Creality Teases New i8 Low-Waste Four-Color 3D Printer
The mysterious printer being teased across the brand's social channels is most likely the upcoming SparkX i8, a new multicolor-printing bedslinger with in-nozzle filament changes and filament path switching tech.
A unknown 3D printer draped in shadow, shared on social media. Standard 3D printer marketing fare, and something we’d normally take in spirit with some guesses and theorizing. Except, this time, we don’t need to, because the printer in shadow is already named and detailed on one of Creality’s forward-looking “crowdfunding” websites.
Taking a leaf from Anycubic’s book, the upcoming SparkX i8 from Creality looks set to tackle the scourge of purge-waste with filament switching localized to the printhead.
The headlining feature is a piece of printhead tech Creality calls QuarTeks, which the company describes as “the fastest most efficient four-color system.”
As a concept, QuarTeks appears to do away with the filament cutter and associated limitations. Each of the four filament paths it offers run all the way through the printhead and into the hotend itself. Each filament sits close to the nozzle opening in a discrete channel, which theoretically means there’s only a very short part of this inner space where filaments could mix. In short, less purging required. An animation on a page detailing the i8 appears to show this purge happening in a print’s infill.
Above this new type of nozzle is a motorized filament track switcher that Creality says achieves changes in just one second.
The possible time-savings are pronounced – we saw with Anycubic’s Kobra X that such a system, changing the filament track close to the actual melting, saves time over single nozzle printers that rely on an external filament changer. Creality’s i8 takes this further, omitting the filament cut and purge that has become commonplace and leaving only a marginal overlap inside the nozzle to be purged.
Outside of the exotic switching tech, the i8 looks like the i7 printer that came before it. Key specifications read off at 260 x 260 x 255 mm build volume, with an advertised print speed and accelerations of 500 mm/s and 10,000 mm/s, respectively (the usual caveat of this being a theoretical top speed, not actual operating speed applies.) The hot end reaches 300°C, the heated bed, 100°C. Standard stuff.
An integrated 720p camera watches out for spaghetti and gives you the possibility to monitor prints via Creality’s software, while a full-color RGB lightbar adds some, well, color, to print status updates and the like.
It’s nice to see that things have moved on from simple Bambu Lab A1 clones that added nothing. Some folks like to print multicolour prints, and the SparkX i8 appears to be an appeal to that group with a system that cuts back on print waste.
No word of a price or release date yet, but with IFA Berlin just around the corner, it seems nailed on that we will get a closer look at the printer there.
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