You can also mark designs as ready-only and they no longer count, so this limit is really 10 concurrently editable designs. I just keep everything read-only unless I’m actively working on it.

The New York Police Department has reportedly seen a 60% increase in ghost guns seized from city streets for the past two consecutive years. NYPD recently traced some online ghost gun sales to a “ghost gun printing operation” filled with 3D printers and firearms nestled within a daycare center.

I have no idea from this if the increase in ghost guns was attributable to 3D printing, or if the increase even represents a significant number.

It also seems like this would be really difficult to enforce. You can buy hardware or kits to build your own printer, or you can buy an old printer off someone else.

All that said, if it represents a reasonable concern and they figure out a way where it’s not trivially circumvented (both of which seem unlikely), I really couldn’t care less about a background check.

I do not expect that the Mk4 will have caught up to the Bambu in 1 year since it’s missing physical hardware that seems necessary to do so. Here are some examples:

Input shaping calibration for a specific machine benefits from having an accelerometer. The Mk4 needs a module that can attach to the extruder and the bed. The current beta firmware with input shaping only allows for Prusa’s universal preset setting instead of allowing you to measure the frequency responses of your own machine. Critical reviews of the current input shaping implementation show subpar performance with excessive smoothing and high frequency artifacts. I expect that comes down to inability to calibrate your specific machine and environment.

When you print with a new filament, especially a new manufacturer, you usually need to tune a filament profile to get better printing results. With the Mk4 this is a manual process, and this is where many new to 3d printing quickly get frustrated with failed or poor quality prints. The lidar system on the X1 has been fantastic for automatic pressure advance and flow calibration right out of the box and I’ve found I largely do not need to maintain custom filament profiles for the Bambu.

Webcam support and failed print detection are absent from the Mk4. The closest feature the Nextruder assembly supports is crash detection via its load cell sensor and I’m not entirely sure if the Mk4 even has that enabled. If you attach a webcam to the frame and run octoprint / something else standalone, you’ve again thrown off the preset input shaping calibration.

It’s an i3 style printer or “bed slinger,” which is fine on it’s own, but it will never reach the same speeds as core-xy because it’s physically moving the mass of your printed object sitting on the bed. Printing speeds aside, you’ll potentially run into taller objects wobbling slightly as they are moved.

I really like Prusa’s open source commitment, and I’m still in line to purchase a multitool Prusa XL, but I cannot recommend waiting for the Mk4 to improve and reach parity with the Bambu if that’s your expectation. If it doesn’t do what you want it to do today, I’m not sure it ever will.

As for cloud connectivity on the Bambu, you’ll really have to consider just how important that is to you given the significant tradeoffs. Minimally you can print from the sd card or use lan mode. It looks like you currently lose the camera and mobile app connectivity with lan mode, but I haven’t tried this myself and these are at least software aspects that could easily improve.