Full-color 3D printing at home has long been a wild-eyed dream of consumers and hobbyists alike. Thus far it’s been fun to print out little trinkets in a single color, but to create something more akin to a painted action figure would be a game-changer. And, thanks to inkject technology, we just might have reached that milestone.
XYZprinting[1], the maker of the popular Da Vinci line of printers – including a printer-scanner that launched in 2014[2] – has announced the $3,000 Da Vinci Color, a printer that uses inkjet technology to inject color directly into the filament as its printed. Previous full-color solutions required the use of nylon powder or multiple filaments for mixing enough colors to simulate full-color printing. The Da Vinci Color simply sprays that color into the hot PLA filament it uses to print plastic objects, resulting in full-color objects. Spools of filament cost $35 and the ink costs $65.
The best thing? The system offers almost unlimited colors. From the release:
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The industry’s ultimate full-color 3D printer, XYZprinting’s 3DColorJet solution enables the da Vinci Color to mix and fire CMYK color droplets onto PLA filament for accuracy and precision. The printer’s technology achieves the full-color spectrum of 16 million color possibilities across printed layers in finished 3D products. The proprietary technology combines color detail, which has been perfected in inkjet printing, with advanced, professional 3D printing technology.
Manufacturers have explored this technology in the past but it looks like XYZ has finally reduced the complexity and cost enough to sell for about the price of a better single-color printer. What can you expect out of this machine? As you can see from the samples below, this...