Although I don’t (entirely) disagree with what you say, I’m of the opinion that (perhaps) we should wait and see what Prusa will come up with, as they do need to keep up with their competitors or risk losing market share.
Not sure how correct their numbers are but they put Prusa at 3.9% of the market in early 2025. (EDIT Q2 2024; I had to do machine translation)
2024 it’s the year when Bambu’s market share increased exponentially, due to the explosion of X1 and P1 sales. Obviously that must have impacted not just Prusa sales, but also the sales of its main competitors.
yes prusa does not like to innovate.
They are also suffering from arrogance, refusing to adopt features that other suppliers have put into their printers for ages (nozzle wipers anyone? ah right… the latest core one now finally has one and the nozzle does not try to “clean” itself by scraping over a pei sheet… what a joke…)
yes. had a Zortrax for 12 years. print quality almost as good as my H2D that replaced it
Zortrax suffered from the same issue that prusa is suffering from, just much more worse… arrogance. They thought they were above the rest (for a short period they were) and stopped innovating…
Thinking about the Spark I8, I wonder if there isn’t a fatal flaw: when it retracks one filament backward in preparation for loading the next, wouldn’t it leave melted filament along its particular dedicated channel to the nozzle tip, and that residual will continue to cook at or near the nozzle temperature for potentially a long time? As that residual cooks, wouldn’t it get rather crusty? Compare that with the bambulab approach we’re all familiar with, where the new filament comes in and cleans out all the residual, because there is only one path to the tip.
Furthermore, if the filaments are different types, potentially printing at much higher temperatures, then it would cook that filament residual even more. If nothing else, it might mean the Spark I8 can print only one filament type per print.