The P1S is Bambu Lab’s mid-tier CoreXY machine — basically the P1P with side and top panels bolted on, plus a built-in filtration slot. That enclosure is the whole story: it turns a printer that already ran fast into one that can also chew through ABS, ASA, and other warpy engineering filaments without turning your workshop into a fume chamber or a cold draft causing your first layer to lift. Build volume is 256 × 256 × 256 mm, the hotend tops out around 300°C with a hardened steel nozzle stock (swap to hardened+coated if you’re running abrasive carbon-fiber blends), and the whole thing ships in a footprint of roughly 389 × 389 × 457 mm at about 13 kg. It is not a small object on your bench.
Where the P1S actually earns its keep day to day is the stuff that used to be a whole afternoon of tuning on other machines: auto bed leveling, flow calibration, and vibration compensation all run automatically before a print, and mostly stay out of your way after that. Rated speeds go up to 500 mm/s with 20,000 mm/s² acceleration, though real-world prints with any detail settle in well under that once you factor in cooling and quality settings. The built-in camera is genuinely handy for keeping an eye on a print from another room, and it doubles as a timelapse generator if you’re into that. Pair it with an AMS and you get automatic multi-material and multi-color printing without babysitting filament swaps — though that combo introduces its own quirks (see the AMS entry).
The rough edges are mostly software and ecosystem friction rather than mechanical failure. Bambu’s cloud-account and firmware-authorization changes over the past couple years have annoyed a chunk of the user base who bought the printer specifically to keep it local and offline, and while there are workarounds (LAN-only mode, Home Assistant integrations, third-party slicer support via Bambu Studio’s open API), it’s not the plug-and-forget appliance the marketing implies if you care about that. On the mechanical side, it’s a genuinely reliable workhorse for the price — most of what goes wrong traces back to AMS feed issues or filament quality rather than the printer itself.
Pricing puts it in an odd but useful middle ground: it typically runs somewhere in the $600–700 range on its own, with combo bundles that add the AMS pushing closer to $950–1,000 depending on what’s on sale. That undercuts a lot of the “prosumer” enclosed CoreXY competition while still giving you auto-leveling, a real enclosure, and filtration out of the box — you’re mostly paying for the P1P’s speed plus the panels and carbon filter slot. For a workshop that’s already running a mix of open-frame and enclosed printers, the P1S tends to become the default “just needs to work” machine, while anything fussier or more experimental ends up on a printer you don’t mind babysitting.
Pros
- Fully enclosed chamber makes ABS/ASA/PC actually printable without a warped, delaminated mess
- Auto bed leveling and flow/vibration calibration remove most of the manual tuning other printers demand
- Fast without sacrificing much surface quality at sane speed settings
- Built-in camera and timelapse are actually useful, not just a checkbox feature
- Strong value relative to fully-enclosed CoreXY competitors at a similar build volume
Cons
- Cloud-account and firmware-authorization requirements have gotten more restrictive over time, which rubs local-first users the wrong way
- 256 mm cubed build volume is fine for most parts but limiting for bigger projects
- Enclosure fans and chamber circulation add noticeable noise under load (~45 dB range) compared to open-frame printers
- AMS integration inherits the AMS’s own jam and feed-reliability issues on long multi-color prints
- Enclosed chamber traps heat that can be a problem for PLA on hot days without extra cooling management