If you've been eyeing 3D printing but keep talking yourself out of it because the hobby has a reputation for fiddly setups, failed prints, and endless calibration — the Bambu Lab P1S Combo is the machine built to change your mind.
What You're Actually Buying
The P1S Combo pairs Bambu Lab's P1S printer with their AMS (Automatic Materials System) — a four-spool unit that sits on top of the printer and feeds filament automatically. That combo is the whole pitch: one box, minimal setup, and multi-material printing without babysitting spool changes yourself.
Core specs:
- Build volume: 256 x 256 x 256 mm (about 10 x 10 x 10 inches)
- Max print speed: 500 mm/s, with 20,000 mm/s² acceleration
- Hotend: All-metal, up to 300°C
- Enclosure: Fully enclosed chamber with an activated carbon filter
- Bed: Textured PEI spring steel plate, auto bed leveling
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi, chamber monitoring camera, companion app (Bambu Handy)
That fully enclosed chamber matters more than it sounds. It's the difference between the P1S and its cheaper sibling, the P1P — the enclosure stabilizes chamber temperature, which means fewer warped prints and the ability to work with trickier materials like ABS without your garage smelling like a chemistry set.
The AMS Is the Real Upgrade
The AMS holds up to four spools and switches between them automatically mid-print. Want a two-color logo, or a model that needs dissolvable support material under overhangs? The AMS handles the swap without you touching anything. It even reads RFID tags on Bambu's own filament to auto-populate the type and color in the slicer software — one less setting to fumble.
Stack up to four AMS units together and you're printing with sixteen materials in a single job. Most people won't need that scale, but it's a good signal of how seriously Bambu built this system for people who plan to grow into more ambitious prints.
The tradeoff: multi-color prints generate a "waste tower" — the purge material the machine extrudes when switching colors mid-layer. It's a known quirk of AMS-style systems generally, not a P1S-specific flaw, and Bambu's software gives you ways to minimize it depending on how you design your color changes.
Setup and Software
This is where the PLS earns its reputation. Unboxing to first print is commonly clocked at around 15 minutes, and the printer auto-calibrates — bed leveling, vibration compensation — without manual tuning. You hit print, it handles the rest.
Bambu Studio (desktop) and Bambu Handy (mobile) round out the experience. You can slice, monitor, and start prints remotely, with a live camera feed on the chamber. For a hobby that has historically demanded a lot of trial, error, and forum-diving just to get a clean first layer, this is a meaningfully lower barrier to entry.
Where It Sits in 2026
The P1S isn't Bambu's newest printer anymore — the P2S and H2 series have since launched. But two-plus years after its debut, it's held up as the value pick in the enclosed CoreXY category, largely because the price gap between it and newer models is often wide enough to put an AMS 2 Pro in your cart instead — arguably a more useful upgrade for most people than incremental hardware refinements.
It's not the printer for everyone. There's no LiDAR scanning (that's reserved for the X1 Carbon), no AI camera, and Bambu doesn't recommend it for fiber-reinforced filaments like carbon fiber without additional hardware upgrades. If you're chasing the bleeding edge of Bambu's lineup, look higher up the catalog.
Bottom Line
For makers, hobbyists, and anyone building out a home workshop who wants an enclosed, multi-material printer that doesn't require a steep learning curve, the P1S Combo remains one of the easiest recommendations in the category — reliable, fast, and priced to make the AMS's multi-color capability accessible rather than a luxury add-on.
Best for: first serious 3D printer, multi-color/multi-material hobbyists, workshop and CNC-adjacent makers who want a "set it and forget it" machine.
Consider something else if: you need dual-nozzle printing, LiDAR-based scanning, or you're printing advanced composite filaments regularly.
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