I’ve nothing useful to add about the company, because I’ve had minimal interaction with them. Only time will tell if they stick around.
The printer itself is rocksolid, and solidly aimed at someone like me who doesn’t want to spend time tuning the printer. It’s so far been only about 50% successful at noticing spaghetti issues - but it’s worth noting I’m running on LAN only, which probably limits the AI. It’s been very good at pikcing up first layer issues, and it even noticed and compensated the one time I had the build plate slightly crooked.
The worry about the firmware demanding their proprietary filament is possible, but I think it’s pretty minor. For one thing, they seem to understand that would be a death blow to any future sales - the community just wouldn’t tolerate it. For another, the printer itself doesn’t read the RFIDs, that functionality is in the AMS. I don’t have an AMS installed, and the printer has no idea whether I’m using Bambu Labs filament or not.
I’m not 100% thrilled about the print surface; I like the really smooth finish, so I don’t want to try their PEI plates, but the “cold plate” is a sticker that is slowly peeling off. About every third print I have to peel it up and smooth out the bubbles. Now, after about a month and half of fairly steady printing, the sticker is reaching the point where the edges are peeling up as the ABS cools. So I’m getting minor warping, not because the print is detaching from the print bed but because the print bed sticker is detaching from the spring steel sheet! So I personally would like something similar to the cold plate, but more pernanently attached than just a sticker. Still, such things are consumables.
Unfortunately, I’m suddenly unable to launch Bambu Studio. I get an “invalid pointer” error when I stry to launch it. I just now sent in an email about that, so we’ll see what the response is.