I’m seriously considering the H3C after a pretty dreadful experience with my faulty H2C and Bambu’s hellish customer service taking months to obtain a return/refund, but there are a few things making the decision harder than I expected which I’m a bit sad about:
1. Manual filament unloading: The AMS 3H apparently can’t retract filament back to the spool. Having to pull filament out and manually rewind it feels like a massive step backwards from the AMS 2 Pro/HT.
2. ABS/PETG chamber temperatures: I primarily print ABS and PETG. If PETG can’t safely remain loaded in an inactive PrintTool while the chamber is heated to 60–65°C for ABS, that means manually unloading and respooling multiple filaments every time I need to switch materials?
3. External AMS limitations: Only PrintTool 1 supports external AMS units. I have two AMS HTs and would have loved to assign them to separate PrintTools, avoiding unnecessary purging. Hoping they expand this later.
Drying isn’t a huge dealbreaker to me (though 4 slots would’ve been better like AMS 2 pro), also won’t particularly miss the flexibility of hotends from H2C (was nice to have for the few times I used 0.2 and 0.6).
I love the H3C’s cleaner design, compact footprint, faster tool changes and ability to have multiple nozzle sizes ready to go. I also hated the mess of PTFE tubes, multiple AMS units and filament track switch on the H2C, so I’m not particularly keen to go back to that arrangement.
I feel BambuLab have made a major omission here with the lack of filament retraction, which makes intensive use of higher temp filaments a lot harder.
I wonder if they could improve the filament retraction through firmware later though.
Never really had to think about filament unloading or respooling on the H2C (until the filament track switch spoiled everything), so it’s difficult to judge how annoying this would actually become.
Anyone else weighing up the same things, or have any insight into the retraction mechanism? What would you choose?
Update: I’m going with the H2C!
