Should you keep the printer you already have?
Our position, and other voices worth reading before you decide.
Our position
This one is touchy, and we want to be careful with it. The best printer is the printer you have access to - a working Ender, a hand-me-down Prusa, a crusty enclosed thing a parent donated. If it prints, kids are making things, and that is the point. Do not throw away a working printer because a blog post told you to.
That said - if you can afford a Bambu A1 mini, upgrade your life. Get a printer that just works. And if you are already spending an arm and a leg on proprietary filament, or if half your prints fail and you are eating filament cost plus teacher time chasing bed leveling and first layers, the upgrade math starts to tilt hard. Failed prints are not free. A printer that lets you use any filament on the open market, and that actually finishes what you start, pays for itself faster than the spreadsheet suggests.
Other voices
Reputable sources you can use to pressure-test our take. Labeled by whether the site's general tone aligns with, pushes back on, or splits the difference with our position.
The title alone tells the story. All3DP's staff reviewers tested the A1 mini in depth and concluded the Bambu line is "not different, just better" than the manual-calibration printers it replaced. Their annual Best 3D Printers roundup places the A1 mini and siblings in the top beginner slots.
Tom's Hardware gave the A1 mini their Editor's Choice award, specifically praising that it "completely auto levels itself and uses the nozzle as the probe so it can also set the z height for you" and that it is "an excellent choice for beginners looking for an affordable, compact machine that just works right out of the box." See also their Best 3D Printers for Beginners (kids and teens) roundup.
Matt's whole pitch in this video is the exact framing we keep reaching for: 3D printing used to be a hobby where the printer itself was the project - constant tuning, fixing, leveling, calibrating. Modern printers like the Bambu X1 Carbon flipped that. The printer is now a tool you actually use, and printing things is the hobby. For anyone who tried 3D printing five or ten years ago and bounced off, this is the video that explains what changed.
Maker's Muse (Angus Deveson)
Nuanced / mixedMaker's Muse is a long-running engineering-focused 3D printing channel that regularly covers both high-end printers and the "how to make your existing machine actually work" side. A useful counterweight to upgrade-chasing if you browse the channel's recent content.
Teaching Tech (Michael Laws)
Nuanced / mixedTeaching Tech's channel is heavy on calibration, bed-leveling, and troubleshooting tutorials for a wide range of printer brands. If you are weighing "keep maintaining my current printer" vs. "upgrade," his catalog is where the tuning knowledge lives.
Prusa's own writing explicitly argues that open-source firmware, documented hardware, and long-term spare-parts availability are what make a printer last years. Their CORE One Open Community License announcement codifies a "Right-to-Repair" and commits to keeping spare parts stocked even for discontinued models. If you are weighing "keep maintaining my printer" vs. "replace it with Bambu," this is the strongest counter-argument on the internet.
Quincy's first 3D printer was a Prusa - the kind you actually built yourself from a pile of nuts and bolts from Home Depot, sprinkled with "vitamins" (the plastic structural parts) printed from somebody else's 3D printer, with a circuit board you had to solder together. That was a great 3D printer. And Prusa has continued to turn out high-quality products ever since. They are fantastic.
But a printer without modern conveniences - auto bed leveling, auto flow calibration, plug-and-print workflows - can weigh you down and get discouraging, especially in a classroom. Modern Prusa printers are top-notch quality, they are just expensive, so they do not make our recommendation list. Their older generations are... old. And the in-between generations are better suited to hobbyists who are as interested in fiddling with the printer as they are in using it to print stuff.
If you are reading this site - you are probably trying to get kids making things, not tune printers for fun. Get a Bambu.
r/3Dprinting (community)
Pushes backA large and vocal segment of the community argues that recommending Bambu to every new buyer flattens the hobby and sends users into a walled-garden ecosystem with cloud dependencies. Worth reading dissent threads before spending money. Search for "Bambu vs Prusa," "Bambu lockdown," or "should I keep my Ender."
The community is not wrong about the walled-garden concerns. Quincy does not like Bambu's "proprietary" network plugin - it is unnecessary, it is a black box, and almost certainly no good lives in that box. Bambu does not quite force you to use their software, but their software is by far the most convenient way to run the printer.
Quincy's workaround: run the Bambu software on an isolated network, on a dedicated computer that is only used for 3D printing, with a separate Bambu account on his phone for the app. That is almost certainly more trouble than it is worth. But he is paranoid like that. And Bambu is good enough that he is not willing to walk away from the printers over it.
One concession to the critics: MakerWorld is public - anyone can browse and download models without a Bambu printer. So the model-library piece of the "walled garden" is not actually walled.
On the alternatives: a new Prusa is too expensive for most schools, and a Voron is too much effort at this point in life (Quincy is well past the "nuts and bolts from Home Depot" stage). XYZprinting (da Vinci) and Toybox, on the other hand, have very little in the way of redeeming qualities. Unless one of them is the only printer you have access to - in which case, work it for all it is worth and get kids making things.