Scoring the Bambu Lab A1 mini 3D Printer

We scored the VERY POPULAR Bambu Lab A1 mini with our new 35-point 3D printer checklist! This is going to be a fun way to compare 3D printers as well as their relative value to one another!

Bambu Lab A1 mini

Download the checklist, score along with me, or go and score some of your own printers and then post your results in our Discord! Discord link below! I'd love to see how you scored.

LM 35-Point Printer Checklist:

See ALL of our scores! We are updating this nearly daily as we score new machines!

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#3DPrinting #bambulab #bambua1mini

[lacroserocks]

This was fun! I ended up with 117. A1 Mini is a fantastic machine, I can't imagine what a printer with a 130+ score would be like

[crashingsux]

My scoring was close to yours but one place I disagreed was belt tensioning. The belt tensioning on the A1 Mini is the best I have ever experienced. When it does it's resonance test at startup if the resonance shows the belts are loose it gives you a notification, linked to instructions that show how to tighten the belt, and tightening it is the easiest design I have ever seen. On the back of the toolhead near the bottom is a single allen head bolt, loosen the bolt, then re-tighten it and you are done. The belt is hooked up to a spring to adjust the tension automatically whenever the bolt is loosened. Really user friendly in my book.

[cardinalcraze]

Your scoring system seems more wishful than practical.

[RedMageGaming]

Just got my A1 Mini Yesterday, regret not getting the AMS with it, but, totally worth the $250 asking price on its own. Not counting its preflight checklist it went through, it spit out my first benchy in a little over 13 minutes. For someone starting out new, after going through a lot of content covering different printers, I came to the conclusion, that for the price in the entry level printer market, it trades build volume for a more complete feature set. I can live with not being able to print large things for now, as I really want to learn the ins and outs of the hobby, and when it comes time that I absolutely need a larger printer I can start looking at larger printers with more confidence.

Their printers are more of a home/business 'appliance' rather than just a hobbyists tinker toy as 3d printers were for so long. So not only can you get it out of the box and ready to go in 15 minutes give or take, if you are also using their 'brand' of filaments, the profiles are already there for you. They know their own materials, and what settings their printer needs to use to print with those materials. So, if you have the AMS and it reads the RFID tag, it automagically sets that up for you, and if you don't have the AMS, you just select the filament type, and tell it what color it is, and your off to the races. Nearly as pain free as swapping an ink cartridge on a printer, but with the added benefit of these printers wont refuse to print your project just because you're out of cyan. A big part of me chose the Bambu lab because of how turnkey it is as an entry level printer. No fussing about with bed leveling, or going through the trial and error of printing something, adjusting settings, printing again, repeat, to dial in the settings needed to get a clean print, I've seen a lot of people selling their printers because the tinkering was too much for them. I didn't want to lose motivation to that cycle early on so here I am.

Would love to see printers like this come with a bigger sample of filament. 250g I think would be a perfect sample size. The 20g sample in the box is such a tease when they ship the printer and the filament separately, and the printer shows up a whole day before the filament, and you live too far away from a store that carries 3d printing stuff.

[woutmoelans]

Just a rough estimate, but my score will be around 120. This is because the A1 mini is my first printer and so far no problems. I love the printer, the app, the speed. Even the volume I find more than good enough, especially since I work on a small scale as a hobby in my spare time. I also think printer doesn't need a cover, especially when you look at it price-wise. but other than that, I almost completely follow all the criteria you give.

[FoodElitist]

Love your videos man, keep up the good content

[TinTalon]

I would like to score along but I just don’t have the experience or knowledge of any other brands. Never seen or used any other printers in person. So I can only base things off of what others say…like you and hope they are not biased towards or away from other brands. But that being said I do like your scoring system and once you get a bunch of printers scored (hopefully the scored sheets for all printers will be available) it will be a nice reference for new and experienced users. Thank you again for yours and Mrs LM hard work. It does not go unnoticed.

[scodavis]

LoyalMoses - Thank you for this video! I really like the attempt to bring objectivity to ratings and, of course, introduce a way to compare different models and brands directly. By the way, I have bought somewhere around 30 spools of PolyMaker filament so far. I really like their products and their customer service has been phenomenal, especially since I've only been 3d printing for 2 1/2 weeks and they really helped me get educated on the products and what works for what!

