Disclaimer:
I acknowledge that Bambu Labs as produced one of the most refined 3D products out there and has really competed on creating greater value at lower costs. Anyone who experienced the Japanese conquest of the west during the 80s will recognize this behavior. It’s very admirable and spurs other companies to improve their game.
However, a leopard cannot change its spots. Japan is a culture that inherently values quality while Chinese culture values and focuses on shortcuts as well as focusing solely on price. I can speak from experience having dealt with supply chains from both cultures over the years.
You have two camps. The Bambu Studio corporate folks and the Softfever Orca folks.
The Bambu Studio camp is motivated to simply pump out just enough features to do the job or in Chinese business philosophy, Chabuduo Pronounced Cha-Bu-Duo which means “almost” but in the west he equates to “cutting corners”. The Bambu camp in their recent release of Bambu Slicer added only one major feature and that was 
. I am underwhelmed. 
In a nutshell, they only added a feature that doesn’t enhance the outcome of print quality or the end-user experience but instead, is pure unabashed Self-Promotion which is completely distasteful in my view.
I had abandoned Bambu Studio after about a month of using Orca. Recently, I went back and revisited Bambu Studio since it had the direct interface to Makerworld and I wanted to understand what we were getting. In the end, it ended up being a big nothing sandwich. But what was really astounding was living back in the Bambu Studio world for a week and learning how many features are absent that for me are just show stoppers.
So now let’s take the second camp. Orca is a tool forked from Bambu and maintains almost 100% compatibility albeit maybe one release behind. But orca borrows very heavily from the innovations that continue to appear in Prusa Slicer which was what Bambu itself was forked from.
The difference between the two camps couldn’t be more stark in the latest beta of Orca. Orca is made by enthusiasts for enthusiasts whereas Bambu is made to feed the corporate overlords of Bambu Labs.
Orca’s developers continue to innovate and deliver on what is known in the Software Dev world as “Quality of Life” features. These are defined as features that don’t necessarily change the underlying function of software but makes it easier to use. So without further adieu, hear are my top new features since the 1.6 release in July of 2023 up to the new 1.8 beta release this month that Bambu Studio doesn’t have.
(If you don’t see one of your faves or know of features in Bambu - other than the “upload button” - that Orca does not have, please post it here. Include screengrab)
1. Time to completion with Clock
2. Set default launch preference to “prepare”
3. See amount of time on Layer slider.
4. Straight lines option for Seams
Oh boy is this a welcome addition if you’ve ever tried to place a tidy seam on an irregular option. I used to use the Windows clunky mousekeys function but this is much better.
5. Continually improving the Calibration submenu which Bambu doesn’t even address.
Bambu Studio doesn’t even have this and Orcas has added a new feature on every release.
6. Pinned vs unpinned and most recent files from the right-click on the taskbar menu
How could they possibly miss this one. I could swear it was there back at version 1.6 of Bambu Studio but if it was, it’s no longer working.
