So, this happened. Oh, sorry. This happened. Bambu Lab, after seeing my evil plan
video, decided that they wanted me to experience their flagship product
firsthand, and they generously sent me an X1-Carbon Combo on one condition. Despite the fact that I generally don't
like to say negative things on my channel, and I prefer to share my feedback as
constructive rather than outwardly critical, they absolutely insisted
that I give my raw, unfiltered feedback both about them and their product. Well, I've been playing around with
the X1-Carbon Combo for a little while now, and I have to say,
there have been some surprises. Just like all of you. I've watched literally every video
I could get my hands on about the Bambu Lab X1-Carbon, the P1P, and
any other Bambu Lab product updates. So as a latecomer, by the time I
received my test unit, I thought that I would know everything that
there is to know about this printer, and yet there were a lot of things
that really did surprise me. Things that I couldn't believe
nobody is talking about... And in this video, I'm going
to share them with all of you. Who knows? Maybe even those of you who own
a Bambu Lab product like this didn't notice these things. Let's find out. Let's talk texture. Unboxing the X1-Carbon, there
were honestly very few surprises. I'd seen folks talk about unscrewing
the screws, and I actually noticed that they even had implemented the feedback
of some influencers, like CNC Kitchen, by putting red stickers to highlight
exactly where you need to remove them. The quality, as you've already heard
like 10 million times, is top notch. The fit and finish, look,
you already know all of this. Here's one thing that
did surprise me, though. There's no textured plate included. It seems silly, but it wasn't actually
clear from the website, and I guess I just thought that they would include
one in the package, given just how popular textured plates have become. Of course, Bambu Labs will sell you a
high temperature plate or a dual-sided PEI one for $30 to $35, and of course,
they give you the engineering plate right in the box alongside the cool
plate and spare sticker sheets. So you really do have everything
that you need to print pretty much any material out there. But I guess I just thought that
it was an interesting choice. I get it. I mean, the X1-Carbon is really
geared towards engineering materials. And I guess in engineering you
want a smooth surface to reduce tolerances, so that's probably why
the P1P ships with the textured plate and this flagship one doesn't. But personally, I definitely prefer
a textured finish on most of my 3D prints, and not having that
option was a little bit bizarre. I definitely don't think, by the
way, that this is a way of trying to squeeze an extra 35 bucks out of you. Bambu Lab doesn't seem like that kind
of company, given just how reasonable replacement parts are on their
website, but more than likely, they wanted to hit a certain attractive
looking price and adding in that extra plate would've gone over cost. Still, it might just be a good idea
to give users a choice of swapping out the engineering plate for a textured
one instead, or at the very least, put a dropdown on the sales page or write
even in the recommended upsells in the shopping cart that lets me add it to
my cart so that it's really clear to me that if I want the textured plate,
I need to purchase it separately. Though, if I were Bambu Lab, I might
just A/B test just selling the Combo for $1479 and including the build plate. It's still thousands of dollars
cheaper than an Ultimaker. Oh, and while we're at it,
why not just make it $1499? Still a nice, attractive number and
include a 0.6 millimeter nozzle too. But hey, maybe these recommendations
are only relevant to me because unlike those of you in the US who get free
shipping over $49, where I live, it's going to be a lot more of a hassle
to ship consumables or replacement parts if I decided I want them later. So I prefer to get everything I could
possibly need in one shipment, so take that feedback with a grain of salt. The software is deeply integrated. With the printer out of the box and set
up, again, no surprises there, it was time to get going and that meant downloading
not only Bambu Slicer for my laptop, but also the Bambu Handy app for my iPhone. As a side note, it's still mind blowing
to me that we've made such a leap forward as to have dedicated, good iPhone apps for
our printers like AnkerMake or Bambu Lab. I mean, my Prusa MK3S+ doesn't
even have wifi, much less an entire app ecosystem baked right in. But I guess the app thing won't
surprise any of you if you've already seen other reviews. Anyways. Immediately though a few things did
stand out to me that I haven't seen anyone else talk about, and they're
really surprising ones actually. As I'm going to talk about
towards the end of this video or maybe the next one, we'll see. Bambu Lab's ecosystem is a "walled
garden", and we're going to come back to that in detail later because I
think it's the single most important trade-off that Bambu Lab has made,
and it's very much worth exploring. But for now, suffice it to say that
if you want to use your printer with other software such as OctoPrint
or Mainsail, well, you can't, at least not in the foreseeable future. Now, Bambu Lab has solved this in
a predictable and deliberate way. They just built their own software, but
in doing so, they did something really clever that I seriously didn't expect. They made an all-in-one suite. Allow me to explain. Of course, I'd seen online that
Bambu created their own Slicer, which is a fork of Prusa Slicer,
and that's not surprising. I mean, lots of manufacturers do that. Creality and Sovol have
forks of Cura, for example. This is great because it means that
the software can make recommendations based on the machine itself. For example, telling you if you're
