The One to Beat: Bambu Lab X1-Carbon 3D Printer Review

you've been asking how I like the bamboo lab X1 Carbon okay let's talk about it welcome back to Cloud 42. my name is James and this is the X1 Carbon 3D printer from bamboo lab and so is this I've been using these printers for about six weeks now and I have about 300 hours on them so I feel like I understand what they're about and have enough experience with them to share my thoughts first off though some disclosures this printer was provided to me free of charge by bamboo lab I agreed to use it and provide feedback but I'm not required to do a review and I'm not even required to show it on the channel if I don't want to however after using it for a couple of weeks I purchased a second identical printer with my own money at full retail price bamboo lab isn't paying me anything directly to promote their products however I am an affiliate so if you use any of the links down in the video description to buy something I earned a small percentage at no additional cost to use just keep that in mind as you evaluate what I have to say about it the X1 Carbon is a core XY 3D printer with a fully enclosed chamber and all the fancy new features that everybody else in the industry is trying to duplicate right now it has a lightweight carbon fiber Gantry to support Fast Printing and high accelerations in fact if you've heard anything about this printer it's no doubt that it's super fast and it is very fast it has a 256 millimeter Cube build volume with a 300 degrees Celsius hardened steel nozzle and an all metal hot end it has a heated bed and you can get a bunch of different flexible build plates with different surfaces it has full mesh bed leveling and it does this by actually probing the bed with the nozzle so there's no Z offset adjustment required or really even possible the print head also has a built-in down facing camera and a dual laser lidar system that it can use to read the bed surface and any filament that's laid down on it and this allows it to do its own flow rate and pressure Advanced calibration and it can also scan the first layer for defects after it's laid down it also uses the down facing camera to read a QR code on the build plate to ensure that it's positioned correctly and that the build plate that's actually in the printer matches the settings that were used in the slicer software it has a chamber camera that you can use to monitor the printing process remotely and that it can also use for AI based spaghetti failure detection so if the part pops off the bed and it's just squirting spaghetti all over the place in theory it can detect that now I've not been able to test that because I haven't made any spaghetti none of my parts have come off the bed the goal with all of these features is to make the printing process as simple as possible and requires little knowledge and experience from the operator as possible in theory the printer takes care of everything it takes care of purging and cleaning the nozzle setting the Z height adjusting flow rates and checking the first layer for defects so that the experience of using it is as close to the fictional Star Trek matter replicator as possible it's certainly not perfect but they're getting closer the base X1 Carbon printer retails in the US for about twelve hundred dollars now both of these printers have the optional four spool AMS that can automatically load and swap between different colors and materials during the print in this configuration they retail for about 14.50 let's start out by talking about speed these are marketed as being extremely fast they throw around numbers like 500 millimeters per second and 20 meters per second squared acceleration and okay I'll I'll accept those numbers but what does that actually mean if you print the pre-sliced benchy that comes already loaded on the printer it's done in 20 minutes and it is impressive to watch but it's kind of a party trick right it's fun to watch but not of much practical use for actual prints of real parts that I want to make using the default profiles in the slicer it doesn't run quite that fast but it's still typically about four times faster than the same part printed on a prusa Mark III the four hour print on the Mark III is done in an hour on the bamboo a 24-hour prusa print is done in six most of the small prints that I run in the shop take 15 to 20 minutes and that's the real superpower of this machine it means that when I'm prototyping and iterating on a design I can get several design iterations in a day instead of just one or maybe two I can print earlier in the process and I can print more often and I can get feedback on my design sooner fix problems sooner and see the results of my changes sooner if my part's going to take four to six hours to print I'll spend a lot of time in the computer trying to make sure everything is right before printing it I'll send the job to the printer at the end of the day and get the results tomorrow but if I can print the part in 20 minutes to an hour it's way less costly to just sketch something up that I think is close and just send it I'll have the results quickly I can make adjustments and send it again doing that four or five times in a day makes me way more productive when I'm prototyping and it's a huge win for production printing too previously I was printing 12 spacers for the electronic lead screw on the GDI fast and a job that took four hours I could run four jobs in a day for a total of about 48 Parts if I wanted to actually sleep on the X1 Carbon though I can print 18 in a job and it's done in two hours so I can get seven jobs a day for a total of 126 parts that's two and a half times more productive just because of the speed not to mention that I can get two of these for about the