[metaphysicalArtist]

A 35-point analysis of how to improve the current components of the model would be useful, as it would show us the possible features of the next versions of Bambu Lab A1 Mark 2 mini or Bambu Lab A2 mini.

[Bfab_Tech]

Great video ! We need a collection of 3D models for a cool start in Bambu and 3D printing usage 👌

[SynthOSphere]

While I did appreciate you going through all these categories and explaining them, I felt your pointing system had a lot of blurry zones and was perhaps a bit more subjective than I was hoping for. Still useful so thanks!

[zatedford]

Really like the idea of your scoring system and seems fair in how you scored it, but what would be really interesting would be seeing a Master list with all of your printer scores somewhere. That would help with context and help us decide which printer to buy.

[tyotee]

Love the checklist and the agree with the score. Just an idea for the checklist, have you considered adding a repair-ability score? I had to replace the heatbed cable on my X1 and it definitely made my own score of it go down a lil bit due to it being like working on a Nissan lmao. I've gotta use this checklist on my own printers now, thanks for the template!

[SirHackaLt.]

I bought one of these printers this week during their sale Best £169 I’ve spent recently. Amazing little first printer.

[animeniac]

You missed a couple of things for a very understandable reason: Bambu treats some features as if they're disreputable or something: they go to all the trouble to develop them, then while they should be splattered all over the sales literature, they're not mentioned at all. (I think Bambu is more engineer and less salesmen.)

The big one: You mentioned that some people object to cloud access, and I'm one of them. It took me DAYS of digging to discover the Bambus have "LAN mode". In LAN mode, from what I can discern, the printer won't connect to the internet in any way, but you can still up and down load files across the LAN, manage settings, start stop. The smartphone app doesn't work (it should, if connected the the local wifi, but maybe they'll add that code later). Also, the camera doesn't work, and I think that's the same situation: no reason it couldn't work between printer and PC over the LAN, but they've not (yet, I hope) added that code. In any event, LAN mode does address a lot of those cloud-related concerns, but appears nowhere on their sales pages. But you're not stuck with SD card sneakernet as the only option if you're offline.

A small one: I'll take your word on belt tightening being a nuisance (I've no hands on with these; I'm familiar with some of these issues due to seriously considering an A1), but they do have a nice related feature: it detects when a belt is loosening and tells you. It may be a nuisance to fix it, but you won't be unaware.

I personally think printers *could* be loaded with misc popular files, but benchie and a bunch of diagnostic/test prints are what's most important. Fill the rest of the space with fluff; I bet people would like that.

Other than those, I think your scores were pretty fair.

[Barbasnoo]

I feel like the nozzle deserved a better score than it received. The innovative hotend/nozzle design on the A1 Mini is pretty nifty. Not only is it steel, but removing it for replacement or maintenance is an absolute breeze.

[ebkprints]

hey loyal moses, I love ur vids. I also love polymaker, which sponsored me for a school project, and gave me 5 rolls free of charge. I also got an extra roll of pc just for the box being damaged... polymaker support is infinetly better than bambu support.

[Goosefang]

Funny you are wearing that shirt on today’s video. I went to a sushi 🍣 place today and they had Ryu, Mario, Godzilla and a smiling piece of sushi roll painted on a mural wall.

[julianeyt]

In the end you have weight the points depending on your usecase. for me the a1 mini is probably the best printer on the market right now.

[michaelbraaten]

I like the idea of scoring printers… but I feel like giving things a 3 out of 5 for “average” is a mistake. 3/5 = 60%, which would be a D- as a grade. I would rate everything out of 10, and average would be 7/10 (or 3.5/5)… I just think arbitrarily choosing whether it’s out of 5 or
10, then saying average is 3/5 artificially gives a more negative impression of the printer. Since the idea is to compare printers, I think the scale needs to be a little more relative. In other words, for example, you might give both the Prusa Mini and the Bambu A1 Mini hot ends 3/5 because they’re “average” in performance, but that doesn’t really help show the differences between those hot ends… they might perform similarly but they may be very different for maintenance or some other attribute.

TL;DR: make every category out of 10 for more exact grading, and grade things a little more relative to comparable printers.