Always "on it's way", delayed or "soon", but never here and ready to go. Not this year, though. Bambu Lab, Prusa, et al may be grabbing the attention, but Phrozen's quiet monster of a printer is now available to buy and made its proper debut at Formnext this year.

What sets it apart? The Arco uses Klipper (properly, with attribution) uses a fast, flying gantry CoreXY design, and features a novel heat pipe-based hot end cooling system that helps shorten the filament drive path. Ours just arrived, so we'll be going hands on soon.

but we'll be talking about the immediate future of desktop printing for a while. It looks like multiple printheads and high-tech nozzles, seamlessly swapping in and out as needed. Three such printers made their Formnext debuts this week – which would you buy?

At Biqu’s booth, Czech-based independent printer manufacturer Stōn-Wolf (pronounced stone wolf) debuted its eponymous printer. It's a gorgeous slab of thick, mirror-finish metal surrounding an unusual flying-gantry motion system over a 300 x 300 mm build area. Built-to-order in Czechia, kits start at €1,395.

But even there it can come from unexpected places. A nondescript table appeared today at Bambu Lab's booth, showing off a bunch of heavy, highly polished metallic looking pieces. Like the CyberBrick was once a stealthy, interactive exhibit at the company's stand, perhaps we'll see a high metal-content filament from them soon, too.

At least so says Recreus, flexible filament specialists whose Formnext highlight solves the difficulties of high-speed printing soft flexibles: a new filament size. Soon, the company will offer a 2.20 mm flexible filament alongside the standard 1,75 mm. The logic goes that 2.85 mm filament takes too long to melt properly, and 1.75mm buckles too easily.

This new goldilocks size melts juuust right for higher-flow printing of flexibles at PLA-like print speeds, they say. Recreus-made Bambu Lab and Prusa Nextruder compatible nozzles, required for this optimal new size, will also launch soon.