Bambu Lab X1 Carbon VS P1P 3D Printer Review

this is the X1 Carbon the hottest 3D printer to come out of Shenzhen startup bamboo lab and it can print incredibly fast in a huge range of materials and this is the p1p which looks like someone took the X1 and removed half of it which is mostly true but it also prints incredibly fast and most importantly is less than half the price so which one should you get the X1 the p1p neither let's get started we'll start things off for the X1 Carbon which really is a beautiful piece of industrial design I'm not the first to cover this new printer from bamboo Labs far from it with their successful Kickstarter launching way back in June 2022 but the 3D printing Community has been burnt too many times for me to ever discuss 3D printing kickstarters again on this channel no matter how alluring so I politely declined the review until I shipped rewards out to backers and shipping this thing is no easy feat it comes in a huge cardboard box almost fully assembled and weighs around 14 kilos so be careful moving it around the unboxing and setup process is well documented in the manual but it's pretty small and the gray text might be hard to read if you're poor of eyesight bamboo uses screws and straps to secure the bed and movement axes in place during Transit which you must remove so make sure you don't miss any but it's pretty straightforward the X1 Carbon combo also includes the AMS or automatic material system which intelligently loads and unloads phone element allowing for up to four different materials or colors in one single print the mechanism by which it does this though is incredibly complex and I experienced some issues with it but more on that later if you're coming from any other prosumer 3D printer the X1 Carbon is refreshingly different and boasts an impressive list of features some of which I've literally never seen before and to clarify this is the X1 Carbon which has a few upgrades over the regular X1 and is what I'll be referring to for the rest of this video it has a print volume of 256 by 256 by 256 millimeters not huge but very capable and employs magnetic print surfaces for easy print removal which I am a big fan of but bamboo lab expands on this idea with different kinds of surfaces for different materials these soft matte surface is the one I like the least which is the cool bed they recommend applying glue stick to reduce print adhesion yeah because pla sticks too well to it even when it's completely cool the p1p actually came with their newer Pei bid Which is far better for printing with PLA and releases the prints when cool I'm not quite sure where the X1 didn't come with this bed I've heard conflicting results that it doesn't play nice with their lighter but regardless the X1 Carbon is specifically engineered to handle hotter and more demanding engineering filaments so it has the engineering filament side which is smooth to the touch and works very very well all of my carbon fiber nylon and abs prints to date have experienced zero warp and simply pop free once the bed cools and to Aid in the printing of those high temperature abrasive filaments the X1 Carbon comes from factory with a hardened steel nozzle and a hot end that can reach up to 300 degrees Celsius combine that with a bed that goes to 110 degrees Celsius and a robust enclosure with a glass top and front door real glass then you have the perfect environment for Warp 3 ABS PC and pacf carbon fiber nylon Prints but this printer is also Smart in fact I haven't done any anything to calibrate it no bed leveling no acceleration tuning nothing you unbox it set it up and just let it do its thing all on its own this printer uses a whole Suite of sensors to figure out where everything is where it should be and adjust accordingly even going so far as to use lighter to probe nozzle height and assess Extrusion width and if the first layer is bad for any reason it will actually inspect it and then stop and tell you if you want to continue the print which pretty much negates any catastrophic print failures because they almost always cause by that first layer now this cleverness is fantastic but it actually slows down how quickly your print will start with the machine faffing about for several minutes after preheating as it does all of its checks and it's lidar and blah blah blah but once it does do that and it starts printing Boy Does It smash out prints and its ability to print this fast is in part due to the fact the X1 Carbon actually uses carbon fiber tubes for the x-axis Lin of bearings why well the faster you move something the more it wants to resist those changes in speed so by using lightweight carbon fiber rods instead of the heavier steel rods they can reduce the inertia of the print head drastically and squeeze even more speed out of an already very rigid XY Gantry assembly however moving this fast does do strange things especially if you hit harmonics like if you ever noticed your 3D printer may seem louder when moving at certain speeds than others but of course they have a solution for that too with the printer running a range of increasingly fast movements to figure out how best to shape the output to prevent these resonances from translating into the final print [Music] to ask me how it works because I have no idea but the team at bamboo lab are ex-dji Engineers so they probably know what they're talking about and it does make a significant difference in improving print quality this machine is absolutely fanging it all the prints I've thrown at the X1 Carbon have turned out perfect but I'm most