Bambu Lab X1 Carbon: Info & Discussion (SRO)

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!

14 Likes

So, what else is there to say?

Well, this thread is for all of that discussion. There are many reviews of this printer on Youtube, some positive, some with some issues. As for me and my printer? It’s been excellent so far.

I’ve done about 20 ish hours of printing, and have used the following filaments:
ABS, PLA, PLA+, PETG, and Silk PLA. All of these printed flawlessly with zero adjustment to print parameters. I was even impressed with how easy it is to remove support material - it really just comes right off.

There is one thing you might be curious about - the AMS states that it has RFID built into it. Does that mean you are not allowed to use any other filament? NO! Fortunately, this is a convenience feature. When you load filament into the AMS, you either use Bambu Lab filament with its built-in RFID tag, which stores the color, amount of filament, type of filament, etc, on it, and it’ll auto detect, or you plug in the parameters yourself when you insert the filament.

Now of course in a roller-based, enclosed box like this, you will be slightly limited in what filament rolls you can use. There is a google doc that is community run that shows you all of the compatible filament rolls, and is a great resource to have.

I’ve successfully inserted 5 or 6 different ones in with no issues (ESUN, Priline, some generics).

Here’s the official facebook group, there is also a discord server available to join.

I’m currently out on work travel but I’ll be home this weekend and can share some video of it printing, as well as pics of the machine and unboxing

4 Likes

How much was one of these through the Kickstarter vs now?

Good question

Delivered, mine was $1295. I ordered in the first hour of the Kickstarter, and I got the X1C combo, which includes the AMS.

$135 of that was for shipping

Here is the current preorder. Retail price of $1449, before tax and shipping. However, I expect shipping to be much cheaper since it would be shipping only from the US based location.

I’d expect a bit over $1600 delivered for the combo. But, who knows when exactly preorders ship, I haven’t been keeping track since I already have mine. Today or yesterday was when ALL of the Kickstarter orders have been sent out, so I expect they will be starting production of the pre-orders next.

Some people are upgrading their farms with these, ordering 5 or 10 of em, no farm management software as of yet but it’s being discussed

1 Like

I think shipping is $35.00 for preorder. ( at least in the US)

1 Like

isn’t too bad if i order here, but idk what to do with a 3dprinter :joy:

1 Like

Lol I realized that the preorder page has a rough schedule, approx October for Preorder shipping

I’m curious to hear how TPU fares.

Thanks for this information! :grin:

One note - TPU may not be used in the AMS system because of the unique tensioning design. On the rear side of the X1 there is a special mechanism that manages the tension of the filament as it is fed into the hotend. Since both the AMS and the hotend feed filament, it is very important to make sure one doesn’t feed too slow or too fast.

It’s very impressive, but you cannot use TPU there. On the regular hotend by itself though, you can. It just requires unplugging the tubing from the AMS and running the filament right into the printer itself. I too am interested to print some, I’ll give it a go sometime soon.

3 Likes

I’ve been printing away on my X1 Carbon since I got it a few days ago. It’s been absolutely amazing!

I’ve only been using PLA during my tests, but I’m looking forward to testing out some PETG, TPU, and PA-CF that I have.

I’ve had a roll of “tough PLA” for 2+ years now, and I could never get it to print nicely on my (modified DD) Ender 3 or my S1 Pro. But that same crappy roll that I came close to throwing out numerous times is printing beautifully on the X1 Carbon with standard PLA settings.

3 Likes

It’s kinda crazy how it does this lol - glad to see there’s another of us! I was so excited when it came haha

I had a 4 yr old roll of ABS that printed almost perfectly, no warping, first try, with the generic abs settings.

Additionally, the roll of silk pla that completely came off the bed on my Artillery, printed great with generic pla settings. Crazy stuff! Also, it prints so fast that it’s entertaining to just sit and watch it haha

2 Likes

Agreed, I love just watching it print at nutty speeds.

I sent this pic to my friend earlier. Normally I don’t like printing more than one object at a time, but I wanted to see what the X1C can do. Not only did it print everything flawlessly, but all this in only 7 hours on the “normal” speed setting.

6 Likes

Right? Crazy stuff. I haven’t even seen a single string on a print yet either lol

My only issue so far was that the AMS acted a little weird on insertion of filament but I restarted the printer and it was fine.

Slicer is pretty good overall too

4 Likes

I didn’t bother getting the AMS, as I don’t see myself ever wanting to print multiple colors. Too much purge material. I can always buy one separately in the future if I ever change my mind :slight_smile:

I’m so used to Cura that I was dreading having to learn another slicer software, but it’s very straightforward.

3 Likes

Alright I’m back from my trip - here’s a photo dump from when I unboxed the printer and set it up


















11 Likes

This is a big disappointment for me. If I were buying a multi-material printer, one of the main material combos I would be interested to print is flexible-on-rigid plastics. For a printer as capable as this appears to be, that seems like kinda a big drawback.

Makes the AMS significantly less desirable to me :confused:

Oh well, guess that just means I can save some money and only get the X1C for $1200 :joy:

6 Likes

Yeah I mean to be fair, printing TPU at the speeds that this prints other materials seems insane.

On the other hand, I was a little disappointed too, but because of the unique tensioning system that it uses with the AMS, it’s not ablt to deal with something that can stretch.

But yeah I guess you can save some money.

I am not super familiar with the other multi material options out there, but I would wager that most of them also can’t do that.

Only time I’ve been able to do prints like what you’re saying is with the Lulzbot flexy-dual-struder. PLA and TPU together, was pretty cool. Two printheads though.

5 Likes

Can you post a picture of what the mounting interface with hot end unit and the extruder looks like?

What does this interface look like.

34$ for a complete all metal hotend with thermistors installed is unreal.

Complete Hotend Assembly with Hardened Steel Nozzle – Bambulab.US

This what you wanted to see?




Yeah I don’t even mind the proprietary part at such a low price.

1 Like

Had my first swing and a miss with a filament. ESUN PETG, in black. Completely failed. On the same setings, this blue PETG from JAREES printed excellently.

I seriously have no clue what happened lol so I’m gonna try drying the ESUN stuff. Same exact settings on both filament with drastically different results. Maybe I got a dud roll.



2 Likes