The Bambu Lab P1S with AMS (Automatic Materials System) combo kit is an affordable, fully-enclosed 3D printer with multicolor capabilities. It’s fast, reliable, and can produce some stunning results. But before you begin printing all the colors, you should know that full-color printing involves a lot of waste. Still, at under $1000, the P1S and AMS is a superb beginner-friendly package.
Bambu Lab P1S
A superb beginner-friendly enclosed printer with outstanding software for your smartphone or desktop. Combined with the AMS (Automatic Materials System), the P1S can produce stunning multicolor prints: up to four filaments can be stored in a single AMS, and up to 4 AMS units can be combined for 16 filament printing. However, you should be aware the multicolor prints produce a lot of waste, and to mitigate that, you’ll need to print either in multiples or print additional “waste” objects to soak up the purged filament.
Bambu Lab was one of the first companies to produce a commercially available CoreXY printer. Although you’ll still find other types of 3D printers in their lineup, it’s the CoreXY models that lead the way in the form of their top-of-the-lineCarbon X1and the more budget-friendlyP1PandP1S.
CoreXY printers have a number of advantages over the traditional Cartesian (or “bed slinger”) design of 3D printers, in which single or dual servo motors control each axis independently. In a CoreXY printer, the print bed only moves down slowly with each new layer, rather than being flung back and forth along the Y axis. A pair of servos then control the X and Y axes simultaneously. This design results in a compact printer—maximizing build area to the desktop footprint—as well as faster, better print quality, and fewer errors.
Unboxing and Setup: Securely Packed
With over a decade of reviewing products, I can tell you that packaging matters. Not only because a well-packaged product is less likely to be damaged in shipment (especially important given the glass on this enclosure), but because it shows a holistically considered user experience. If it’s thrown into a box haphazardly with some expanded foam, that’s the lowest-tier effort, and you should usually expect the same from your ensuing product experience.
The P1S arrived securely packaged, with the machine and everything except the sample filaments inside a strong plastic bag, with instructions to lift the bag out whole. It’s light enough to do so, and it meant I could transfer the printer to my desk hassle-free instead of trying to tip the box upside down or slide my hands down the tiny gaps at the side, ripping everything in the process.
I initially thought the AMS unit was missing; it’s actually all secured inside the main printer cavity, along with a box of tools and other bits and pieces. You’ll need an Allan key from the toolbox to “unlock” the AMS unit, which is screwed down inside the printer.
There’s a little construction to do before you can print, but nothing unexpected or tricky: attach the screen, plug in tubes and cables, etc.
From there, insert at least one of your sample filaments (it ships with three: two standard PLA and one support), then you’ll probably want to print the included benchy, which will be completed in less than 20 minutes.
Design and Specs: Plastic Build, But Brilliant Anyway
Most of the P1S enclosure is ABS plastic, though you’ll find a glass lid and front. That doesn’t mean it’s flimsy in any way—quite the opposite. It’s a well-designed and durable structure that minimizes unwanted vibrations.
The CoreXY design means you get an incredibly compact printer with a maximized build area, taking up a mere 43 x 40cm footprint on your workspace (not including filament or waste bin). The height of the machine is a little larger at 47cm, but you may also choose to mount the AMS multicolor unit on top of the printer, bringing the total height to 63cm—and remember to allow clearance for the AMS lid to lift. You can also place the AMS by the side or to the rear—it’s no wider than the P1S.
The largest you may print is 256mm cubed; that’s not enormous, but it’s more than enough for most people.
The build plate provided is a general-purpose double-sided textured PEI plate with a lovely golden coloration. This provides an incredible surface for first-layer adhesion while also letting your print slip effortlessly off once cooled. However, it produces the same distinctive texture on the bottom of your prints, so it’s not appropriate if you need things to be smooth on all edges.
I’m accustomed to having to wipe a bed down with IPA to clean off grubby hand prints and ensure adhesion each time, but after weeks of printing, I’ve yet to do this, and I’m shocked. As well as having to handle the bed less because the prints come off so easily, it does seem like the best surface I’ve tested yet. It should handle PLA, ABS, and PETG—it had no problem with PLA-CF either. For TPU, PA, or PC filaments, you may want to purchase thesmooth high-temperature bedinstead, and Bambu recommends the use of a glue stick, too.
Also of minor note are the build plate guides, which make it easy to slide the magnetic sheet back in again. When a printer doesn’t have these guides, fighting against the magnetic force and getting the plate skewed is easy.
One of the compromises Bambu Lab makes so the P1S can be sold at such an affordable price is the screen. It’s a simple monochrome display with a D-pad and some buttons to the side rather than a larger color touchscreen.
