Well well, here we are. One of those Kickstarters you wish you could have backed has come to fruition and delivered something incredible.
What is it?
The Bambu Lab X1 / Carbon X1 are a next-gen series of 3D printers that bring an incredible amount of features and new tech into the consumer 3D printing space. On top of that, they claim / print at breakneck speeds and extremely high accelerations, previously only touched by highly modified custom printers.
Hailing from Kickstarter, the team at Bambu collectively raised backing from nearly 6000 people, and has successfully shipped all of the Kickstarter units. “Shipped” is a relative term of course. The first 3000 Kickstarter printers shipped out weeks ago, and are slowly filtering out to all of their respective countries. Only few select countries had air shipping, while the rest had sea shipping. My personal printer was part of the sea shipping. Bambu shipped all of their printers out to their US locations (one being their Texas based), and they are slowly making their way to customers.
I was backer 1009 and I received my printer last week! Shipped by UPS, and arrived with no damage. People are receiving them pretty out of order, so it really depends on your location, the speed of the actual transport, etc.
Why buy it?
Here are the blanket tech specs of the printer for your viewing pleasure (straight from website)
This printer boasts a lot of incredible features, here are some as pictured on the website:
Hardened steel nozzle (X1 Carbon)
Up to 120c hotbed
Chamber thermostat to keep chamber around 60C when printing high heat materials (not actively heated)
Part cooling fan (similar to ones that are on some Voron Mods)
Dual auto bed leveling (once by force sensing, and again with the lidar)
Filament sensor & fan operation detection
Built in camera (with LED strip) and door sensor
Some AMS features and the belt tension sensor
First layer inspection using the micro-lidar module
Mega speed - one of the major flashy selling points that it actually delivers on. Seriously. 17 minute benchy!
Other cool stuff:
Active vibration compensation:
In addition to the ability to print such a wide variety of materials, thanks to the full metal hotend, you can also use the AMS (up to four of them in parallel) to it up to 16 colors in a single print. This is not without its drawbacks of course, and no one has seen it in person yet, but four colors alone is pretty dang cool.
I have the X1C combo and that came with the AMS, which is an awesome thing to have. I’m still waiting for them to do auto-filament runout detection & resume, but it’s on the feature list for the near future. Imagine being able to not worry about running out of filament on a print!