same price as the ifast and together they take up about the same amount of space okay so it's fast but what's the print quality like actually it's pretty good this is the built-in benchy that was printed at absolutely insane speeds I think the whole print was under 20 minutes and it's good it's it's really good in fact it's one of the cleanest benches I've ever printed this is the infamous clock spring torture toaster printed in bamboo lab pla basic by the way I'll put links to all these models down in the video description as you can see this is super clean overhangs pretty great all the way up to 80 degrees the clearance test sliders are mostly free I did have to put some pressure on the 0.3 millimeter and 0.2 millimeter clearance sliders to get them to move and the 0.1 is stuck I couldn't get it to free up the gears and the doors are nice and free and the toast pops up cleanly there's basically no stringing at all or any other artifacts that I can see in the print this is the Maker's Muse puzzle cube this is printed with 0.12 millimeter layers and it just turned out beautifully this model has a lot of really difficult unsupported overhangs and the x1c handled them beautifully I left the door open to keep the chamber temperature down and that worked great the cooling was totally sufficient to freeze the layers without any curling or sagging this is the version with the 0.3 millimeter clearances and honestly it's a little bit loose I think the 0.2 millimeter version would probably fit a little bit better this is one of the brackets for the prusa Mark III light bar by in 3D space I printed these in a variety of different materials and they all turned out fantastic this one is pla the features are all crisp and clean the overhangs are nice the surfaces all look fantastic this one's printed in Flash Forge ASA and it also looks great the bridging was a little bit less clean than in the pla a but the finished part still looks really good and the bridging difficulties could just be the settings of course there's no predefined profile for the flash 4 JSA I had to set it up myself it does feel to me like the corners aren't quite as crisp in the ASA but under a microscope it still looks pretty clean so it might just be a surface texture thing they came out really nice and they are noticeably lighter and have a little bit more flexibility than the PLA and that's just the ASA material I also printed a pair in carbon fiber nylon these are the ones I'm probably going to use this is just the bamboo lab PA high temperature carbon fiber I just let the printer read the RFID tag in the filament and use the default settings and as you can see they also turned out great I did use a brim for these I trimmed it off with a noga deburring tool and smooth the Disturbed edge of the print with the heat gun I also tried printing some larger models in more difficult materials just to see how well the enclosed chamber works this is a nose piece for my drill press and it's printed in esun abs the chamber isn't heated but it does get up to 45 or 50 degrees celsius if you keep the door closed and that's apparently enough to be successful with something this large in ABS of course I've also printed several hundred of these PC board spacers they were all printed with thick layers and a 0.6 millimeter nozzle and even though these were printed super fast you know 18 pieces in two hours they're all still really clean honestly they're much better than what I was getting from the cheaty High fast and those were even printed slower you've also seen some of these other larger prints in other videos already this grinding wheel balancer was printed in the PA high temperature carbon fiber and it just turned out fantastic you can watch the previous video for the details this one is petg and it's also pretty clean I also printed one in ASA just to see if I could and yeah it worked great these large Parts with solid sides do pull a little they didn't detach from the bed at all but the buildup of stresses left the bottom surface just slightly curved they're totally usable and without an actively heated chamber this is still quite impressive but this is probably about as good as it's going to get on any printer without a heated chamber the last test part I have here is the Clipper ringing Tower I actually printed one on the prusa Mark III and one on the X1 Carbon to compare this print has sharp Corners that are designed specifically to excite ringing and I'm seeing essentially none this was printed in pla with all the defaults took about 30 minutes compared to two hours on the Mark III and honestly I think the print from the bamboo lab machine looks better they say that what they're doing isn't exactly the same as the Clipper input shaping but whatever it is it's working there are two software applications that come with the printer bamboo studio is the desktop slicer software it's a reskinned fork a prusa slicer and it has a lot of the same controls and options I've run into a few minor glitches in things like the automatic support generation where it didn't identify something correctly it was easy to fix using the support painting feature to put the support where I wanted it so it wasn't a big deal but it isn't as refined as prusa slicer and the same goes for the printing profiles they're good and they work in fact just about everything you've seen in this video was printed with the default settings for a beginner they're going to be way better than you'll probably be able to get on your own but if you're a long time prusa Fanboy you will see little tweaks that you want to make to make them better this is especially true if you stray from the 0.4 millimeter nozzle that normally comes with the printer I did some testing with the 0.6 millimeter nozzle and