Does print speed really matter anymore?
For more than a decade desktop FFF 3D printers suffered from very slow print speeds. Typical operational speeds at the time were about 50mm/s, whereas today it’s closer to 300mm/s. Manufacturers have all switched over to higher speed machines, and because of that we don’t even call these devices “high speed” anymore. I don’t think anyone would buy a “slow speed” system anymore.
However, there are still marketing battles among the 3D printer manufacturers. Some have tweaked their systems to print a bit faster.
Nowadays the speed of a print is less determined by the toolhead motion and more by the speed of the filament swapping system. Many of today’s systems have accessories that can switch filaments in mid-print to enable multicolor 3D print jobs.
These devices can indeed print in many colors, but it is largely at the cost of speed: each filament swap takes many valuable seconds, and there might be hundreds of swaps in a given print job.
I read a thread where someone compared the effective print speed of a Bambu Lab H2C with Vortek against the Snapmaker U1. Both machines use more advanced multicolor approaches: Bambu Lab swaps hot ends, but still requires filament to be pushed and pulled; Snapmaker assigns filaments to toolheads during a print job and does not require filament pushes and pulls.
In that analysis, the Snapmaker U1 completed the test jobs faster, simply because it didn’t involve filament pushes and pulls that are required on the H2C. That wasn’t surprising.
But then a thought occurred to me: does this even matter anymore? Is print speed really that important anymore?
Long ago the print speeds were so slow that larger prints might have taken days to complete. Modern machines, even with filament swappers, rarely take more than a day to print complex objects.
It seems to me that machine operators are trading for functionality (multiple colors) and paying with slower speeds, and accept that arrangement.
Why do they do so? I believe it’s because many desktop FFF 3D printers are used on a casual basis. If that print finishes tonight or tomorrow, it doesn’t matter because I won’t get back to the machine until then anyway.
Where speed does matter is when the equipment is used for production purposes. In that situation the goal is to produce the maximum number of parts per day. Such machines are typically run 24/7, tweaked to push the envelope as far as it will go.
That’s is the correct approach in that scenario, but that is definitely not the same for casual 3D printers. That’s why they are mostly fine with the slower speeds. In other words, color could be more important than job time for many operators.
I suspect this might be the same logic Bambu Lab used when designing their H2C Vortek system: color choice is a bit more important than print speed.
As the months unfold, we will see if their approach is in fact true, as they face competitor from both Snapmaker and Prusa Research in waste-free 3D printer approaches.
