⏳Long Term Review: Creality K1 Vs Bambu Lab P1P🥊⏰

okay welcome back everybody now it's time for the long awaited part two of the creality K1 versus p1p comparison I wanted to take some time and really get to use these printers so I've been using this K1 for the past 2 months I've had this p1p for about 6 months so I've really got the hours in on these machines and now I can make a little bit more of an informed opinion about which one might be right for you I've prepared a final print job for these two machines I've got a print in place mechanism here with this scissor snake model my stand calibration print and then I've got my Jesse head over here I don't know why I'm printing out Uncle Jesse's head but it's just a model I had on my computer so I figured why not while those prints are getting started up I'm going to tell you about today's sponsor flexi spot this is a huge upgrade over my previous table you can see it's able to lift my substantial weight as well as these two printers and the nice thing about this is if I need to work on my printers or film something you can bring things up to an ergonomic working position so that you're not having to bend over to work on things also it's important to have a nice sturdy desk when you're running your 3D printers you know how a lot of people put their printers on the floor because that's the only stable surface that they have well this table's nice and sturdy as you can see we'll give it a little Shake test this is actually quite sturdy for a desk I have my older desk here and you can see when I wobble it it just keeps shaking rocking back and forth for a while this flexi spot desk is built with much thicker steel beams and it's just a lot sturdier overall so I think it'll hold up a lot better during these 3D print tests when I was comparing some of my old printers on my old desk I was genuinely concerned that that thing was going to shake itself apart and cause all the printers to come crashing down and Destroy stuff but on this table I think it's a lot sturdier and should hold up to the violent shaking of these machines much better also the integrated Cable Management down here makes it super easy to have a tidy wiring setup I've always had a mess under my desk when it comes to wiring but now with this Flex F spot desk I have all my wires neatly managed in here so everything's super clean and it just makes everything look a lot better so big thanks to flexispot for sponsoring this episode they're actually priced very competitively so if you're looking for a desk check out the pricing in the affiliate links down below all right so let's get back to the print tests and we'll see how this desk holds up as we start our print jobs one Improvement that they've made to the p1p since it's launched is they updated the decompression algorithm so basically it start it's printing faster um whenever you started up a print job there was this lengthy unzipping phase of the print where it would spend 3 to 15 minutes just unzipping the file they've cut down that unzip time dramatically however it still takes some time and the interface on this thing still sucks also unfortunately I'm not able to benefit from that faster decompression algorithm because for some reason my P1 P's networking capabilities have stopped working so I can't upload new firmware to it you can see here in my bamboo Studio when I try and click my printers and show what's on my network it's just not showing up on the K1 you're able to upload firmware using a USB stick which is kind of standard practice for most machines so you can keep it up to date and running without having to connect it to the cloud which I think is a big Advantage you can also do wireless updates on this machine where you just have it update through creality cloud or whatever but I like running my machines offline so I'm glad that you can update the firmware on this machine without hooking it up to the Internet and going through all the to agreements and all that kind of stuff I just enabled tree supports and I'm slicing it this is one thing that I hate about Cura based slicers is they take forever compared to anything that's based on prusa slicer that tends to run things a lot faster so here we go we finally got it to finish slicing all right there's our tree supports I'm just going to use land printing here confirm I'm going to click K1 and do oneclick printing that's just going to send this file over to the printer and execute it bamboo studio is just as easy to use in theory but since my Lan isn't working I have to upload it through that little micro SD card all right so now our K1 has just started up its print job meanwhile we've got our p1p over here getting a little bit of a head start so I let creality print pretty much decide how to slice this model and as you can see it's doing a pretty good job but since I added this modification the retraction settings aren't perfect so it's causing a little bit of stringing also back here you can see the support tree material that they put down it's just a single perimeter that's supposed to hold that to the print tray they should probably put a little bit more material down just to get better bed adhesion for that support structure also if you look right here the Extrusion on this little perimeter layer isn't perfect let's just compare that to the p1p for a minute one of the P1 PS great greatest strengths is how well it's tuned right out of the box all right so it looks like I was actually printing at 240 for that first layer until I just turned it down on the slicer settings I had it set to 220 so I'm not sure why it was running at 240 that excess heat is probably what was causing the issues on that first layer so before we get into our final thoughts about these two machines let's discuss what happened with this final print test so on this p1p everything went pretty smoothly we got excellent print quality all around the only issue that I saw was on this Jessie head we had some undere Extrusion this would be a severe weakness in a mechanical part so I'm not sure what was causing that underere