the presets for that were missing some things like elephant foot compensation and I had to adjust some settings to get really good results one other thing I noticed about the print profiles is that there are some performance differences between the different colors of filaments the default profile for the bamboo pla basic for example will allow flow rates above 20 cubic millimeters per second and this works great with the red but at the highest speeds the silver pla starts to choke it needs to be run a little bit slower which you can easily do but that's something that I noticed that wasn't incorporated into the default profiles they've integrated the print status and monitoring using the chamber camera directly into the bamboo Studio application and you can also use it to download time lapse videos of your prints after they complete they also provide a mobile application called bamboo handy that allows you to monitor your prints from your mobile phone the printer's Cloud connected so you can monitor your prints using either application from anywhere on the internet now some people get kind of nervous about any product that interacts with cloud services and I get that but I also see the benefits being able to Monitor and control your printer from anywhere is something that I use all the time the cloud service also synchronizes your custom material profiles and settings between different computers and facilitates better customer support when you file a support ticket with bamboo lab you have the option of uploading logs and even recorded video of the failed print jobs with your ticket so the support people can better see what's happening you can turn off all the cloud features and run in local network only mode but you do lose functionality if you do that most notably the ability to monitor your prints with the chamber camera it would be nice if that was supported in the local network mode but there are also technical reasons why it's done that way just be aware that that's a trade-off prusa has set a real precedent in the 3D printing industry by open sourcing their printers for many people this is their default expectation they expect it both out of a sense of fairness to the contributions of so many people who have made the technology a reality over the years but also so that they can tinker and improve their own printers and have access to a large aftermarket of mods and accessories this printer is not that I won't weigh in on the philosophical arguments but I will try to describe the value that I think bamboo brings to the table this printer isn't intended to be an extension of the reprap movement it's intended to be a tool it's a part of a vertically integrated ecosystem they build and manufacture the printers they sell them through a limited number of channels they have their own line of accessories and materials and they've tested with their printers and they publish their own control and slicing software already set up with settings for their machines and their materials they're targeting people who do not want to Tinker but just want a turnkey system that they can buy and use but it's not a totally Walled Garden either if you buy your filament from bamboo lab it does come with an RFID tag that the printer can identify it can set up the printer and select the correct slicing settings but you can still use your own filament and configure things yourself it also reads the QR codes off of the bed sheets to make sure the correct sheet is in the printer and it's positioned correctly but you can still substitute your own and disable or click through the checks if you look at the prices today you'll pay about two dollars a kilogram of a premium to use the bamboo lab materials with the RFID tags that the printer can identify is that worth it to you it's worth it to me especially when I've got four rolls of something in the AMS and the printer already knows what it is and keeps it straight for me I think the people who are concerned the most about the closed nature of the solution are worried that bamboo lab will use tools like the RFID tags to lock it down in the future after selling lots of printers and locking in their customers and while that is technically possible I personally think there's a lot more money to be made by leaving it open charging a small premium for the convenience of using the in-network materials and selling in volume to people who just don't want to mess around with their printers given that this printer is a semi-closed ecosystem one thing that really surprised me was the availability and pricing of replacement parts the full hot end assembly with the hardened nozzle the ceramic heater the heat sink and the fan pre-assembled is thirty dollars if you want to try a different diameter of nozzle this is definitely the way to go you can just pop off the magnetic cover take out two screws undo three connectors and swap it in a couple of minutes you can get just the bare nozzle and heat break for cheaper but then you have to transfer the heater over and mess around with thermal paste a replacement gear driven extruder is forty dollars the feed motor assembly for the AMS is 35 and you can even buy the x-axis carbon rod assembly for something like ninety dollars compared to other printers knocking on the door the industrial space that's really refreshing if you remember the Chidi X plus 3 I reviewed recently they actually had a warning sticker on the printer telling you that the carbon rods can't be replaced at all not everything about this printer has been perfect I have encountered a few issues the main thing I've struggled with has been bed adhesion the printer comes with a single bed sheet that has what they call the cool plate on one side and the engineering plate on the other both are