Hands-on: Bambu’s first mini might show the future of consumer 3D printing.
DJI didn’t dominate the drone industry by selling drones to people who already knew how to fly. It relentlessly developed tech that made its drones easy to control by first-timers. In 2018, five DJI engineers founded Bambu Lab to do the same for 3D printers, and the just-announced Bambu A1 Mini may get them closer than ever before.
I believe the $299 Bambu A1 Mini could be the friendliest 3D printer ever made. Over the past week and a half, I’ve been churning out part after part in PLA — the most commonly used plastic — printing in up to four different colors at a time, with the highest quality-to-effort ratio I’ve experienced yet.
I just wish I could say the same for more robust PETG plastic I use for objects I want to last — and that it had a larger bed.
Imagine this: it took me just over an hour to go from the sealed shipping box to a fully printed three-color Benchy (the industry’s cute little boat test print), and a quarter of that time was simply letting the printer calibrate itself automatically.
If not for the printer’s louder-than-motors cooling fan and the fact that tiny particles of airborne molten plastics are reportedly hazardous to health, it’s the rare printer I wouldn’t mind inviting into my home office.
The A1 also does its own bed leveling and its own Z offset and X-Y resonance calibration every single print… since these prints are literally lines of molten plastic stacked atop one another, it’s important for prints to get off on the right foot, and those features I just named help make that happen automatically.
PETG performance isn’t the only detractor. The only way to print some larger parts is to lay them down diagonally — like the main body of this awesome LeedleDynamics Corsair nerf blaster, whose every part I printed on the A1 Mini itself.