Extrusion but it's an artifact that we really dislike to see you definitely wouldn't want to be trusting your life to a part printed on a machine like this but in terms of this support material it seems really well done so that came off pretty easily and we've got our nice little print here overall a really good result let's try the Jesse head on this K1 this uh tree support is just kind of peeling away it looks like this support material was undere extruded a little bit that might be the fault of creality print or it could be my hacky way of changing the flow ratio for the material because I put this new hot end on and I can't update the Eeps also on the squarish test print there's some issues with the print quality we have a bunch of just crap hanging off right here I'm pretty sure that was because it started building a tree support on the base platform here and and I peeled that off when it was printing the first layer but that was a mistake on my part and it prevented this tree from being properly anchored there um however I can just pull that away it didn't cause the print to fail one of the issues that I have with the support material that it printed is there's no brim on the support material so it's just relying on a single perimeter to hold this down to the bed which isn't the best solution I prefer what the pe1 P did here where it prints a little raft or brim around each of the tree supports which really helped helps them hold that in place and get a more successful print overall going back to the Jesse head it looks like the supports came off about as clean as they did on the p1p there's not a whole lot of difference here one thing I'm noting is there's no little bits of undere Extrusion both prints look pretty good however I'm going to give the edge to the p1p in terms of overall print quality I think the print looks a lot better coming off of this p1p on the K1 there's a little a bit of inconsistent layer lines on this calibration test print I left the supports on so it built up some tree supports yeah we're just peeling that away and we're left with really nice steep overhang surfaces um in terms of the overall print performance all the text came out legible on here I would say the p1p is easier to read overall and is a nicer cleaner print however we've got that random undere extruded layer on this p1p it seems like the support material is stuck on a little bit better so again I'm going to say on the p1p the prints turned out looking nicer however there's this one random layer that's undere extruded which is kind of bothering me the last print we're going to take a look at is this print in place mechanism it's this pair of scissors here see if we can extend it I always like to break it free by just pulling on it like this and there we go it works really good okay and then on the p1p let's see breaking it Loose was a lot easier on the p1p I just had to actuate the handles here and it it broke free versus on the K1 I had to pull it apart to break everything free but overall this seems to be a tighter mechanism it's really nice and smooth on this p1p it seems like well I compare them side by side the p1p you can hear it rattling the K1 you can't hear it rattling this p1p maybe it printed everything extremely accurately and reproduced the tolerances that are supposed to be in this model but in any case it seems like it's a little bit looser so overall I like the result that came off of the K1 a little bit better in terms of the overall surface finish I would say the p1p looks a little bit better however in terms of the functionality of the two prints the K1 takes the win I printed out one of these articulating ties on both machines I think the one that came out on the p1p looks a little bit better uh one because I like the color scheme of blue and white more than this black and red color scheme but also because the p1p has like a better tuning and calibration so that means you get better straight lines and cleaner Corners versus on the K1 you can see some random bulging and over Extrusion and undere Extrusion in different areas and that's one of my frustrations with this machine compared to the p1p on all of the bamboo lab machines that I've seen they're extremely well tuned and they're getting the most out of the hardware and I think that's something creality needs to work on all right so now it's time for the final thoughts and conclusions about these two machines now uh get a bowl of popcorn or your favorite snack or maybe a beer the common strengths on these two machines is excellent Hardware excellent print quality an excellent feature set let's go over some strengths that are unique to the p1p over the K1 this thing is built and tuned to Perfection it gets excellent print quality right out of the box I haven't bothered to change or tune any of the slicer settings out of bamboo Studio because bamboo lab did a great job of tuning all of the print profiles and making sure that they're well tested I think bamboo lab and prusa are kind of unique in the market because they've validated a bunch of print settings and material settings so it's a much easier uh click to print experience most other competitors in the 3D printing Arena suffer from an issue where they're not providing the most tuned profiles for their printers with the bamboo lab printers you just load up the filament select the profile for that filament and hit print and it works 95% of the time this machine is able to print at higher speeds and higher quality than 90% of the 3D printers on the market which makes it a no-brainer to pick up for most people there's a few caveats when it comes to this printer but overall it's an incredibly competent machine and it's really good for anyone who's wanting to get into 3D printing what I really love about this K1 is that it's a huge improvement over City's previous attempts at building a high performance 3D printer they've met or exceeded a lot of the performance characteristics of the p1p and they kind of took some inspiration from the p1p like the uh the bed leveling system using the three load cells attached