After printing 40,000 whistles, this is the 3D printer I’d buy

One year later, the Bambu P2S Combo is the only 3D printer I can easily recommend.

by Sean HollisterNov 6, 2026, 12:00 PM UTC Sean Hollister is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

I’ve been wanting to try 3D printing, people tell me. Which printer should I get?

I finally have a fairly easy answer: the Bambu Lab P2S Combo. The auto-loading, fully enclosed touchscreen printer is one of the very few I can recommend. It’s the only one I’d buy for myself. It’s on sale for $649 through December 1st, but I’d vouch for it even at its normal $749 price.

I’ve spent an entire year testing the P2S alongside several competitors, printing 40,000 whistles for ICE whistleblowers along the way. After racking up 6,770 hours of print time across four different printers, I’m sure of my recommendation.

Some people who know 3D printers will argue with me:

• Some will say you shouldn’t support Bambu because it’s profiting at the open-source community’s expense.
• Others will say you shouldn’t spend so much when a $369 Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2 Combo or a $509 Bambu P1S Combo can print just as well.
• Some will say you should save $100 or more by skipping multicolor “Combo” systems.
• Some may even say, “What about all the fancy new tool-changing printers you just wrote about, Sean? Won’t the leaked P3C make the P2S obsolete?”

But for the reasons I’ll explain below, the P2S Combo is my pick despite all of that. It’s durable, reliable, and simple to maintain and clean and forget about, even in ways my trusty Bambu P1P and the similar P1S lacked.

The P2S makes 3D printing easy. When I’m in the mood, I don’t even need to walk over to my printer half the time. I can fire it up from my phone or laptop, using Bambu’s app to send one of millions of ready-made models from the cloud. The automated material system (AMS) automatically loads one of the rolls of filament that I leave in its protected enclosure for months at at time without fear. It automatically calibrates, automatically prints, automatically winds the filament back up when it’s done.

I tell friends that no matter which printer you buy, you should buy a multi-material system “Combo” because manually loading and unloading filament is a chore; it means standing around a printer waiting for it to heat up and feeding plastic into a tube by hand. Automated filament systems can fix that. For me, it’s not about having lots of colors in a single print; it’s about knowing I can print something black, or white, or red, or my kid’s favorite sparkly purple without any further effort — because I loaded those colors weeks ago.

It is true that the $369 Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2 Combo also has automatic four-color filament feeding at a seemingly unbeatable price, and printed whistles and household items just as well as the P2S. I’ve spent 1,271 hours printing with the Centauri Carbon, and 939 hours with a Centauri Carbon 2, and they printed almost flawlessly right out of the box — no need to level a bed, no need to adjust belt tension, the printer calibrates itself.

But like other Bambu rivals, Elegoo doesn’t automatically load its filament from mostly airtight containers. I can’t leave rolls of filament in the printer for weeks or months when I’m not actively using them because they’ll quickly absorb moisture from the air, turn brittle, and jam up the printer’s tubes or nozzle.

Moisture is the primary reason I wouldn’t recommend an inexpensive Bambu A1 Combo to newcomers, either, or a Snapmaker U1, or any other attractive multicolor printer without sealed filament storage. The entire experience of using a 3D printer is friendlier when you don’t have to prep the printer before printing.

Even so, it’s pretty dang tempting to save $280 or more by going with the Elegoo. But over the course of the roughly 1,000 hours I tested the Carbon and Carbon 2 side by side with the Bambu P2S, the Elegoo printers broke down in ways that were more difficult to diagnose.

The original Carbon’s extruder had some feeding issues and I found a lot of black dust inside after taking it apart, seemingly from worn plastic gears. Just this week, my Carbon 2’s stopped working after its nozzle mysteriously crashed into the bed and it refused to auto-level itself (which would normally fix that issue). I had to take the bed apart and still couldn’t find anything wrong.

In the end, yanking and reseating four tiny fragile-and-yet-too-tight connectors inside the bed fixed that problem, but it’s not the kind of solution a consumer should have to do.

Anecdotally, my Bambu printers have led a comparatively charmed life: In 1,692 hours of printing with the P2S, I’ve had to swap out the nozzle twice, clean and relubricate the traversal rods and screws several times, wash the removable magnetic printing surfaces a bunch of times with water and dish soap, and clear several filament jams in the AMS. That’s about it.

P2S nozzle replacements are easier, too. When you jam today’s Elegoo printers, you’re going old-school, either by wrenching off a hot nozzle so you can clean or inexpensively replace it ($25 for eight nozzles) or by fishing out tiny wires and unscrewing two bolts to remove an entire $30 hotend (which includes the elements that heat the plastic) at once. With Bambu’s P2S, you can just yank off a gasket and open one spring clip to swap a whole new toolless hotend ($18) in less than a minute. It does help to have a pair of mini pliers to grab the nozzle, though.

The Elegoo printers also have noisy fans that stay active even when you’re not printing, unlike the Bambu, though the Centauri Carbon 2 does shut them off more quickly than the original. Both Elegoo and Bambu let you remotely mon

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