Maker Monday: A Stacked Week for New Printers (Creality K3, Elegoo Centauri 2, and More)
Four new printers landed in the same week, and the biggest one solves a problem that's been annoying multicolor printers for years. Creality's K3 ditched the single nozzle for four of them, Phrozen and Formlabs both pushed into new price and size territory, and Elegoo stripped its cheapest CoreXY printer down even further. Here's what matters and what I'm actually watching.
Creality K3: Four Nozzles, No More Color Swap Waste
Creality opened pre-orders on the K3 this month at $849, with official sales starting November 2. The headline feature is KliTek, a four-nozzle system that swaps colors in under 15 seconds instead of purging and rebuilding a single hot end every time. Creality claims up to 80 percent faster multicolor prints and up to 85 percent less wasted filament. That second number is the one that actually matters to me. Purge towers are the single biggest reason I avoid multicolor jobs on anything but the AMS, so if four independent filament paths genuinely cut that waste, this is worth a real test. I am not calling it a game changer until I have one on the bench, but it is the first multicolor approach in a while that is not just another AMS clone, and it picked up an IFA Innovation Award on the way in.
Phrozen's Sonic Mighty Revo 16K MAX Goes Big
Phrozen's newest resin printer is built for volume, not just detail. The Sonic Mighty Revo 16K MAX packs a 14 inch 16K screen into a build area over 300mm on its longest side, with dual chamber heating to keep a full 2 liter vat warm and a nFEP release film for faster peels. It lists at $1,600. My Sonic Mini 8K earns its keep on fine head sculpts, and this is a different machine entirely, built for printing a lot of medium-to-large parts at once rather than one tiny detailed one. If you are running a print farm or batching out full-size props, this is squarely built for that. For most home hobbyists, it is more printer than you need.
Formlabs Opens Orders on the Form Studio 1
Formlabs just opened worldwide orders on the Form Studio 1, a resin printer starting at $699 with shipping set to begin November 16. Formlabs has spent most of its history in dental, engineering, and other professional spaces where their printers run well north of a thousand dollars, so a $699 entry point from that brand is worth noticing. I have not touched one yet and will not vouch for it until I have, but if any of their reliability and software polish carries down to this price, it is a real option for painters who want a cleaner resin workflow without building it themselves out of a budget machine.
Elegoo's Centauri 2 Strips the Enclosure, Keeps the Price Low
Elegoo's follow-up to the Centauri Carbon 2 drops the enclosure, the print monitoring camera, the chamber LEDs, and the air filter to hit a lower price point. What is left is a 256 x 256 x 256mm open-frame CoreXY printer rated up to 500mm/s with 121-point auto bed leveling, listing from $279. If you already have ventilation sorted in your space and do not care about watching prints remotely, this is a sensible way to get fast CoreXY printing without paying for features you will not use. Grab it through my Elegoo link below, the printers and resin on there are the same ones I run.
This Week's Technique Tip: Get a Wet Palette, Then Learn Wet Blending
If you are still painting off a dry palette or a paper plate, a wet palette is the single cheapest upgrade to your painting setup. Acrylics on a wet palette stay workable for hours instead of skinning over in minutes, which means you stop wasting paint and start actually using the time you have on the bench. Once you have one, try wet blending: load two colors on the brush at once and work them into each other right on the model, mixing them where they meet instead of pre-mixing a bunch of intermediate shades. It takes a few ruined test models to get the timing right, but it is faster than layering a dozen thin glazes once it clicks, and it reads better under a wash afterward too.
That's Maker Monday
That's the maker world for this week. If any of this got you thinking about a custom print, paint, or engraving, come see what we make on the commission page. See you next Monday.
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