Prusa is facing strong competition, more than they can handle, I suspect. It’s no surprise that a middle sized European company can’t beat the always rising power of the Chinese industry, if only in terms of labor cost and sourcing components.
If you were a regular on Prusa forums, as I’m, you’d know that the last two years they’ve been struggling badly to maintain their current market share. The “birth” of the xy core XL and, to a lesser extent, the new slinger MK4, has been (and it is ) a bumpy ride, to put it mildly. Never ending problems with sourcing components, change after change of the final designs, frustration of many customers who paid full price and months later still haven’t their printers.... Worse still, when finally the machines started to be slowly delivered to the customers, complains about badly assembled units, faulty components, buggy firmware and what not.
Fools rush in, they say.
I’m very satisfied with my Prusa MK3S+. It’s a nice little printer sturdy and reliable, in spite of the dated electronics and limited printing size but, if I were looking today for a new 3D printer I wouldn’t consider the new Prusas MK4 or XL.
On the other part, I dislike and mistrust the Bambu business model, Not only the suspicious need to connect to their servers but the fact that even if it’s a neat product that seems to work well, the customer knows very little about how the printer works and where to look at if something goes wrong, that it will sooner or later. Exactly the opposite of Voron’s totally open source approach,
Long term reliability of hardware/software, availability of spare parts and after sales support with the Bambu, as with many Chinese products, it’s a total incognito that only time will tell. I’d never buy a printer ( Bambu or whatever) under these conditions, even if it was ultra cheap.
So, no new Prusa or Bambu for me. What was left for a reliable/affordable XY core ?. In my book, only Voron. One year ago I knew practically nothing about this project. When I started to dig into it I was discouraged at first, specially about the software setup, all seemed so complicated, but the excellent documentation on Voron web and plenty of youtube videos helped immensely. Yes, it has been a steep and sometimes rough learning curve, but it was well worth the reward in the end. Nowadays my Voron 2.4 sits facing my Prusa MK3S+ on opposite sides of the room and they work together, never quarrelling, like well behaved ladies.
