Having tinkered with 3D printers for over a decade now, I’ve always described them as more of a shop tool than a home gadget. Like a drill press or a table saw, they’ll prove a lot more useful after a few months of trial and error, trying extra attachments, and tossing away little piles of half-spaghettified plastic.
No longer! The Bambu P1S combo happily fired off a near-perfect Benchy—the ubiquitous tugboat used to test basically every 3D printer’s chops—in less than 20 minutes. Within just a few days of getting it online, I was confidently starting jobs from my computer on the other side of the house with complete faith they’d be done later that day.
My complaints about the P1S are minor, and won't be any trouble at all if you already have experience with 3D printers. As long as you don’t mind handling a little bit of plastic waste, you'll be able to easily print many items.
Print Speed and Quality
Photograph: Brad Bourque
Every time I upgrade my home 3D printer, I'm blown away by how much faster I can make things. My last printer, the Creality Ender 3 Max Neo, was able to break 150mm per second in ideal conditions. The P1S smashes past 200mm/s without breaking a sweat. It was so fast I had to reinforce the sturdy end table I usually use for printers to stop it from shaking, which was causing some light stringing on sharp corners.
3D printed models are always going to have imperfections, but the P1S performs a little ritual that directly addresses some of the most common causes of total print failure: Before every print, and whenever it changes filament, the nozzle moves to a trash chute at the back of the print area and poops out a little coil of extra material. As it moves off the chute, it wiggles across a bar, cleaning the nozzle and triggering a trap door that drops the extra waste. As a result, I haven’t had to clean my nozzle tip since I set up the machine, and the first layer of every print comes out clean and smooth.
This simple solution does wonders for both maintenance and print completion rate, but it isn’t exactly elegant. There’s nowhere for the waste to go, so it just falls out the back and plops onto whatever surface is behind the printer. Sometimes the filament is still warm when the nozzle flips the switch and it doesn’t fall, so you may need to manually reach in and unblock the pile after a big, multi-colored print.