to the print tray I mean that pretty much got lifted and put onto the K1 exactly as bamboo lab implemented it bamboo lab entering into the market with these high performance machines really made them focus on building a high-speed high performance printer I really like the touchscreen interface compared to what you have on the p1p the this touchcreen is really bright and responsive and lets you do most of the functions of the machine right there you don't have to pull out your phone and use the app or get onto your computer and connect to it to be able to do basic functions you can just do everything through the printer itself which is really nice the fact that this is enclosed really sets it apart from the p1p having that fully enclosed area makes it so that you can print materials like ABS polycarbonate and other materials the other thing I really like about the K1 is the smoothness of the offline workflows let's say you're not connected to the internet for some reason sending files over to the K1 or getting them onto the printer using removable flash storage like a USB drive is very easy on this K1 compared to the p1p you have to use this little SD card and plug it into your printer and then put it back in there and the printer can't operate unless it's got an SD card installed in there so it's kind of a little bit more tedious and if you don't want to use creality print you want to use prusa slicer or something you can take your old profiles from like your Ender 3 or your Ender 5 S1 and just slice your files and load them onto this printer and it'll run them just fine all right now let's talk about what I hate about these printers let's start with the K1 I mean it's got a fan that's on 24/7 which I generally despise on a machine so let's just go ahead and turn it off reality has simultaneously managed to steal the work of clipper developers and piss them off immensely while also making a product that's less functional I think it'd be better if creality just used stock Clipper because this machine would be a lot better if I had access to all of the tuning and calibration tools that are available in Clipper so the sooner you open source this and unlock the full potential of this machine the better and I think basing creality print off of Kira is a mistake I don't like Kira I much prefer the prusa slicer workflow maybe that's a matter of personal opinion but I just like the workflow more the other issues on the K1 is it's got slightly degraded print quality compared to their previous products I think I've been able to get higher quality prints out of my Ender 3s1 um my Ender 5 S1 even my Ender 3v2 so this machine isn't about getting better print quality it's about getting higher speeds and they've traded off a little bit of print quality to get those speeds I think that's kind of a step in the wrong direction you should be focusing on quality and speed at the same time also I think the extruder on this machine needs to be redesigned basically the construction inside of the the print head is just not ideal I think uh there's a lot of tried andrue designs like this lgx light like the uh Sherpa Mini all these other extruders on the market are extremely Compact and reliable so I don't see why creality decided to reinvent the wheel here all right and now let's turn our attention to the p1p which I've been very vocal about hating on some aspects of this machine and we'll give the audience a little refresher here the main things that I dislike about this p1p are this user interface it's complete garbage you have to switch over to using your phone to get on the Wi-Fi and in order to use your phone to get on the Wi-Fi you have to download the bamboo handy app then you have to create an account just so that you can get this thing on your Wi-Fi network and in order to use the bamboo handy app you have to create an account and agree to their terms of service and privacy policy which if you've bothered to read it is a huge red flag for anyone using these machines for commercial purposes if you're working under an NDA with another company if you're working on defense related items because if you've bothered to read it the privacy policy says they get to take the webcam footage also there's third parties that bamboo lab works with for uh various purposes that they can redistribute your CAD data to so you upload your stuff to your printer you think no I'm just printing this at home we'll know bamboo lab is taking a copy of that 3D data and they're storing that data now they are using this for customer service and Improvement but the bottom line is that this data is being shared with third parties those third parties are going to do if they use it inappropriately I just don't need webcams in every single device in my house I think uh there's already a lack of privacy enough with your phone and your lapt toop having webcams I think adding one to your printer is just something that's not really necessary especially when that data is being beamed over the cloud so if you're working on open source projects or your main hobbies include printing Pokemon on your 3D printer then this might not concern you if you want to do firmware updates you're going to have to connect this to the cloud if you're running bamboo Studio on your computer that has some cloud functionalities and sign-ins and stuff so bamboo lab has ways of getting your data off of your computer and into their servers whether you're using glan mode or not and if you decide you want to update your firmware you have to connect it to the internet I don't believe there's a way to update the firmware on these machines without connecting it to the cloud versus on the creality K1 and a lot of other printers they have the firmware file available for download so you can download it on a USB drive plug it in and update your firmware that way as far as I know there's no way to update the firmware on this machine except by doing it through the cloud another thing I don't like about this machine is it's basically impossible to mod if there's something you don't like on this printer that's