Bambu Lab

The Bambu Lab R1 is a 55W desktop CO₂ laser cutter and engraver aimed at makers, small shops, and product teams who want serious cutting capacity without the setup work of a dedicated industrial machine. It handles wood, acrylic, leather, fabric, and stone, with single-pass cuts up to 20mm, a 600 by 300mm bed, and a conveyor option that extends throughput to 3 meters of material. This launch matters because it is the first product to ever exist outside of its 3D printing ecosystem , marking Bambu Lab's first move beyond the FDM printers that built its brand. The engineering carries over from those printers. Motion control, vibration compensation, and a vision-encoder calibration routine let the R1 hold absolute motion accuracy within 0.1mm over 600mm while running at up to 1000 mm/s. A sensor detects optical-path misalignment and corrects it automatically, cameras and XY encoders coordinate to trace printed outlines and locate small parts on curved or clear surfaces, and a second exhaust fan sweeps smoke across the chamber to prevent it from pooling in the corner opposite the extractor. Bambu Lab was founded in August 2020 and is headquartered in Shenzhen, China , by a team of ex-DJI engineers led by Ye Tao, who previously ran DJI's consumer drone department. The R1 is priced at $2,499 in the US and €2,499 in the EU, with pre-orders starting September 22 and shipping in October , positioning it against hobby diode lasers on ease of use and against industrial CO₂ systems on price and bed size.