Bambu Lab P1S Review: I Bought One — Here’s the Honest Truth

The first thing I printed with my Bambu Lab P1S was a vent adapter so I could pipe fumes out of my window.

Let that sink in. I used a 3D printer to solve one of 3D printing’s biggest problems — the fumes. Not from a file someone handed me, but from a design I made myself. That moment told me everything I needed to know about what this machine is actually capable of in the right hands.

I bought the P1S solo for $400 during a Bambu Lab sale. No AMS, no combo package — just the printer. Months later I added the AMS at retail. I’ve since printed molds, functional parts, and a growing list of things I used to buy or simply went without. This review is based on that hands-on time, not a press unit that got returned after a week.

Here’s the honest take.

What Is the Bambu Lab P1S?

The P1S sits in the middle of Bambu Lab’s lineup — above the open-frame A1 series, below the flagship X1 Carbon. It’s a fully enclosed CoreXY printer designed for users who want professional-grade output without the X1C price tag.

At launch, it retailed for $699. Today it regularly drops to $399–$449, which completely reframes the value proposition. The P1S Combo (with AMS) runs $549–$799 depending on the sale.

Here’s how it stacks up against its closest siblings:

If you’re choosing between these three, the decision usually comes down to one question: do you need to print engineering-grade materials and want every bell and whistle? If yes, spend the extra for the X1C. For everyone else, the P1S at current pricing is almost impossible to argue against.

Unboxing & Setup — Faster Than You’d Expect

Bambu Lab claims setup takes 15 minutes. I’d call that optimistic — but not by much. I was up and running in about 40 minutes, and that includes me slowing down to watch the unpacking video and double-checking a few things I was unsure about.

The P1S ships in a well-engineered box with custom foam cutouts. Nothing rattles, nothing shifts. First impressions of the printer itself: it feels solid. The glass side door and glass top are a cut above what I expected at this price point. There’s a light inside the enclosure that illuminates your print job — a small thing, but it makes a real difference for checking in on long prints without opening the door.

Auto-leveling is genuinely set-and-forget. You run the calibration sequence once, and the printer handles it from there. No manual bed leveling, no Z-offset fiddling, no paper-under-the-nozzle ritual. You send a print, and it starts printing a good first layer. After years of hearing 3D printing veterans talk about leveling nightmares, this alone felt like cheating.

Print Quality — My Real-World Results

I’ll skip the generic “the prints came out great” take, because that tells you nothing.

The thing that convinced me the P1S was genuinely different was printing molds. I design molds for small parts — the kind of application where a fraction of a millimeter off means the mold doesn’t release cleanly or the part doesn’t fit. With other FDM printers I’ve used, this kind of precision work required constant tweaking, post-processing, and accepting some amount of “good enough.”

With the P1S, the precision was immediately different. Sharp edges came out sharp. Dimensions matched the design. I was pulling usable molds right off the build plate without sandpaper or touch-ups on the first try. That was the moment where this machine moved from “impressive gadget” to “genuinely useful tool” for me.

Beyond molds, I’ve printed functional brackets, organizers, and replacement parts. The PEI-coated flexible build plate is excellent — prints release cleanly when the plate cools without prying or scraping.

On print speeds: the P1S offers three modes — Standard, Sport (124% of standard), and Ludicrous (164%). Standard is where you’ll spend most of your time. Sport is usable for less detailed prints. Ludicrous is technically impressive and practically inadvisable for anything you actually care about — ringing artifacts show up on detailed surfaces at that speed. The default profiles in Bambu Studio are dialed in well; I’d recommend sticking with them until you understand what you’re changing and why.

The AMS — Is It Worth Adding?

I started without the AMS and added it later. Having done it both ways, here’s my honest take.

If you’re new to 3D printing, start without it. Get comfortable with the printer first. The P1S solo is a complete machine — you’re not missing something essential without the AMS, you’re missing a feature. That’s a different thing.

Once you add the AMS, it sits on top of the printer and connects via a cable. Setup is straightforward. The AMS lets you load four filament spools and automatically switch between them mid-print, which enables multi-color printing and lets you print with a support material that releases cleanly from your main filament.

The honest downside: multi-color printing wastes filament. Every time the printer switches colors, it purges the previous material into what the community affectionately calls the “poop chute” — a waste chute out the back of the printer. For prints that switch colors frequently, that waste pile adds up. If you’re printing single-color or dual-color work, the waste is manageable. If you’re going full rainbow mode on every print, factor filament cost into your budget accordingly.

I use my AMS primarily for functional multi-material work — printing parts in one filament with a soluble support material. That use case alone has made it worth the cost for me.

What the P1S Does Brilliantly

The Bambu Handy app. Monitoring prints remotely is genuinely useful. You can start, pause, and cancel jobs from your phone, check on progress, and receive notifications when a print finishes. It’s the kind of feature that sounds like a gimmick until you’re at work wondering if a 6-hour print finished without a problem.

Enclosed chamber for engineering materials. ABS and ASA warp badly in open-air printing environments. Temperature swings and air drafts cause different layers to cool at different rates, leading to cracks and lifted corners. The P1S enclosure eliminates that problem. If you want to print functional parts in real engineering materials rather than just PLA, enclosure matters — and the P1S has it at a price the A1 doesn’t.

The activated carbon filter. ABS, in particular, releases styrene during printing — not something you want building up in an enclosed room. The P1S has an activated carbon filter on its exhaust system. This, combined with my printed window vent adapter, means I can print engineering materials in my workspace without the air quality tradeoff that would otherwise come with it.