too bad you're just going to have to live with it the way that it is and if you do decide to mod it then that'll probably void your warranty and you won't get any support from bamboo lab to fix it and the convenient thing about this little webcam is it can see if you've installed a thirdparty mod you know it's got footage of like hey that's not supposed to be on there so we can deny that warranty claim the other thing I don't like about this is It's reliant on the phone and computer to do basic settings for example I have this bamboo lab AMS I'm not sure how to get it to work on here because basically the Wi-Fi decided to stop working on this machine how am I supposed to set up and learn how to use that AMS when everything's offline and the only interface I have with the machine is this crappy little button remote control looking thing I think it's just kind of daunting to figure out how to use it I think it' be much better if my Lan actually worked so I could figure out how to use these things and get some multimaterial multicolor prints working but it's just really challenging and I can't really figure it out so that's where I'm at with that so I've got a lot to to complain about with both of these machines but I want to offer some advice to these companies for bamboo lab I feel like you really need to improve the offline workflow whether you want to work offline for security reasons or if the Wi-Fi on your machine breaks and you're forced to run the machine offline it should be easy to use I don't think this is easy to use in its current state because I'm having to Fumble around with that tiny little SD card adding support for a thumb drive and being able to update the firmware offline would be a big Advantage for me and I wish that they would provide some kind of functionality like that also so I don't want my printer the bamboo handy app or bamboo Studio sending any information back to Bamboo lab as far as I'm concerned the things that I print on my machines should be kept private I think it's good to offer an unenclosed version but a lot of people want to print higher temperature materials and I think it would make this printer a lot more useful if it had an enclosure it shouldn't cost that much and they've got the technology to do it so it's something that I think they should do right away so that it's more in line with what the K1 is offering all right so my advice to creality for this K1 is to redo the extruder put something better on there that's not going to have any reliability issues I know it's annoying to have to redesign something you've spent all the money and tooling to produce but moving forward with a design that isn't 100% reliable is unacceptable in my opinion I don't think software and firmware design has ever been City's strong suit I think they're really good at producing affordable printers at a very low price point and just flooding the market with them they've got the mass production Specialties and they've got a recognizable brand name that allows them to sell a ton of units so just do what you're good at and let other people take care of the rest and I think that would be the best option for creality moving forward bamboo lab has the benefit of all of that cloud data they're just harvesting everyone's data they're figuring out how people are using the machines and what kind of slicer settings can be adjusted to get better quality and better speed out of their printers and they're folding that data back into their slicer and their firmware to improve the quality of their prints and improve the speed of their prints creality needs to be doing the same thing and just making sure that the the software and firmware is as good as it can be all right and a question that I'm sure a lot of people are wondering is which machine is right for me do I want to get the p1p or should I get the K1 personally I wouldn't get either of them uh I think that the K1 has a few Hardware problems I think bamboo lab is a little bit problematic in how much data they're harvesting from you they're getting your personal information selling it to advertisers probably for me I'd rather just not be connected to the cloud at all none of my machines are connected to the internet they're just on a local network so that gives me some degree of privacy but still it's not ideal because this is closed Source Hardware running on a somewhat closed sourced slicer sure the slicer is open source but there's plugins that bamboo lab has installed on top of it that are closed source so with bamboo lab I think you should pick this machine up if you just want something that's fast and prints with high quality right out of the box however that privacy thing is just like a non-starter for me for these reviews I'm just printing this random crap so I don't really care but if I was working on anything that I wanted to develop into a commercial product I would not print it on this machine for casual users who just want to print stuff that's available on the internet I think this would be a great printer for you for the K1 I think this is a great printer if you want to get into high-speed Printing and it's got really good offline workflows so if you're working on something private you can run a different slicer and just manually insert things into this machine and you're in control of what comes in and goes out of this machine also the fact that this comes with an enclosure means you can print higher temperature materials like ABS nylon polycarbonate with those pros and cons in mind I think the K1 offers an excellent value and is still a good choice for a lot of people for the average user I would actually advise you to buy neither of these machines because I think the joy of 3D printing comes from being able to just modify your printers printing things now and then and just having fun with it these high-speed printers is just like a pissing contest that I don't really care to participate in the only useful application for highs speeed printing in my opinion is if you're doing research and development and you're doing rapid prototyping then having