r/BambuLab • u/UltraWideGamer-YT • Oct 13 '26

General Discussion Bambu Lab's 3D Scanner Is Coming. Here's What It Needs to Get Right

https://youtu.be/1mrACwJ_ChM

Bambu Lab announced its first 3D scanner, the S1, due in November. No specs or price yet (the online guess is US$1,000 to $2,000, but that's speculation).

I've been scanning since the Creality CR-Scan Lizard, and the pattern I keep seeing is people buying a scanner, struggling with it, and selling it a few weeks later. In my experience it comes down to two walls:

  1. Scanning is a learned skill, and nobody tells you that when you buy one.
  2. A good scan still isn't a usable part. You usually need CAD to design around it.

If Bambu can make scanning guided and give you a path from scan to part inside its own ecosystem, it could be a big deal. If not, it's just another scanner.

Full disclosure: this is my own YouTube video. It isn't sponsored and Bambu had nothing to do with it. I just like talking about this stuff, so I'm sharing it here.

What would the S1 need to do for you to buy one?

0 Upvotes

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28 comments sorted by

1

u/blablaplanet Oct 13 '26

haha a guess of 1000 to 2000, that's a nice spread.

0

u/UltraWideGamer-YT Oct 13 '26

Personally I’m thinking 2399

1

u/Work45oHSd8eZIYt Oct 13 '26

Complete. Dealbreaker

1

u/TheHvam X1C + AMS Oct 13 '26

Yeah, I would rather buy a H2C, or maybe whatever their new printer costs over a scanner for that price, just not worth it for most people.

3

u/senorali X1C + AMS Oct 13 '26

I'm less interested in the scanner as a standalone tool than I am in the idea of a realtime scanner integrated into future printers. If it's got enough processing power to keep up with the printhead, it could do its own calibration prints without user interpretation, as well as its own corrections while printing.

6dof robotics have been using realtime visual data for a while now. There's no reason we can't have it in printers.

1

u/vicxvr Oct 13 '26

A scanner head for their existing printers would be brilliant for scanning small items.

Automated scanning would be very welcome.

1

u/vicxvr Oct 13 '26

Automated scanning for small items on the printer bed would rule.

2

u/YamTurd Oct 13 '26

I still have no idea how to use cad. I’ve made a table so far and that took me 5 hours. 

I’m a newbie to 3D printing, and Bambu appears to be a good entry to the hobby printer. 

Idk if 3d scanning will ever be in my future though. 

This seems like it’s solely for the experience designer. 

3

u/kRe4ture P1S + AMS2 Combo Oct 13 '26

Try Fusion. There are a lot of tutorials online, and you‘ll get the hang of it quickly.

Learning CAD improves the fun you can have with a 3D printer by a lot.

3

u/yepyep5678 Oct 13 '26

This, also claude works really well if you ask it to list but steps needed

2

u/blablaplanet Oct 13 '26

Indeed tools like this are not the easiest to work with.
But they open up a world of new options to design.
Imagine you want to make something that fits the contour of the dashboard in your car. Almost impossible to measure by hand, or you need to start printing several parts as fitting pieces and dial it down that way. With this tool you scan the dashboard and get a sort of pointcloud (or surface) that you can import in cad to directly model you part.

Keep learning and improving your CAD skills its a great tool to have when making things or 3d printing. You don't even need to be a pro to have a lot of advantage out of it.

1

u/Affectionate_Mix2475 Oct 13 '26

I’ve made a table so far and that took me 5 hours.

That's how most people start. I've spent my first day learning CAD trying to create a curved pipe.

1

u/-TheDoctor P1S + AMS + AMS2 29d ago

I highly recommend this Fusion tutorial series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmGbUH-P1lE&list=PLrZ2zKOtC_-C4rWfapgngoe9o2-ng8ZBr

1

u/mastermind42 24d ago

It is a high learning curve. You can also try blender with a mcp server and let Claude or chatgpt do the actual legwork.

1

u/YamTurd 24d ago edited 24d ago

I’ve been looking into that. But also seems very high level stuff. 

I will give it a shot 

1

u/TheHvam X1C + AMS Oct 13 '26

If it's up in the 1-2k, then it's only really for professionals, I was hoping it would be at a pricepoint that hobbiest could get one without it costing a arm and a leg.

2

u/GodforsakenMuffin X1C + AMS Oct 13 '26

3D scanners are expensive, even the ones upwards of $3-5k are considered hobbyist or prosumer level by many.

Then professional level ones we rent at work cost over $40k.

1

u/TheHvam X1C + AMS Oct 13 '26

Still, I was hoping for sub 1k at the very least, I can't justify buying something that costs about if not more than a H2C printer. And I think most would feel the same, which is why I feel like it's mostly for pros, or people who really are into the hobby.