basically smooth but the cool plate is meant to be used for pla at 35 degrees Celsius and the engineering plate is for abs polycarbonate nylon and other materials at higher temperatures I personally have struggled to get pla to stick reliably to the cool plate I've messed around with glue sticks and liquid glue both help and clean the play with dish soap and alcohol help to sometimes things stick great and sometimes they don't personally my advice would be to just skip the cool plate and get the optional textured Pei plate I've been using it for everything and it has been fantastic there is also a satin finish plate with a smoother surface that's specifically for pla it's in an open Beta at the moment and should be available soon and it is absolutely fantastic every first layer I've laid down on it has been essentially perfect in fact I don't think I have had a first layer adhesion failure since I stopped trying to use the cool plate and I've got 300 hours on these machines that's like 1200 in prusa Mark III hours you may have seen some discussions online about the beds on the bamboo lab printers not being flat and it's true they aren't at least they aren't as flat as the one on my prusa Mark III I initially thought the bed adhesion issues I was having might be related to bed leveling so I made a tool for measuring the bed shape and it does have a measurable sag in the center of the front of the bed it's flatter towards the back on both of my printers and this appears to be common here's a map that someone on Reddit managed to extract from their printer and this is almost exactly the same shape that I see in the beds on both of my machines I filed a support ticket uploaded the logs from the printers and support sent me new beds for both of them now the bed replacement procedure is a little time consuming so I measured the new beds to see if they're actually better and they are a little but they're still pretty similar to the ones that I have so is this a problem I think for most of what I print it isn't the mesh bed leveling compensates so the first layer follows the curve of the bed and lays down great technically it does mean that the bottom of a large printed object is not going to be perfectly flat but I haven't actually noticed this most of the things that come off the machine sit flat on a Surface plate and are as least as flat as anything I've ever printed on any of my other machines now when a large part does have a little bit of a rock on the surface plate it's usually because it's a material that shrinks like ABS and the out of flat condition is due to stresses in the material and not the shape of the bed so I think this is just the way it is and honestly it hasn't caused me any issues with real parts so what other things do you want to know about the machine you no doubt heard other reviewers talk about The Poop Shoot in the back where the printer discards the excess filament when it purges the nozzle at the start of every print and when it changes filaments during a print you'll definitely want to put a container back there or print one of the ones available online for most normal printing I haven't found it to be excessive this in fact is all of The Purge material from my 300 hours of testing if you are printing large multi-color models you will generate a lot more but I don't generally do that of a sound level from the perimeter is a bit of a mixed bag when it isn't printing it's silent it doesn't have any fans running continuously which is a really nice change from the cheating machines that just whine all the time but when it is printing it can generate a fair bit of noise due to the high accelerations and if you're printing pla it turns on the chamber fan up on high and it makes this surprising amount of noise doesn't bother me that much since I'm barely human but I think most people will want to be in a different room when it's printing so what's the verdict should you buy the bamboo lab X1 Carbon I don't know because I don't know what your needs are hopefully I have provided some useful information that you can use to decide if it's right for you for me I've already made my choice bamboo lab gave me this one for free and I bought another one myself and I would do it again just because of the increased productivity that I get from the shortened cycle times now in addition to the capacity I get from having a second printer it also allows me to keep eight spools of filament in the AMS units where they will stay dry and ready to go I keep ASA polycarbonate nylon and high temperature support material in one and I keep multiple colors of PLA and low temperature support material in the other that way I can just slice and send a job whether I'm in the shop or elsewhere and the job will be waiting for me on the machine later now I'd like to hear from you do you have any experience with these machines do you have any useful tips or tricks that you'd like to share put them down in the comments so we can all benefit from them if you enjoyed this video or found it useful feel free to subscribe and maybe consider supporting the channel over on patreon if you're already a patron thank you you make it possible for me to do this thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: Clough42

Views: 394,775

Keywords: 3d printer, bambu lab x1 carbon, 3d printing, best 3d printer, 3d printer in action, 3d printed, best 3d printer 2023, 3d printer for beginners, 3d printers, best 3d printer for beginners, diy 3d printer, input shaping, bambu lab, bambu lab x1, fdm, bambu lab x1 carbon setup, bambu x1 carbon, 3d printer 2023, tool review, 3d printers 2023, 3d printer review, multi material, bambu lab ams

Id: xsNna_Zof6Y

Length: 24min 52sec (1492 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 04 2023