impressed by these two in particular this CF nylon part is absolutely incredible it's dead flat with no warping yet it has barely any first layer inaccuracies like elephants foot effect and this ABS spiral which is for a super secret project coming soon subscribe for more it was printed in ABS from 2017 at a 0.12 millimeter layer height with no support material tell me another 3D printer that can do this with this sort of quality and print this at the speed it did it is ridiculous to say the least did have one print fail after the first layer but the camera actually detected it and paused the print a very handy feature indeed and I also pushed the printer to its limits with a carbon fiber lattice touch Cube which it did complete it doesn't look amazing but it did actually finish this is what the same print looks like in ABS it was however one noticeable failure during my testing this this little multi-colored Dragon was printed using bamboo Labs incredibly sophisticated and complicated AMS or automatic material system this is an optional unit that allows you to maintain four separate filaments at once ready to be fed into the hot end for multi-color or multi-material printing and if it works as it should the results are stunning as already demonstrated by many others online unfortunately I kept experiencing failure after failure after failure it turns out there's an unfortunate manufacturing decision where the bearings of the filament rolls are pressed into place and the plastic can easily crack but they can now move jamming up the filament roller and resulting in the extruder just chewing filament it's a pretty big issue and bamboo lab are well aware of it offering a fix on the wiki and working on improved design and I did try to do my own temporary fix which helped but it's not great and the issue is still not fully resolved but even if you do get awesome multi-color prints let's talk about the waist because the filament purged during multi-color prints from one nozzle is not to be understated this print takes about 19 hours and most of that time is spent cutting the filament with drawing it loading a new color purging a coil of filament out the poop shoot at the back of the printer and then more waste in printing a purge Tower as it moves between colors and if you're into multi-color FGM prints that's totally cool but I won't be doing anything more personally than just color changing at layer Heights which can work fantastic okay so you like the X1 Carbon but your budget says no well then the p1p might be the choice for you this 3D printer is literally like someone took the X1 and removed everything from the chassis except the Bare Essentials They removed the fancy lighter the camera and they replaced a gorgeous full color touch screen with a potato I'll be real I actually love the bare sheet metal aesthetic of the p1p it's kind of nice seeing all the sheet metal forming tricks that used which are covered up in the X1 and because it's lighter the p1p comes in a slightly smaller box with thinner gauge cardboard but it still arrives very well packaged the unboxing experience is much the same but actually easier because there's no panels in the way instead of the AMS system there's a simple sheet metal spool holder that's screwed into the back the next one comes with one too but I'm not really a fan of it and I'll most likely be replacing it with something rounder and on the side of the 3D printer that's kind of the point of the p1p because they have marketed as a printer that you can make your own which is a funny way of saying we haven't finished it and we've left panels bare so you might want to cover them up being open frame it really is only suitable for pla petg or I would say small ABS Parts but it boasts the same ridiculous print speeds and automatic bed leveling and these pla prints really do look the business I know it's simple but this vars mode print in tri-extruded filament just looks stunning literally zero ghosting artifacts or issues with overhangs but with a p1p you do miss out on a few key features number one the interface you get this awful monochromatic thing with a button array and sluggish refresh rate just doing a preheat to load filament is an absolute chore on this thing and I really don't understand why there isn't a routine for it so the first thing you'll want to do is bind the printer to your phone and the bamboo app which is called bamboo handy and connected to Bamboo studio and then you can control the printer from there and you can avoid having to use it ever again and second the p1p has no lighter to measure first layer accuracy nor any webcam for spaghetti detection which I found out the hard way when my first print completely failed almost instantly and I didn't know till I came back hours later because I had accidentally used the cold bed setting and slicer instead of the Pei bed setting which Heats it up to the correct temperature to hold on to the print while it's printing so yeah even people like me who have been printing for years can still make silly mistakes like that but beyond that little accident print quality is again very good and very very fast but High polygon count models tend to have the facets accentuated rather than smooth which is interesting so there's still a lot of room for improvement bamboo lab also kind enough to design a custom side cover for me which I did print over the course of several days and like a whole roll of filament but the parts joined together with incredibly delicate details which even this printer can't realistically pull off accurately