Practically speaking, this hasn’t bothered me at all. My interactions with the machine have been done through the superb desktop software, which both prepares your prints, lets you watch the camera live, and gives you full control over all the parameters. With the AMS connected, you don’t even need to heat up the nozzle to load and unload filaments manually, so feel free to swap them out at any point that it isn’t actively printing. Outside of the initial setup, I haven’t touched the front controller.
Regarding noise levels, the P1S runs the gamut of virtually silent to “What on earth was that?” High print speeds of up to 500mm/s can also sometimes result in quite a melodic overture. Most of the time, while printing, it’s quiet enough to have next to my workstation. I wouldn’t want to sleep in the same room, though, as swapping filaments results in a loud and sudden clunk. It also makes some disturbing sounds while calibrating; this is intended as it learns how to counteract its own vibrations and those of the surface it’s sitting on with active compensation.
AMS: Glorious Multicolor Printing (But It Wastes a Lot)
The AMS (Automatic Materials System) unit can sit on top of the main enclosure or to the side, plugging its own Bowden into the feed at the rear. Made of ABS and acrylic, the lid of the AMS shuts tightly to keep out the ambient air. While it’s not strictly a filament dryer, the AMS does include a couple of high-performance dehydrator sachets as well as a hygrometer to let you know when they need replacing. Theoretically, you shouldn’t have a problem with filaments getting too wet when stored inside the chamber.
Since the AMS holds up to four filaments, it also conveys the benefits of less waste when swapping filaments. If you have a little left on the spool and want to tackle a big new project, you needn’t sit around waiting for it to run out or printing smaller items to use it up—you can specify which filament to roll over into or leave the leftover in one of the unused slots until needed.
Up to four AMS units can be daisy-chained together, meaning you may use up to 16 filaments at once. That means anyone who regularly churns out models on demand will see a significant productivity increase.
One other fascinating aspect of the Bambu Lab AMS is that it can read RFID codes built into Bambu Lab’s own filaments. This relays details of that filament’s type, color, and print settings to the software, so you don’t have to enter any settings manually, and there’ll be no mistakes when assigning colors to a model. That doesn’t mean you’re locked into their ecosystem, though. You can still print with standard filaments from any manufacturer at the same high quality, but it’ll be as convenient as any other printer in that you’ll need to specify the settings yourself or choose from some well-known brands (and tell it what color it is). I had no problems mixing and matching filaments during my testing. But for those who want to stick with first-party filaments, you’ll be pleased to know Bambu Lab prices are entirely reasonable.
In order to facilitate filament changes, the P1S includes a delightful “poop shute” around the back, from which little curled rolls of extruded waste filament will be wiped off and sent down.
I presume there’s a waste catcher somewhere waiting to be printed, but one isn’t supplied, so I used a small cardboard box. Don’t forget to put something there at all, or you’ll return to find quite a mess to clear up. And don’t forget to empty it either, or it’ll back up and overflow into the print chamber.
While impressive, there’s a massive dirty secret to multicolor printing: the sheer amount of waste it produces. As a quick example, the articulated dragon pictured above used about three times as much orange in the waste and tower as in the model. The black was fairly efficient, and the green was about twice as much wasted.
This was having applied a few waste optimization methods. Without any optimization, the default settings would have wasted three times as much total filament as was used on the model. In the example above, the filament needs to be changed 739 times. That number can’t be reduced, so it’s what you do with the purged filament that matters.
To mitigate this, you have a few options:
Still, even with all those mitigation strategies employed, there’s a fair of waste on complex prints. But no more so than printing a complex object with lots of supports.
My second multicolor print was aPanda from Flexifactory (free to download). The stand was a separate print and the pandas are articulated. For this, I cut the waste significantly by simultaneously printing some helpful household clips. They exhibited random color changes that ended up being quite attractive, so this seems like, by far, the best method of using that waste material.
This doesn’t affect simple duotone signs or color changes at specific heights, which result in almost zero waste. They don’t really take advantage of the color switching, of course, but it’s very convenient not to have to swap over filament halfway through by manually pausing.
I’ve toyed with dual-extruder and dual-filament feed printers before. I’ve always been thoroughly disappointed by the results and how utterly finicky they are, with constant clogs or other awkwardness.
The AMS module of the P1S hasn’t failed me yet, producing incredible results. Combined with software that makes it easy to color 3D objects that aren’t precolored for it, you have the most functional, full-color affordable 3D printer yet. In over a decade of covering 3D printers, I continued to be astonished by the progress.
