Elegoo has released their long-awaited CANVAS upgrade for the original Centauri Carbon 3D printer.
The Centauri Carbon was a revolutionary announcement at the time, mainly because it totally reset price expectations for the desktop 3D printer market. The price, under US$300, was around half of the going rate at the time. Since then, the market has been in a bit of turmoil to react.
Elegoo sold vast numbers of the Centauri Carbon because of this, and the machine turned out to be quite capable.
But there was one thing it didn’t do: multicolor 3D printing. Many competing systems had filament swapping accessories, such as Bambu Lab’s AMS. Centauri Carbon buyers assumed that Elegoo would offer a similar system at some point in the future, so they didn’t feel especially left out.
But then nothing happened for quite a while, and some buyers began to get concerned. Finally, Elegoo did announce a multicolor system, the CANVAS, which was directly integrated into the main system, rather than being an accessory like the AMS.
This development was both welcomed and not by buyers who had been expecting a simple method to “plug in” a multicolor accessory. That wasn’t the case with the CANVAS because it was literally part of the 3D printer.
Demand for answers finally resulted in Elegoo announcing an upgrade path for single-colour Centauri units to CANVAS. That was welcomed by the community, but it could not be ordered.
Until this week, that is. Elegoo finally released the CANVAS upgrade to the public, and it is now available for direct order.
It’s available as a kit that you can use to upgrade your single-colour Centauri 3D printer, and it’s not that difficult to do. We are in the midst of testing this upgrade, and we’ll have a full report on our experience coming up, probably next week.
The most surprising thing about this upgrade is the price: US$55.
This is spectacularly lower than competing filament swapping accessories. For example, the Bambu Lab AMS Lite, the most comparable unit, is priced at US$199, almost 4X the price of the CANVAS.
It seems that Elegoo has kept on the low-price trajectory they started when they released the Centauri Carbon 3D printer.
Via Elegoo