enough not to mention the amount of support material that I need to remove so I appreciate the thought but I won't be putting it on before I discuss my final thoughts I need to discuss some of the drama around bamboo Labs since I've hit the scene because some of it is warranted and much of it is incredibly stupid if you saw my recent post on the second Channel I tested both of these machines the thermal runaway protection and found it to be in place but inadequate in my opinion the ceramic heater used for both these machines is significantly different to the cartridge heaters you may be familiar with in some other 3D printers and it can heat the nozzle to up to 300 degrees Celsius incred terribly quickly and thermal runaway protection is in place to disable the heater if the thermistor reading is not matching the set temperature but it'll only kick in after three minutes and I confirm that in my testing battery Labs say that the heater itself can't reach much higher than 400 degrees Celsius due to its design but three minutes at that temperature is still plenty of time to do significant damage they are well aware of this and will hopefully very soon be implementing a firmer update to improve it boundary lab have implemented a cloud ecosystem for these printers which involves printer activation through the app bamboo handy normally any 3D printer which requires the cloud to work would make me run for the hills but it does work quite well and you can always print directly via the micro SD card in the slot in both machines should the company disappear or drop support in future but if they did disappear you might be a bit screwed for parts because these printers are completely closed and proprietary from the hotend design to the AMS to the Innovative use of sensors this printer is about as hackable as your drink Jet and that'd be a big problem if it just flat out sucked but at least in my experience these past few months the printing experience has been pretty seamless I had one failure that was my fault and the AMS system issue which is definitely really annoying but it's almost like a different entity in itself with its own teething problems to overcome I wouldn't really blame those issues on the printer itself These are 3D printers that you can just use to 3D print and for some reason a lot of people are upset by that I've seen some really nasty Behavior towards new people coming into this space because they finally feel comfortable enough to enjoy and engage 3D printing technology and some of the hardcore 3D printing enthusiasts don't like that like someone on the Facebook group was asking what these weird lines on their print were they were seam lines but if you're new to it you might not understand that and they were getting absolutely trashed for it for not reading the manual or not learning on an Ender three if new people entering the space has you acting like this grow up now obviously there's still a ton to learn it would be a stretch to call these printers as user friendly as an inkjet printer but they are some of the closest to hitting the mark of 3D printing as a tool not as a hobby that I've seen for a long time and that's a really good thing because oh I don't know you can like either of them and it's fine if you want to Tinker on your 3D printer with a community of upgrade Parts there's plenty of options but I'd say last time I came across a printer kind of similar to these was seven years ago when I reviewed the cubicon single which was an incredibly Advanced smart and unfortunately quite expensive 3D printer that worked really well unfortunately it was later plagued with reliability issues that resulted in the resellers at least locally dropping support for it now this could very well occur again here but I just hope it doesn't and I'm fully aware that resellers around the world are just begging bamboo lab for the rights to resale printers and parts which I do hope starts to happen but as of right now if you want anything to do with these machines you have to go through bamboo lab directly so with that said I really hope that they can stick it out despite the drama improve their products in just a few areas to be honest and absolutely destroy the lazy overpriced and outdated prosumer 3D printers currently occupying the same price points because if I mention how much these machines cost 6.99 us for the naked p1p that goes up to 1449 USD for the X1 Carbon with the AMS combo it's not cheap absolutely and the budget I3 Market can rest easy for now because again there's nothing wrong with 3D printing as a hobby but if I was I don't know ultimaker prusa craftbot tier time I'd be taking notes 3D printing technology is for everyone and on here on makers Muse it's my aim to empower your creativity through technology so if you watch to the end thanks this took ages to put together if you want to print some cool things on your new 3D printer maybe consider learning CAD you can find my whole cab for newbies playlist here to get you started or learn how to search through all the file repositories at once to find cool things to print here bamberlab sent me the X1 Carbon and the p1p free of charge check out and I didn't even request a review but I just thought they're important enough to make one but I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below and you can find links to these in the description as well thanks for watching guys bye

Channel: Maker's Muse

Views: 391,706

Keywords: 3d, printing

Id: m75GB9lTrSA

Length: 15min 42sec (942 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 11 2023