Bambu Studio and MakerWorld. Bambu’s slicer is polished. Pre-configured profiles for common filaments work reliably without tuning. MakerWorld, Bambu’s model repository, gives you access to thousands of free designs you can send directly to the printer with a few clicks. For people who want to print without becoming 3D CAD designers, this ecosystem provides a real on-ramp.

Speed that’s actually usable. At standard speeds, the P1S is fast without sacrificing quality. I’ve cut print times by 60–70% compared to slower machines I’ve used, without meaningful quality loss.

What Annoyed Me About the P1S

This section matters more than the praise. Anyone can write a glowing review. Here’s what actually frustrated me.

The D-pad interface on the P1S is genuinely bad. The P1S uses a small monochrome LCD with a directional pad for navigation — the same interface you’d find on a budget MP3 player from 2005. When the X1C right above it has a proper touchscreen, using this feels like a deliberate downgrade. You can work around it by managing everything through Bambu Studio or the app, and most people will. But it’s still a real miss.

The camera is not a live camera. The built-in 720p camera refreshes every 3–4 seconds. It’s a slideshow, not a stream. Good enough to confirm your print is running, not good enough for detailed monitoring or catching a failure in real time. Worth knowing before you buy.

The software learning curve is the real barrier. I want to be direct about this because almost no review covers it honestly: the hardest part of owning the P1S isn’t the hardware. It’s learning to design your own prints.

I use both OpenSCAD and Blender for modeling, and neither one has a gentle learning curve. OpenSCAD is code-based — you write geometry like you write a program. Blender is a full professional 3D animation suite that has been adapted for CAD work through community add-ons. Both are free. Both are powerful. Both will frustrate you before they reward you.

If you plan to print other people’s designs exclusively, this isn’t your problem. But if you bought the P1S because you want to make your own things — and that window vent was exactly why I wanted to make my own things — you need to budget serious time for software education alongside the hardware purchase. Fusion 360 (free for personal use) is arguably the more approachable starting point if you’re design-curious.

Ecosystem lock-in is real. All parts are proprietary and sourced directly from Bambu Lab. That’s not inherently a problem — the web store carries every component you’d need. But you are committed to the Bambu ecosystem in a way you aren’t with more open platforms. The January 2025 firmware controversy, where Bambu announced changes that sparked significant community pushback around third-party tool access, is worth reading about before you buy. They walked back portions of the change, but it’s a reminder that you’re dependent on a young company’s ongoing decisions.

Who Should Buy the Bambu Lab P1S?

Buy it if:

• You want an enclosed printer that handles ABS and ASA without a dedicated chamber setup
• You’re coming from a budget printer and want a significant quality leap without flagship prices
• You value a plug-and-play experience over tinkering and open-source flexibility
• You want to design and print functional parts, molds, or precision components
• You can grab it at the $399–$449 promotional price

Skip it if:

• You only plan to print PLA — the A1 Combo does that well for less money
• You need LiDAR-level precision and real-time failure detection — get the X1C
• You’re deeply committed to open-source workflows and third-party tool compatibility
• You’re not ready to invest time in learning 3D design software (or you’re happy with existing model libraries)

Final Verdict

The Bambu Lab P1S is one of the best value propositions in consumer 3D printing — particularly at its current promotional pricing of $399.

The print quality is legitimately impressive. Setup is straightforward. The ecosystem is polished. The enclosed chamber opens up material options that cheaper open-frame printers can’t touch. And when you’re printing precision molds, functional brackets, or custom parts you designed yourself, this machine delivers results that feel out of reach for the price.

The D-pad interface is a legitimate annoyance. The camera is a slideshow. The software learning curve is the part that most reviews skip, but it’s real. And if you value full open-source control of your tools, Bambu Lab’s ecosystem philosophy may not sit right with you.

For what I use it for — printing real, useful things that solve real problems in my workspace — it’s been worth every dollar.

Recommended config: P1S solo at $399 to start. Add the AMS when you’re comfortable with the printer and you’ve identified a specific workflow that needs multi-material capability.

Where to buy: Bambu Lab’s official store runs the best deals, and orders ship from US warehouses within 1–3 business days. The P1S Combo is also available on Amazon if you want Prime shipping.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Bambu Lab P1S worth it? At $399–$449 (its frequent sale price), yes — without much hesitation. At $699 MSRP, the value calculus is tighter but still favorable compared to competitors in the same feature class.

What’s the difference between the P1S and X1 Carbon? The X1C adds LiDAR-based print inspection, a touchscreen interface, and an aluminum enclosure. Everything else — speed, build volume, material compatibility, AMS support — is essentially identical. Expect to pay $500–$800 more for those upgrades at current pricing.

Does the P1S need the AMS? No. The P1S is a fully capable single-color printer without the AMS. Add the AMS when you have a specific need for multi-color printing or multi-material work — not as a default purchase.

Can the Bambu Lab P1S print ABS and ASA? Yes. The full enclosure and active chamber temperature management make the P1S well-suited for ABS and ASA — materials that warp badly on open-frame printers. It’s one of the key reasons to choose the P1S over the A1 series.

Is the Bambu Lab P1S good for beginners? It’s beginner-friendly from a hardware standpoint — the setup is fast, auto-leveling actually works, and Bambu Studio’s pre-configured profiles remove most of the calibration guesswork. The steeper part of the learning curve is on the design software side. If you’re comfortable using Thingiverse or MakerWorld models without designing your own, the P1S is genuinely approachable for beginners.

Looking for more gear reviews based on real-world testing? Check out my reviews of other products I’ve personally bought and used across tech, fitness, and home setup.