your prints come out as fast as possible is extremely useful because it allows you to iterate more and improve your design if you're just printing the occasional Pokemon and your printer is sitting idle 95% of the time the only benefit you're going to get from a speed printer is instead of your printer sitting idle 95% of the time it's going to sit idle 99% of the time so uh unless you have an actual need to have high throughput on your printers or to be able to print something out as fast as possible it's really not advisable to get either of these machines you should just get something that gets the job done for as cheap as possible in terms of value I think the p1p is an excellent value because it's larger it prints more reliably has a more convenient and easier to use slicer so a lot of advantages there however on the K1 you've got a bunch of additional features you've got the full enclosure you got the better touchscreen interface the better offline workflow you can print higher temperature materials because it's enclosed so there's a lot of pros and cons to each machine it's up to you which one you think is right for your application personally I hate the cloud so it's hard for me to use a machine like this I'm actually working on a way to take this off the bamboo Cloud I'm going to run one of these off of a Sonic pad so it's going to be fun so uh make sure you're subscribed if you want to see a bamboo lab printer running on a Sonic pad just for the memes if you want the features that the K1 has on a bamboo lab printer you got to upgrade to the x1c which is significantly more expensive it's over twice as expensive as the K1 and then in terms of the K1 Max I'm not sure how that's going to fit into this whole lineup the K1 Max is going to be even bigger than the x1c and less expensive so we'll see what happens there I think that'll be an interesting time reality their business model has always been to make as many printers as possible make them as cheap as possible as accessible as possible and just get them out there and sell massive numbers of of printers with bamboo lab there their business model is a little bit more complicated the bamboo lab business model is very much like apple where they get new users into their ecosystem and they hold on to them Forever by you know releasing high quality products having a completely different user interface and just locking people into their ecosystem I think it's a good business model and they produce some pretty fine products all of the upgrades and replacement parts you have to get through bamboo lab so they want you to basically you know keep coming back and to keep selling you stuff and you have to pay for shipping unless you buy $60 worth of stuff so you know you're buying some replacement part for your printer you might as well throw in a couple of spools of filament while you're at it and then the next thing you know you're spending $100 on bamboo lab's website and they're making a ton of money off of you and they're getting your customer data and all that kind of stuff so um bamboo lab are definitely being a little bit smarter about this getting those repeat customers to keep coming back and keep spending money on their website cality it's just about moving printers so as far as I can tell that's the difference between the business models of these two companies one thing I really like about creality is their openness to modding from the people I've talked to they say no don't mod this machine we don't want you modding it but personally I like modding things so you can see I've put my aftermarket extruder on here it might have caused a detrimental effect to the print quality on my stuff but I'm getting that reliability back that I wanted so it's a trade-off that I'm willing to make all right so I feel like I've done this comparison to death I feel like in Practical terms these printers are very similar overall uh the user experience and print quality that I get out of my p1p is a little bit higher but at the same time you're dealing with that cloud stuff I will say for anything that I'm planning on open sourcing or if it's just random stuff that I print out that I find on the internet I have no problem running it on this machine because it consistently delivers really good print quality in Practical terms I get a lot more use out of the p1p than I do the K1 just because the K1 is kind of handicapped by it it's poor software and firmware implementation I really think creality needs to open that up and at the same time I really think bamboo lab needs to improve their offline workflow and make the cloud more of an optional thing not a necessary thing at the end of the day just get the printer that works for you there's a lot of really fast bed Slingers that are hitting the market like the elu Neptune 4 and the Sall sv7 so in terms of speed printing you don't have to break the bank you don't have to buy a $500 or $600 printer just to get that speed printing capability so with that said I feel like I've completely exhausted everything I have to say about both of these printers remember no matter which one of these printers you get I get paid for the affiliate links so make sure to click those in the link down below also if you're looking for a nice sit stand desk make sure to hit up flexi spot they've got some nice high quality desks that won't break the bank and if you're looking for a nice work surface to put your 3D printers on these things will do the trick just fine you can see in my time-lapse footage the table was barely moving while these printers were thrashing about so they're very sturdy and good tables for 3D printer applications or if you want to set up a sit stand desk to do your work from home you can do that as well so I'm really glad to have flexispot on the channel as a sponsor and make sure to subscribe and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Nathan Builds Robots

Views: 77,765

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Id: Neakuea_uBY

Length: 27min 14sec (1634 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 13 2023