facebook rss twitter

3D Systems announces the world’s first full-colour 3D Printer

by Mark Tyson on 2 December 2013, 20:45

Tags: 3D Systems

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qab5xn

Add to My Vault: x

The ProJet 4500, the first and only continuous tone full-colour plastic 3D printer, was announced today by 3D Systems. Following its recent headlining partnership with Motorola for the Project Ara modular smartphone, there seems to be no better time to bring out this new innovative printer to show it is at the forefront of the 3D printing revolution.

The printer is designed to produce pixel by pixel coloured 3D prints that exhibit superior surface quality. Output from the ProJet 4500 requires no supports and it prints quickly with minimal waste.

Full-colour plastic semi-rigid parts are produced by hardening powder-like VisiJet C4 Spectrum plastic materials layer by layer with a laser. This allows colours to blend into each other with smooth transitions, and differs from the extrusion technique used by most other 3D printers currently in the market.

Although there have been 3D printers offering options to produce coloured 3D models for some time, it has always been restricted to one colour at a time – it’s still single colour printing. Also tinted raw materials couldn’t be mixed to produce other tones in an analogous way to a normal paper printer which mixes its CMYK inks.

3D Systems emphasised the ProJet 4500’s use for rapid-prototyping as mock-ups and products output from it will not require post-processing or painting before being approved for final production.

“Leapfrogging from monochrome to full-colour functional plastics redefines 'the possible' for designers, engineers, architects, marketers and artists,” said Buddy Byrum, Vice President, Product and Channel Management, 3D Systems. “For the first time ever, users can get directly out of a 3D printer real-use parts, vibrant models, and functional prototypes in full colour, quickly, accurately and affordably”.

Although there is still no information on pricing and availability as yet, we will be sure to keep you updated as soon as we get a sniff of such information. Meanwhile 3D Systems will be showing off a ProJet 4500 demonstration unit, among other things, at EuroMold 2013 in Frankfurt, Germany, 3 – 6 December, 2013.

A PDF brochure for the ProJet 4500 is downloadable from here.



HEXUS Forums :: 3 Comments

Login with Forum Account

Don't have an account? Register today!
Although there have been 3D printers offering options to produce coloured 3D models for some time, it has always been restricted to one colour at a time – it’s still single colour printing
Not true. While this may be the first colour printer to use SLS on plastic, there are plenty of full-colour 3D printers on hte market that output other materials. Heck, Shapeways have offered full-colour ‘sandstone’ 3D prints as a service for years.
It looks good but this press release makes it sound like Z Corporation has never even existed and yet it doesn't seem like a huge advance over what they've offered for a long time. I also suspect that for the market that this is targeted at, continuous colour means 24-bit colour as opposed to what sounds more like 18-bit.

However, maybe the price will turn out to be signifiacntly lower and it's good to see more competition in this area of low-temperature, fumeless printing systems.
I Love The Idea of 3D Printing But Hate The Cost of it!