One thing to note about the AMS is that Bambu Lab advises you not to use it with more complex filaments like TPU or highly abrasive ones. For those, you’ll want to fit the rear spool holder and unplug the AMS. It’s perfect for working with PLA, though.
Reusable Spools
I’ve talked a lot about plastic waste, but what about the spools that filament comes wound on? That’s another huge source of plastic waste, though some manufacturers are increasingly switching to cardboard.
Bambu Lab has gone the other direction, using reusable, durable plastic spools. You can buy these spools alone, as a package, or just use the two from the sample spools provided with the printer—so don’t throw them away when they’re empty!
Simply twist to unlock the cardboard inner core, and replace with your newly purchased filament. Also of note is that the RFID chip containing information about the filament is attached to this cardboard core (in the image above, you can see the small silver RFID disc on the side of the filament). In theory, you could extract this and tape it down to your own third-party replacement filament, but I wouldn’t bother, as the standard settings aren’t exactly difficult.
It would be fantastic to see this reusable spool design open-sourced and used across the industry.
Software: Bambu Studio and Bambu Handy Leads the Way
Software—or lack thereof—can make or break a 3D printer. While it’s possible to get great results from a generic software package, the more specialized features that a printer offers, the more it will benefit from a custom software package.
Bambu Lab has produced two outstanding bits of software for desktop or smartphone. On the handset side is Bambu Handy. You can browse extensive models, slice, and remotely print to your Wi-Fi-connected P1S without ever leaving your phone.
It also offers a preview of the current print through the webcam and full remote control capabilities. In short, if you only ever want to print models from the library, you won’t even need the desktop package. That’s pretty amazing, and moreover, the smartphone app is well-designed, easy to navigate, and not buggy. That’s rare.
For more control, you’ll want to download Bambu Studio, their desktop slicer available for Mac or Windows. The main reason to do so is that it includes remote monitoring and control, as well as a set of enhancements that deal with multicolor printing.
For ready-made multicolor models, assigning each part to a different filament or combining subassemblies is easy. But it’s also easy to enter Paint mode and recolor any model yourself, adding color with a variety of painting tools, including a brush or paint bucket with edge detection. You can even add text to models for quick customization—then paint the text.
There is a slight learning curve to Bambu Studio, but if you’ve used any other slicer software before, it shouldn’t be too steep, and the reward is well worth it.
It’s often easy to dismiss a manufacturer’s own software and say, “Just use Cura” instead. It usually offers more features. In this case, that absolutely isn’t true. Bambu Studio is so good that I’ll find it hard to use anything else again.
Hot-End Switching
I was also sent a few Carbon Fiber filaments to try out, but upon trying to print with these, the Bambu Studio software recognized the filament I was using and warned me that it would damage the standard nozzle. The fibers are quite abrasive, and some tests have found that even just a quarter of a spool of carbon fiber filament will ruin the standard nozzles. Luckily, I was also sent a hardened steel option, so it was time to swap out a nozzle—something I’ve only ever had to do once before, and that previous instance involved heating it up and then carefully extracting it with a pair of pliers and spanner. It wasn’t easy, to put it mildly.
The Bambu Lab replacement nozzle comes as a complete assembly, with only two screws to undo and two wire bundles to carefully unplug. It was ridiculously simple and didn’t require heating up the nozzle at all. I completed the swap in less than five minutes.
I was then able to try out the Bambu PLA-CF filament, which results in much stronger pieces that can be used for structural prints, such as these brackets for 4040 extrusion.
Should You Buy the Bambu Studio P1S and AMS?
After using the Bambu Lab P1S, AMS, and accompanying Bambu Studio software, I suspect I might turn into one of those annoying people who just says “buy the Bambu Lab P1S” to anyone with print issues. I’ve not had a failed print. I’ve made multicolor prints effortlessly. I haven’t spent a week calibrating things. The software doesn’t fight against me at every step. It’s like the Apple of the 3D printing world: it just works (TM). This is what 3D printing was supposed to be. This is how it looked in the movies.
So, I have no hesitation in recommending the Bambu Lab P1S and AMS to you if your budget is up to $1000 for something that can print different colors at once.
The only downside is the amount of waste that multicolor printing entails—but that’s not the fault of the P1S; it’s just the nature of 3D printing with frequent filament changes. Each change has to be purged somewhere. You should print functional objects at the same time as multicolor ones to use up that waste effectively. Still, the environmentalist in me dies a little when I look at the scrap box at the back. I already have a large plastic bag of plastic curls that I don’t know what to do with. Figuring outhow to recycle PLA wastewill be my next hobby.
