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After the first time I tried a Prusa i3 Mk3 we bought several of them at my previous job

… After the first time I tried a Prusa i3 Mk3 we bought several of them at my previous job. The Makerspace I'm a member of has a whole fleet of them. And at every single prototyping company I've been at, there is usually a printer farm consisting of lots of Prusa printers. Not because they can't afford "better" but because it is what the engineers prefer to use. Because they work. When companies that make tons of money and can afford to buy any 3D printer they want still choose to buy a bunch of Prusa printers, it is worth asking why this is. You don't always need to be ahead of the curve to serve your customers. You just need to make a better product and provide better support. Or even a product that works properly. Prusa does that. A lot of their competitors, including the clone-makers and more ambitious products very often don't.

Original discussionThe state of open-source in 3D printing in 2023101 source comments · at import
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NI

I don't think they would be writing this blog post if their "go ahead: clone us" strategy was working as well you imply it should. Mass market products live and die by the average customer, and the average person in need of a 3D printer will see a Prusa clone for half the price, and buy that instead of the original. Most people can't afford to spend double just on principle, even if they wanted to. And not everyone even cares for such principles in the first place. I don't claim to know anything about Prusa's financials or technology, but if they are not technologically ahead of the curve as you say – could it be because they're starved for resources to do R&D, because they're losing too many customers to rip-offs?

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EA

Have you tried the Bambu X1-Carbon? I've had mine since the Kickstarter release and consider it both a workhorse and innovative. It's hard to imagine replacing it with something like the MK4.

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TD

Prusa printers generally work reliably. And they're expensive - epople are willing to pay for that reliability. However, Prusa has been selling essentially 2017 technology for too long. Many customers are OK with this because 3D printing got to a decent point in 2017 and they don't need new frills. However, I think the inherent speed limit of the bed slinger design is going to start causing problems for them. Eventually people who just want a workhorse printer will also realize it's nice when the printer takes 60% of the time to produce the same output. Prusa hasn't demonstrated an ability to keep up with where the industry is going.

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