I’m not convinced of the usefulness, or demand, of this sort of colour mixing. I can see how cool it would be to print in colour, but there’s a big difference between printing highly accurate full colour, and simply being able to mix filaments to change colours approximately . I’d be surprised (pleasantly so) if this printer could, for example, print a human face with appropriately coloured lips, eyes, hair and skin tones, for example. Any tech that mixes filaments in this way is going to be subject to quite large errors in terms of when that “new” colour appears at the end of the nozzle, so unless it purges almost constantly, it’ll at best be able to produce artistic objects that vary in colour, but not precisely. That’s nice, but it’s not terribly useful from a business point of view.
So far, color mixing always required some sort of active blending, a simple static geometry is most likely going to give you toothpaste-like extrusion. It would be interesting if they actually managed to solve that, but even @E3D-Online have tried and failed at mixing.
Fdm is just no the way to go with mixing colors. You could use white filament and color it on the go with paint but that would be even worse i think. You cant get precise because of the way the filament has to take through hotend, coldend and nozzle.
@Jesus_H_Christ sure, but mixing in this way isn’t ever going to be the right way to reach people’s expectations, so it’s ultimately wasted development. It’s not like 2D colour printing where inkjet printing was workable tech, but just needed time to become precise and reliable, when (poorly informed) people think about a full colour 3D printer, they’re thinking about something that produces a printed version of something an expert has painted by hand. Changing the incoming filament is never going to have the accuracy to, say, produced the colour of an eye that’s 1mm in diameter; the supply “chain” is just too long.
Prosumer, relatively inexpensive colour printing that even approaches that goal is going to have to be something different entirely and @VolksTrieb 's comment about injecting ink at the point of extrusion is the closest idea I can come up with.
What about printing Filament and Ink alternating? After each filament layer an inkjet printhead colors the outlines. At least with Nylon this could work.
@ChPech I can’t recall the name of the printer, but there’s something similar “out there” now that spreads a powder on the work surface, then “ink jets” the color binder onto the powder. The powder fuses with the previous layers and also provides its own support, while the colored binder provides the more detailed coloration than an FDM printer can manage.
Pricing, on the other hand, isn’t what one could call Kickstarter level.
@ChPech that has been done with white FDM and servo-deployed colored sharpies coloring the recently-printed layer. Looked pretty good for, you know, servo-sharpies.
@Fred_U Yeah thats kindof standard. Sla inkjet. Kindof simple. But the powder is still very expensive. Id go for it if it was cheaper. Ok it can handle more load and does not need support which is nice. But for my stuff not enough.
A better color-mixing concept for FDM would be to mix clear filament with “masterbatch filament” containing concentrated pigment. That reduces the worst of the pigment-dilution effects that severely limit the color gamut CMYKW FDM mixing can achieve.
Hey guys… The thing with mixing filament also is: you allways need like 5 full spools of filament. And the other thing is…you need to be sure that all filaments will be enough for your print. Imagine the waste. No thank. Multicolor ok. But any color with fdm? No thanks
@Taylor_Landry the 5 micron thing is weird, even their own text on the KS campaign suggests it’s unnecessary, so why make such a claim when it’s going to be impractical?
As for the file type, I wonder if they’ll use something like Prusa’s colour changing app to insert gcode that’s interpreted in a specific way by the printer. In any case, it’s another complication…
I think the bigger issue is that you need tight software/hardware integration through the toolchain AND filament supply chain, to ensure your slicer knows how to mix colors properly to achieve the right output. Basically you’re looking at a proprietary solution where you have to get the printer, software, and consumables all from one OEM. Otherwise, it’s always going to be dodgy and unreliable to get any particular color output.
3D Systems ProJet does the powder and ink. For filament, BotObjects had active color filament mixing, but they got bought by 3D Systems and I don’t think it was ever released. Rova offers active color mixing. It’s OK, going by the trade show examples they present. The only way to get sharp color transitions is hope you can do that as infill or do a lot of purges.