I have enjoyed my Ender 3v2 but my extruder and hot end are acting up and I am ready for a more reliable printer. I like the simplicity of Bambu but it seems to come at the cost of customization. Prusa seems to be more open and extendable, but at the cost of increased complexity. What would you recommend?
Prusa has been a part of the community and active contributors since the very beginning with Adrian Bowyer’s open source university project (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RepRap) That is why the entire hobby exists. If it wasn’t for proprietary companies like Stratasys, we probably would have seen the hobby start in the 90’s instead of the mid 00’s. Exploitation through digital theft of ownership is terrible for everyone.
I bought a Prusa. I wouldn’t accept a free Bambu printer if you paid me. If I have a choice to own a product, versus renting a product at full retail price when the product is not for sale, I think it is an easy decision. You can own or be owned. I am not for sale.
Honestly, the second half of this post is not a very true statement, and is pretty disingenuous to reality. The Bambu ecosystem can operate independently of Bambu labs if you want/need to, there are plenty of knock off replacement parts to keep it running long term, you can buy all the consumables from amazon/aliexpress and many of the other components. The slicer has a feature rich open source alternative too, so software isn’t an issue. The only thing it has against it is its not open source. I own both a prusa and now 2 Bambu printers. I spent a long time researching what I was going to purchase to upgrade my prusa printers. The mk3.9 upgrade for my mk3s+ was almost the cost of a whole new printer, and new units were more expensive than the p1s. The p1p/s has more build volume, is faster, and has been more reliable and in general usable than my prusa ever was. I want to support prusa but they have fallen way behind in nearly every way. If you don’t want your data collected and you desire privacy you can have that with a closed source product, it’s not impossible. And you can get a better machine at 2/3 the cost of a prusa or a multi material one at the same cost.
I simply do not support any company exploiting an open source community. You will find that the parts availability will disappear as soon as retail availability dies. It happens with all proprietary garbage. The only reason for proprietary in this space is exploitation of the end user.