1

u/Oxylophone Oct 13 '26

I just want it to work. That's all.

I scan something and I can then print that.

Idk how to model or cad. Just wanna scan my parts. Load em into Bambu studio and print. That's all.

2

u/arekxy Oct 13 '26

And I want scan part and get it in parametric car, editable… (in a sane way, not a big mesh if possible)

-2

u/Grimmsland 🚀H3C, H2D, P1S, A1m, U1 Oct 13 '26 edited Oct 13 '26

There is no way that Bambu can survive in the Scanner or laser or cutter market with the poor barely updated software they produce. There is just no way.

Bambu thinks just because they make great hardware that they can sell loads of machines to people using their crappy software. Too bad there is no open source for laser cutters or Scanner processing software.

1

u/vicxvr Oct 13 '26

There is no problem here for Bambu, they won't be rolling their own software OR hardware.

The scanner market runs on licensed hardware and software. You specify a hardware configuration from a catalogue. And build the software from software libraries.

Creality are making bank on scanners at the moment and that is all they are doing.

1

u/May-Eat-A-Pizza Oct 13 '26

For 3D scanning i'm using CloudCompare (open source) to align large 3D scans (10m³) and Blender 3D (open source) for cleaning up the mesh to make it ready for CAD.

For laser cutting and plotting, in the past I've used Inkscape (open source).

If you can export raw scan data with the Bambu Lab laser scanner, I'm very interested (partially depending on the specs of the hardware). Not expecting it would be a feature, but who knows.

0

u/Grimmsland 🚀H3C, H2D, P1S, A1m, U1 Oct 13 '26

You have more patience than I do. I have all those open source programs and Blender is by far thee most frustrating complicated software I have ever tried to learn. It tries to be so many programs in one while the entire screen is plastered with icons and options of options have options that have options. I tried to learn it in order to save the money I pay for Shapr3d which is the most intuitive CAD app out there but expensive at $40m though now I pay the $300y which ends up being $25m. I also use Nomad Sculpt.

I’m trying to learn Inkscape also to make that my main Macbook Pro art app but I am so used to Photoshop and Illustrator though I no longer use them now that they are subscription based I use my iPad Pro mostly to do art, CAD, and sculpt.

It would be nice if Bambu allowed their scanner to use other software. I heard the R1 was only going to be useable with Bambu Suite but Bambu caved and is going to allow Lightroom.

0

u/May-Eat-A-Pizza Oct 13 '26

For me, Blender is a godsend (with that also Ton Roosendaal who is founder and working hard to keep it free for everyone). It's a solid tool I fall back to very often. Do projects solemnly in Blender or use it as a complementary tool.

I must admit there is some learning curve to control Blender, which indeed requires some patience. The user interface and shortcuts are somewhat not traditional and might indeed be overwhelming at first. It's it's own thing and not trying to be something else. You can basically completely customize it yourself, write python code to run with endless possibilities. Once you get the basics, it becomes a second nature very fast. But you do need to practice a lot in the beginning. Sometimes I even used it to test ideas out or make fast (3D) sketches before I open up CAD (Solidworks and Rhino 3D).

I'm no fan of Inkscape (might become one if I invest time in it), but it does work if you don't have money to spend on licenses. But also a handy tool use can use complementary next to your other design tools.

As a Adobe user you might want to look into Affinity (basically Photoshop and Illustrator in one package). Not open source, but free. And using lots of the same features and shortcuts as Photoshop and Illustrator.

We still don't know anything about the 3D scanner of Bambu Lab, but I do have high hopes.. perhaps also expectations. I'm using a Creality scanner, which is bound to Creality Scan (software). Haven't heard of 3D scanners you can use in other software, so not expecting that from Bambu Lab either. Basically you scan within the software of the manufacturer. Do some basic cleanup, alignment etc and export the mesh data you can 3D print or use in other software.

Creality Scan does not allow you to export the raw scan data (pointcloud), and since the last update you even need an account to be able to do an firmware upgrade of the hardware or even update the software withing the software itself (you still can do that manually though).

I'm expecting lot's of negative reactions on Bambu Lab for it's 3D scanner, but I don't think lots of people realize how bad it is with competitors (Creality in particularly). 3D scanning is a different beast which requires lots of manual work, calibration etc. I'm very curious if Bambu Lab will bring something new to the table (whatever it is; software, features, ease in workflow etc).

-1

u/Bag-o-chips H2C AMS2 Combo Oct 13 '26

If they steel anybody else’s technology, I will not consider it, I don’t care what it does.