But even once INDX becomes available for the Core One, it's still going to be more than twice what a U1 costs for a much smaller build area. I'd really like a Core One L with INDX, especially because it has an enclosure + heater and the U1 doesn't, but that's going to be almost 4 months of rent for unreleased-but-hopefully-equivalent technology (admittedly with a 30mm larger build area) to the U1, which is only 1 month of rent on proven hardware which I can go and buy right now.
The value for the user they deliver is in the meta-characteristics like their position on opensource (though uh... snapmaker is kinda winning on that point too), their tech support and their community, and unfortunately these days it's not directly reflected in the hardware. That's not to say it's not top notch hardware, but that no longer sets you apart - Bambu alone has demonstrated that (and lets not forget the MK4S had a catch-on-fire problem back in the day, too. Of course, prusa decided not to be utter bastards about it...). You can get equally good machines for at least 1/2 the price, and the differences between hardened ground linear bearings and unhardened el-cheapo linear bearings will never become apparent for 99% of end users.
I really hope that Bambu gets taken down for this (though it's unlikely they'll go away entirely), and I'd love an INDX machine... but I can't justify spending four months rent on something where the cheaper options give identical results. They're almost a luxury brand - great if you can afford them, but most people absolutely can't. And honestly at this point they're just too expensive to be a useful recommendation for people trying to get into the hobby.