Review: Bambu P1S Combo 3D Printer Review

Having tinkered with 3D printers for over a decade now, I’ve always described them as more of a shop tool than a home gadget. Like a drill press or a table saw, they’ll prove a lot more useful after a few months of trial and error, trying extra attachments, and tossing away little piles of half-spaghettified plastic.

No longer! The Bambu P1S combo happily fired off a near-perfect Benchy—the ubiquitous tugboat used to test basically every 3D printer’s chops—in less than 20 minutes. Within just a few days of getting it online, I was confidently starting jobs from my computer on the other side of the house with complete faith they’d be done later that day.

My complaints about the P1S are minor, and won't be any trouble at all if you already have experience with 3D printers. As long as you don’t mind handling a little bit of plastic waste, you'll be able to easily print many items.

Print Speed and Quality

Photograph: Brad Bourque

Every time I upgrade my home 3D printer, I'm blown away by how much faster I can make things. My last printer, the Creality Ender 3 Max Neo, was able to break 150mm per second in ideal conditions. The P1S smashes past 200mm/s without breaking a sweat. It was so fast I had to reinforce the sturdy end table I usually use for printers to stop it from shaking, which was causing some light stringing on sharp corners.

3D printed models are always going to have imperfections, but the P1S performs a little ritual that directly addresses some of the most common causes of total print failure: Before every print, and whenever it changes filament, the nozzle moves to a trash chute at the back of the print area and poops out a little coil of extra material. As it moves off the chute, it wiggles across a bar, cleaning the nozzle and triggering a trap door that drops the extra waste. As a result, I haven’t had to clean my nozzle tip since I set up the machine, and the first layer of every print comes out clean and smooth.

This simple solution does wonders for both maintenance and print completion rate, but it isn’t exactly elegant. There’s nowhere for the waste to go, so it just falls out the back and plops onto whatever surface is behind the printer. Sometimes the filament is still warm when the nozzle flips the switch and it doesn’t fall, so you may need to manually reach in and unblock the pile after a big, multi-colored print.

It's such a known issue that a lot of users print an aptly named “poop chute,” which collects and redirects the waste to the side where it’s easier to empty. I went with the simpler solution of putting an empty filament box behind the printer to catch it.

Before printing, the Bambu also sweeps and levels the bed in a grid, and warns you if it hits any obstructions like leftover supports or an errant bed scraper. I’ve checked out several printers with an auto-level before, but they were slower, and usually required a second check by hand before actually hitting go. I haven’t had to adjust anything on the P1S in the month or so I’ve been using it, with the printer handling the initial setup, regular re-leveling, and nozzle cleaning.

The Bundle

Photograph: Brad Bourque

The Bambu P1S is sold on its own, but I think the bundle that includes the multi-filament handling AMS is well worth the extra cost. When I unpacked the AMS, I had dreams of vibrant, multi-color prints, and while that's certainly possible, it isn't the component's best feature. Changing colors or materials mid-print forces the nozzle to dump a little coil of extra material, and you have to print a tower off to the side to minimize Z-axis variation.

The result is quite a bit of wasted plastic, extra time spent printing, and effort optimizing models and slicing for layers and colors. I also noticed there was a lot of extra length in the purge coils when switching colors, and slowly reduced that amount in Bambu Studio, but your mileage may vary. To get ahead of any questions: Yes, it did feel weird to inspect my 3D printer’s poop to improve its diet.

Rather than print complex multi-color parts in one shot, I found the AMS more useful for reducing the amount of time I spent dealing with the printer to swap filaments. While it walks you through the process, switching a single filament is a fairly hands-on process. You have to wait for the nozzle to heat up, pull the old filament out, push the new one in until it drips out again, then get the roll situated on the spool holder, and make sure it purges anything leftover. With the AMS, I just load the colors I want for a multi-piece project onto the rollers, choose them in the slicer, and it handles everything from heating to purging.

Where I used to have to batch parts by color, or just print in whatever color was already loaded, now I print projects in an order that makes sense for time or assembly order, switching between filaments and colors without a care. The totally contained system even has slots for desiccant to keep your filament perfectly dry and ready to go.

Photograph: Brad Bourque

If you opt to use Bambu filament spools, the AMS can read the chips inside and report the material and color info back to the slicer. You can still use other filament brands, but I did find that sometimes the AMS would get confused when synchronizing the filament colors and types back to the slicer, and I had to manually reset these settings each time I loaded up the app.

I figured out that the slicer and the AMS have different numbering systems, so if you see just a number, that’s the software side, and if it has an “A” before the number, it’s referring to the physical position in the AMS. When you’ve sliced the plate and go to start the print, Studio will let you verify that the two match up.

Even with some very mild fiddling required (hopefully now aided for some by these discoveries), the P1S has changed the way I approach 3D printing. Rather than wrestling with my printer to get a decent result, or dealing with filament swaps and double-checking measurements, I’m spending more time working on the stuff I’m actually printing.

I’m more motivated to start on complex projects knowing I don’t have to worry about perfectly optimized beds or keeping stacks of filaments sealed in plastic bags. The minor software oddities and occasional plastic cleanup are easy to overlook when the rest of the process is so easy and straightforward. If you're after a simple 3D printer and have some projects in mind, the Bambu P1S Combo is a great place to start.