trying to use the wrong build surface for a specific type of material. But Bambu took it one step further
and they did something that I haven't yet seen on any consumer 3D printer. They built the printer management
tool right into the Slicer. This means that, unlike with my Voron, my
Prusa, or any other printer I have where I need to have the Slicer integrated to
send the files and then open a browser to access the actual printer interface,
such as Mainsail or OctaPrint to actually monitor the print, with Bambu Slicer it's all built into one app and I just
click this tab on the top to check on my print or make adjustments in real time. This, of course means that I'm missing
out on a whole world of plug-ins and upgrades, and I definitely miss some
things like the ability to exclude objects or a way of, say, integrating my
DSLR into the firmware for time lapses. But like I said, more on that later. There's a learning curve. Okay, great. So it's a fork of Prusa Slicer
and I should pretty much already know how to use it. Right? Wrong. Personally, I was reasonably overwhelmed
when I first opened and dove into Bambu slicer, which isn't to say
that it's confusing per se, but just that it is not the same old familiar
interface that I know and love. In terms of user interface, it's somewhere
between Prusa Slicer and Cura, which leverages tabs both on the top of the
app and in the settings categories. They're all the same things that you're
used to seeing, but they're just organized a little differently with different names. Instead of layers and perimeters,
they organize the settings into quality and strength. If you wanna find the list of objects
that's in a different screen, rather than always being front and center. Add instance and set number of instances
are merged into clone, and I wasn't sure if that would push the changes that
I make on one instance to the others. There are places that you would
think you're supposed to click, but which aren't actually clickable. Keyboard shortcuts that didn't make
the migration over, smart new features that I haven't seen before, and a
few little tricks and new habits that you're going to need to get into. All of these things are
of course, no big deal. You'll figure it out. In fact, I think a lot of them might even
be improvements over Prusa Slicer or Cura. I'm just saying that if you are already
very familiar with Prusa Slicer or Super Slicer like I am, don't expect this to
be an instant transition for you, and it will take some time for you to really
feel comfortable with this new Slicer. It does most things for you. Okay, cool. So I finally figured out the slicer and
I was ready to print my first model... and of course me being very impatient, I didn't just go about
printing a single color benchy, even if it does take only 16 minutes to do so. No, no, no. I decided I was going to print dual
tone engineering grade parts for my Voron using the notoriously tricky ASA. Immediately I realized something
pretty cool about the X1-Carbon Combo. It kind just does everything for you. Of course, I'd seen that a big selling
point was the lidar, the first layer calibration, and bed leveling, and
blah, blah, blah, blah, and I'd heard that it did its own input shaping and
resonance frequency compensation at the beginning of every single print. But because this was my first time
using any kind of multi-material unit, what I didn't consider was just how much other stuff
it would be able to do for me. Here's an example. We all know that one of the humdrum
little tasks of 3D printing is loading and unloading filament, and even with
so-called automatic filament loading on printers like the MK3S+, you still
need to physically pull out and push in the filament, cut the ends to be
sharp, click some knobs, preheat the printer, tell it whether or not the
change was successful, yada, yada, yada. And I never realized just how tedious
and not automatic that process was until I use the X1-Carbon Combo. Sure, you have to push the filament
into the little hole in the AMS, but after you do that, it kind of just
does everything else from there. It preheats based on whatever filament
it detects or registers in the app. It cuts the filament, it
purges the filament, it cleans the nozzle, it unloads. All you have to do is choose
which filament you want for that part, or for which part of the
print, and it does all the rest. Now, this means that even if you
don't care about multi-material printing or if as you'll soon see
in a few minutes, you are not a big fan of wasting so much plastic, you could just load up your foremost used
filmanets and let the printer do all that annoying, preheating, unloading, cutting,
loading, cleaning, et cetera, et cetera. So you can just kick back on the
couch with the remote and your sweats and wait for your print to be done. Now this is great, not just for the
lazy among us, but also it means that I won't have so many little
filament strands kicking around in my office when I go back in there. It poops. A lot. Now, this doesn't come as a surprise,
so I'm not going to dwell on it too much because in the first video I ever
saw about the X1-Carbon, Joel, the 3D Printing Nerd, memorably described this
behavior as heeding the filament out the back as it purges for color changes. So I knew what to expect. When I didn't expect, though, was just how
much heeding this thing would be doing. I mean that in both senses of the word. First, I didn't realize just how
frequent nozzle changes have to be for a simple multicolor print, but also
just how much filament it purges by default on every single filament change. It's really cautious to avoid color
bleed, as you can see from these purged samples, which clearly show just how
much filament continues purging long after the color has already changed, and
this is before the purge block binding. This inevitably means that a lot of
