I Bought A Bambu Lab P2S. Here’s What Really It’s Like

I spent my own hard-owned money on this, a Bambu Lab P2S – specifically the combo with the AMS 2 Pro, and I’ve printed a fair number of custom parts with it – mostly for my custom sim rig cockpit (video in the cards above) – and I thought I’d give you my thoughts and experience with it, because hot damn this is good. I’ll say this up front, this feels a lot closer to a tool than a hobby. Sure, material choice, print settings and stuff like that is required knowledge to get good quality prints, but the level of automation this thing does is incredible, making it functionally plug-and-play. Gone are the days of fiddling with every single nut and bolt on your printer just to get it to print anything, this is practically perfect. I should clarify that this isn’t a review, at least to my standards. I don’t have anywhere near enough experience with FDM printers, and I have skin in the game in the form of my own money sunk into this thing, so this is simply my thoughts and experiences and I’ll leave any conclusions entirely to you. 

Ok, but, even the damn unboxing experience is polished. Like, the AMS ships BOLTED into the print bed to save space. You unscrew a couple of bolts, pull some foam out, push a few tubes in for the filament, connect their 6 pin mini-molex connector cable between the AMS and P2S, attach the screen (that just clips in), and install some filament, and that’s pretty much it. It’ll run a calibration for about half an hour, where it’ll do vibration compensation, motor noise cancelation, and automatic bed levelling. Seriously, this thing is insane for how well designed it is. There are print files pre-installed for stuff like Benchy’s or bed scrapers, or you can connect it to your WiFi for LAN printing. There is also a USB port up top for fully offline printing, although it’s worth noting that you need a USB stick installed to capture video timelapses – oh yeah there’s a great camera in here, along with brilliant LED lights! The UI is brilliant – it’s responsive, pretty easy to navigate even for a beginner and you can do everything from here – start prints, change settings, start calibrations, and turn the lights off. Even manually set temperatures for the bed and hot end, run the extruder, move the bed and head. Everything is here and easy to use. 

Connecting it to your PC is a little weird, you’ll need the IP address, the access code, and you’ll need to put it in LAN only mode too, which is a little strange. Also, there’s a cloud connectivity aspect here. While I believe you don’t NEED an internet connection – especially since the IP it’s going to is a LAN only address – this might not be quite as private as you might like. Once it’s connected though, it’s great. You can watch the live feed, slice and start prints, view the timelapse files, and do all the same calibrations and controls you can do on the printer’s display. Pretty neat!

When it comes to filaments, this is probably the first crinkle in the experience. Bambu Lab introduced encrypted RFID tags on the spools and readers in the AMS, which does have the benefit of the printer always knowing what filaments are in the printer, what settings to use, all that stuff – it’s great. But, if you don’t buy Bambu’s filament, well you can enter a “generic” spool and tell the software (and therefore the printer) what you’ve put in, but the experience is less than seamless, and Bambu (as far as I know anyway) hasn’t opened up their RFID tag schema to anyone else, somewhat locking Bambu printer owners (ie me) out from a decent experience with anyone else’s filament. The only print failure I had was with that third party PLA where it clearly got too hot and slightly clogged the print head. Luckily it failed at the perfect spot for me to just print the missing part and glue it on, and the smart features they have here meant that the print paused itself instantly, attempted to clean the nozzle, and didn’t waste any more filament. That is incredibly smart, and useful. The experience using the third party filament though, wasn’t. I have since bought some more Bambu filament, mostly because it’s on sale so it actually cost less than the Amazon special PLA, and should give me a better experience overall. One nice thing Bambu do is sell “refill” spools, so instead of needing to replace the spool itself when the filament runs out, you just twist it open and slide a fresh roll on, stick the new RFID tag down, and hey-presto, you’re done. Less waste, smaller packaging, and less cost. That’s really cool. 

Print quality is amazing. The texture from the stock print plate is gorgeous, and even with basically default settings it is incredible. Layer lines are there, obviously, but they are super fine, and for the more structural stuff I’m printing, they are perfect. I do have one gripe, which is that especially when you use supports and print holes vertically (because I need the layer lines in a specific orientation for the most strength) they come out ovalled, and often have a flat spot where the support met the body. That isn’t a big deal to drill them out to the proper size anyway, but it’s something I noticed. Also, unlike my Elegoo Mars 5 Ultra resin printer, tolerances here are a lot looser. A hole that’s meant to be 9 millimetres might be between 8.5 and 8.7 mm, so keep that in mind when modelling stuff, especially when mixing parts between both.

I should mention the noise too. Even with the “motor noise compensation”, this is not a quiet printer, and with large prints taking double-digit numbers of hours to complete, it’s kinda rough to have this anywhere near your bedroom. I’ve really had to time some prints, with the print I’m hopefully showing some footage of now taking a little over twelve hours to complete. I started it at 10am yesterday, and had to wait until almost 11pm for it to shut up. That’s probably the limit for what I can print too as I’m keeping it up here in my studio, which is just close enough to my bedroom to be unfeasible to print overnight. Shame.

It’s also worth talking cost. The P2S with the AMS 2 Pro is £700, and filament spools are between £10 and £20 per kilo depending on how many you are buying and if they come with the spool or if they are refills. That 12 hour print used around 250 grams of filament, or about £3 of plastic. Not bad for a crazy sturdy sim racing wheel mount! So, while the printer is a pretty penny, the prints themselves aren’t exactly expensive, and to be honest the printer would readily paid for itself compared to commercial printing services (JLC 3DP wants £27 minimum for the same model I printed for £3, and that’s resin, white only, etc). That’s rough! 

So, in short, I really like this thing. This is so plug-and-play, so smart, so intuitive, and just so damn easy. Especially with Bambu’s filament, it’s such a seamless experience. There are so many smart features, and just the ability to design something, slice it, and hit print and that be it is incredible. Then a few hours later you have a thing that didn’t exist at all. Crazy. You don’t need to fettle with it, tune it, tweak it and manage it. It just works. And that has meant I have not worried about it at all. It’s a tool, and I love that. That’s my thoughts anyway.