There is something to be said for Creality printers. I thought Bambu would wipe the floor with Creality but I bought an Ender 3 Max and it has put out great large prints (but very slowly)! I was truly impressed after hearing how bad Creality was compared to Bambu!
Both my A1’s started having big problems with the first layer with waves. I did a calibration test and I had to adjust the flow down to .93 on one and .88 on the other! WTF??? How did that happen on both printers? It makes no sense unless something happened with an update?
That’s a dumb marketing strategy, IMO. There is no guarantee that people are going to buy Bambu filament for their Bambu printers. I always buy the cheapest filament on Amazon and it always prints fine.
I have some non Bambu filament, but I really like just being able to toss a spool on the AMS and have it know what color and it is. Sure it only takes a few seconds to manually change it, but I personally like the convenience and can afford the slightly higher premium. I have had some minor issues with some of the off brand filaments where I have never had any with the Bambu stuff.
Whether you think it’s a dumb marketing strategy or not, all that matters is what the customers actually buy, and what the Bambu bean counters see. Not much different than any other printer. You can always buy 3rd party ink/toners, but the OEM ones still sell just fine. The business model of selling those printers cheap (little profit) and relying on sales of supplies (large profit) has worked for many years.
I personally have a bambu lab a1 and to say these printers are mediocre are definitely an understatement of these printers yes they may seem costly but they are definitely worth it and in fact they are in my opinion they are the best early stage 3d printers you can get just make sure to do maintenance every like 20-40 hours of printing me personally i do it every day but i know a lot of people don’t have that amount of time and i also use a glue stick I also use the more expensive type and it does just fine for the first layer I just heat up my bed to 90 c and let it sit that rub it on the bed scrap off the access than spray it with a hairspray and I use rave 4x mega hold while its still hot than once when its cold I also lubricate all rails and clean them with a credit card to get in the groves with a glasses rag and every day and I have been having amazing prints especially compared to my first printer that was a 100 dollar printer ps only printed one print after having it for 1.5 years XD
Every single 3d printer out there is going to have its own set of problems. There is not one printer out there that hasn’t had issues, or cuts corners. Even these new ones like the K2 Plus, Kobra S1…ect…
You see nothing but positive reviews for the first few months, then sure enough, the negative ones will roll in. It honestly all comes down to what you like. Stick with what you are comfortable with. I have had a creality, anycubic, elegoo, prusa, and BL. For me BL was at the top of the list as far as less issues, and ease of use. It has to say something that alot of these companies are JUST STARTING to copy BL after 2 years.
Creality was a big one for alot of people but they generally just released the same printer over and over before actually trying something new, and their CS is FAR worse than BL IMO.
At the end of the day an unhappy person will tell 50 people and a happy person will tell no one. Every review, opinion, and issue has to be taken with a grain of salt, and you have to choose what printer is best for you.