filament is wasted, even if you instruct the Slicer to purge into infill. This is of course, something that you
can configure in the Slicer if you know where to look, but I worry that
a lot of people just won't bother. Now, judging from their website,
Bambu seems to be an environmentally friendly company, so one recommendation
I have for them is to add a little bit of intelligence to the
software or the user experience, even if it's optional, to
configure this kind of thing. They could, for example, offer to vary the
amount of purged material automatically if I specify two very different colors
in the AMS menu, like black and white as opposed to just black and gray. Or they could allow me to enable a
pop-up menu on the screen after the first filament change, asking me to
pick up and evaluate the purged filament and calibrate for more or less purge. Sure. This might seem like a small thing or
maybe even an unnecessary annoyance. And yeah, it'll probably save you only
a handful of cents every single print. But at the volume that Bambu Lab
anticipates selling these printers and the number of material changes
that the average user is going to need to do every single print, this
little feature could lead to millions of millimeters of filament saved
every single year in the long run. And I know Mother Nature would
definitely appreciate that. It doesn't mess with trees. Speaking of Mother Nature, while we're
loading up that filament into this fancy schmanzy AMS, there's one thing
that you definitely need to know, especially if you like me, love these
cardboard spools from PolyMaker or Overture, and it's this, the AMS is
not compatible with cardboard spools. They just don't work in there, period. They won't spin properly. Now, this is kind of a bummer because
it's not so convenient or fun to re-spool your filament onto rolls that
Bambu Lab does provide in the box, and I imagine that the majority of people
aren't yet buying refill spools, though that would be really nice to see. Fortunately, the 3D printing community has
once again come to the rescue and you can just 3D print little rails that go right
onto your cardboard spools to fix this. So no worries there. And long-term, I do hope to
see more manufacturers offering refill spools like Bambu Lab. Hey, editing Jonathan here. So I just wanna mention to all of you that
I am aware that since this video came out, Bambu Lab has already fixed some of the
things that I've pointed out, and even some other content creators like NERO 3D
have pointed out other issues that have literally already been fixed by Bambu. So hats off to them! It's amazing how fast they are fixing
issues, literally faster than content creators like myself can bring them
up, which is just a testament to the fact that when they say they're giving
away these machines 'cause they want the feedback, they really mean it. So kudos to you guys at Bambu Lab! But there is one issue that I don't think
they are going to be able to fix, and it's this: this freaking printer is so
fast that between it and my Voron, I've literally ran out of things to print,
which is why I'm super, super grateful to thangs.com for making this video possible. For those of you who don't know,
thangs.com is principally a search engine that searches all the different
files across all the different websites from Printables and Thingiverse,
but also Cults and much, much more. But it does a whole lot more than that
because they actually have proprietary technology that will scan the geometry
of models and help you find other models that are geometrically similar. And this is super helpful if you
have a really fast printer and you're looking to print a lot of cool. stuff. They also, for my gridinity peeps, just
launched a new gridfinity section on the website which will become the home and
hub of all things gridfinity, and because they search all the different websites out
there, it makes it really, really easy to find the exact model you're looking for. Now they have a lot of other features
like sync and a desktop sync app and version control, really, they're looking
to become the GitHub of 3D files. Really, I think it's amazing what
they're doing and I super appreciate Thangs for supporting this video. Make sure that all of you click
the link below and sign up. It's completely free, and you can
download all the models for free. Thanks to Thangs for supporting
this video and the community. All right, let's get back to the Bambu. All right. We've already gone longer than I know
you guys like, so I'm gonna cut it here and next week I'll come back with all
my different impressions, my overall conclusions, and a few other things that
I think you're really going to want to know if you are taking an interest in
considering purchasing this printer. By the way, I wanna thank each and
every one of my Patreon supporters for helping me get closer and closer to
my goal of setting up a proper studio. It actually took me over an hour
and a half to set up this frame and all this lighting, and I'm not even
done recording because I need to go do other camera angles, and that
means that it's an hour and a half of time that I'm not spending creating
content for each and every one of you. My dream is to have a studio near my
house in some kind of underground basement where I can just have my lights set up
permanently, have my equipment set up permanently, so that all I need to do when
you guys ask for a video is hit record. If you wanna help me make that a
possibility, you can check out my Patreon, which is linked in the description below. I give all kinds of really cool exclusive
perks, like sneak peeks of future videos, the ability to watch my videos ad free,
discounts from top manufacturers, oh, and lots of behind the scenes content. Either way, thanks for watching. Make sure you're subscribed
with the bell notification icon turned on so you don't miss next
week's video with my conclusions, and until then, happy 3D printing!
