Prusa have shipped a CoreXY in the same category as the Bambu Lab X1 Carbon. From the specs and price it looks pretty competitive and yet has the aspects of production and support that has previously made Prusa a beloved manufacturer.
If it gets good reviews from trusted folks then it’ll be my next printer purchase.
Heh. I was in the middle of writing a post about this too, entitled “Prusa finally releases a moderately competitive CoreXY”, so I’ll instead comment here.
Still a little bit pricey relative to print volume, but at least also has some differentiating features, like enclosure cooling for PLA and PETG to not require them to be printed with the enclosure open.
$1199 assembled, $949 for a kit, in the US, feels at least in reasonable range.
Ha! I knew you’d post it if I didn’t.
Yes, I feel like Prusa can ask for a bit of a premium because their customers understand that they’re trying to be a cut above in terms of materials, support, and being a less sharky company.
I’ll be interested in which aspects are released under open licenses given how grumpy the leader has been about selfish clones and derivatives.
I’m happy to see them focused on delivering better solutions than BL in terms of cloud-free functioning, security, and long term support. Pretty much all of the things that annoy me about my X1C and P1S were called out and solved in the blog post.
Yeah, a premium price for actual premium product and premium service makes sense!
My personal need to be able to hack my printer and experiment is not normal, and if this one gets good reviews I’ll finally feel good about recommending Prusa to people interested in getting into the hobby.
It was also possible to recommend the mini to folks who just wanted to get started with PLA to see whether they liked the hobby, but this has a lot more runway, and isn’t priced massively higher than their bed-slingers.
Given I’m running a Qidi which isn’t open hardware as my OOTB printer, I would be hypocritical to complain if Prusa doesn’t release this as open hardware!
They will be selling an upgrade kit for the MK4S which will then get you a Pruse CORE One. Sometime in 2025.
You are among friends…
I missed this statement the first time I skimmed through:
Historically, in order to flash custom firmware to all our printers equipped with the Buddy board you had to break a special seal and that meant losing your warranty. Not anymore: we’re making a huge positive change with the aim to make the printer even more community-friendly and motivate developers to dig into the code and come up with all sorts of tweaks and customizations. From now on, breaking the seal won’t void your warranty, so you are free to flash custom firmware.
I suspect that Bambu backing down on voiding their own warranty based on using alternative firmware created some market pressure here. Prusa probably doesn’t want to be seen as less open than Bambu.
Tom Nardi over on Hackaday posted about Prusa’s tricky balancing act in terms of sharing designs. They removed the warranty seal but also reduced the shared information about the new print head and control boards. I learned in the article that they’ve never opened their boot loader.
So, a story with nuance. I expect to see a wave of influencers’ hot takes which miss that nuance. 
Thank you! I am a few days behind on my RSS reader.
It’s hard for me to get hung up on their bootloader when I think of control boards as a commodity… Both Klipper and Marlin do resonance compensation out of the box, and Prusa, though they came way late to the game, have finally joined that party.
Nothing in his article makes me think that I’d take this off my list of printers I’d recommend to a newcomer. I think it’s actually going to be simply market-competitive for a printer that can handle engineering filaments out of the box. My Qidi X-Max3 is cheaper, but also I’m pretty sure that the Prusa will have higher-quality components, and there’s enough evidence in my massive X-Max 3 owner log that Qidi don’t put quite the finishing touch on their printers that Prusa has an earned reputation for doing. (I have no regrets about buying my X-Max 3 and would make the same decision again; however, if I didn’t own it today, I would consider whether the smaller CORE One would meet enough of my needs.)
Unlike Tom Nardi, I never gave Prusa the benefit of the doubt for being 3-5 years behind their competition without appearing to care or attempt to catch up. I had already seen them as partially-open, and the particular specifics of their openness with the Core ONE don’t seem so fundamentally different to me from their past few years.
This essay, though more harsh than I would write, captures the essence of the inner conflict I have about Prusa closing their hardware.
I’m in a bit of a pause in my printing journey while I move and do a bit of construction which I think might be a lucky break because I suspect Creality and friends will double down on open hardware, FOSS, and modder support in order to put another nail in Prusa’s coffin.