There’s something strange going on at Elegoo.
The company became top of mind earlier this year when they introduced the Centauri Carbon, an enclosed CoreXY device that competed against Bambu Lab, Prusa and others — at a price point less than half. They effectively changed the pricing equation for desktop 3D printers, and spelled out the end for sales of open gantry i3-style 3D printers.
One glaring omission from the Centauri Carbon’s features was the ability to print in multiple colors. Their competitors — Prusa, Creality, Anycubic, Bambu Lab and others — all offer a filament swapping accessory. They all have different names for their version, but basically they retract a filament and push in a different one every time a color change is required. It dramatically slows down the print job and produces massive amounts of material waste, but they work.
Elegoo advertised they were to release their version of a filament swapping system in Q3 of this year. Many Centauri Carbon buyers eagerly anticipated buying one later on.
But in the past week those advertisements have disappeared.
Even stranger, there are reports of a “Centauri Carbon 2” being sold on Asian markets.
Is this true? It is indeed, as I was able to find an entry on TaoBao showing this device (see image at top). Let’s take a look at this image and see what we can discover.
The machine is indeed labelled as the “Centauri Carbon 2”, confirming the rumours. It also seems to be set up as a multicolor system. However, instead of being an accessory, the filament swapping hardware seems to be built into the Centauri Carbon 2. This is quite similar to the approach taken by Flashforge with their AD5X.
There is a very large acrylic lid for the Centauri Carbon 2, likely to accommodate the slack in the filament when retraction takes place.
We can’t see much else about this machine. While the rest of the machine seems to be very similar to the Centauri Carbon, there could be internal changes, different toolhead, speeds, etc.
At this time we see no such machine advertised on Elegoo’s western-oriented sites, and it appears to be sale only on TaoBao. The price is about US$700, but listed in yuan.
There’s a big implication here. If this is the approach taken by Elegoo to implement multicolor 3D printing, then anyone who purchased a Centauri Carbon (1) that hoped to add one later will be out of luck. As you might guess, the forums are furious about this development, as many people did assume and expect an accessory.
The presence of the Centauri Carbon 2 does not exclude the possibility of a filament swapping accessory later. It’s just that it is a lot less likely as why would Elegoo develop TWO different methods of multicolor 3D printing?
There’s no word from Elegoo about any of this.
There’s something else, too. Bambu Lab previously announced Vortek, a colour-swapping system that produces no waste. Prusa Research is also working on something similar in a partnership with Bondtech. Snapmaker announced their U1 toolchanger that also produces no waste.
The future is clear at this point: desktop 3D printers should produce no waste when changing colors. Manufacturers should be moving in that direction.
Unfortunately Elegoo was late to the game with their filament swapper, and might be far behind the others. Could they have quickly released the Centauri Carbon 2 as a way to hold some market share while they quickly develop a waste free solution back in their labs?
This is all quite confusing and I am hoping that Elegoo will clear up this matter soon.
Via TaoBao
