【3D Printing】Multi-color Printing Comparison! X1 vs XL: AMS vs Toolchanger
Foreign Youtuber CNC Kitchen recently released a video comparing the Bambu Lab X1C with the Prusa XL equipped with a 5-tool module.
This video analyzes the pros and cons of AMS and toolchanger systems when handling multi-color/multi-material printing.Let's take a look!
Here, I'd like to provide you with all the details on these two multi-color printing solutions and help you decide which machine and process are right for you.
For today's test, I chose the Bambu Lab X1 with AMS and the Prusa XL with a 5-tool module – these two printers are the ones I've used most extensively over the past year, giving me ample hands-on experience.
While some of these figures and conclusions may be specific to these models, the general conclusions also apply to other machines using similar methods.
"Multiplexing" vs. "Toolchanging"
Bambu Lab's setup uses multiplexing, a method also employed by Creality, Anycubic, and Prusa's MMU.
On the other hand, for toolchanging systems, there are hardly any other off-the-shelf solutions available besides the Prusa XL.
Let's first analyze the main technical differences between multi-color systems like Bambu Lab's AMS and Prusa XL's toolchanging method.
Most multi-material or multi-color setups currently use a process called multiplexing, which means multiple filament inputs feed into a single nozzle.
For example, with the Bambu Lab X1, multiple spools of filament in the AMS can each feed into a single hotend in the print chamber.
This is a relatively simple and inexpensive system because you only need one extruder/hotend assembly.
However, when switching filaments, many machines cut the loaded material at the hotend to avoid pulling soft plastic pieces back into the feeder – which can easily cause jams or clogs.
The downside is that the remaining filament in the hotend must be purged before the new color can print cleanly.
This can require a significant amount of purging, especially when switching to lighter colors.
Bambu Lab is known for its "poop chute," which effectively showcases color changes, but even this is often not enough.
Therefore, these machines also typically print a purge tower alongside the actual part.
When not in use, a tool is parked on a dock, and the printer's motion system picks up the tool it needs at the time.
The biggest advantage is that you don't need to purge between color changes – there's no material change and thus no mixing within a single hotend – significantly reducing filament waste.
However, this adds complexity: you not only need multiple complete extruders and hotends, as well as the toolchanger system itself, but all of this requires more space, making the machine larger.
Each tool also needs to be precisely aligned in X and Y directions and in length so that the parts they print are perfectly aligned with each other.
There are different ways to do this, and Prusa uses its load cell to probe pins mounted on the bed, directly measuring the position and height of each tool.
With multiplexing, like on a Bambu Lab, you can avoid those extra alignment steps because all filaments come from the same nozzle, ensuring naturally perfect alignment of printed objects.
Now that we've covered the fundamental differences between multiplexing and toolchanging for multi-color or multi-material 3D printing, let's delve into how they actually affect print time, material waste, print quality, and material compatibility. The goal is to give you an understanding of which method might be best for your needs.
Let's start with material waste, as this is one of the biggest talking points.
Material Waste Comparison
Bambu Lab printers are known for generating what's called a "poop" every time the filament is switched.
Each color change produces a small piece of plastic, and the total number of color changes in a print largely depends on how you design and orient your model.
To illustrate this, I printed two different examples, both using four colors. The first is a cylinder with vertical stripes from top to bottom.
The second is a cylinder divided horizontally into four colored segments. In the striped version, each layer requires three color changes, for a total of 40 layers, resulting in approximately 120 changes.
Each change creates a "poop" on the tower and some additional purge material.
Some people suggest "flushing" the filament into infill to reduce waste.
In this case, it only saved me about 1.5 grams or 5%. For larger prints, flushing might help more, but there's also a risk of unwanted colors showing through the walls, ruining the appearance of the final part.
Beyond the number of changes, two other factors affect the final amount of purged material. When early multiplexing printers first came out, they would purge the same amount of filament with every color change.
But going from black to white requires much more filament than going from white to black.
Modern slicers often have "smart purge volume" settings that automatically adjust the amount of purge based on the color change.
If you turn on this setting in your slicer, you'll see that dark-to-light transitions get more purge, while light-to-dark transitions use less.
Then there's the purge multiplier. This is a simple scaling factor applied to the calculated purge volume.
Lowering it means you'll waste less material, but it also increases the possibility of color contamination.
I tend to set it around 0.5, which usually keeps colors clean. If you always print the same few colors, you can do a calibration test for precise adjustments and save even more.
However, most people would rather err on the side of caution and purge a bit more than risk a messy print.
Finally, there are advanced techniques involving how and when to retract filament to further reduce purging, but this impacts reliability.
So, the default profiles on Bambu Lab printers generally lead to slightly higher waste, but they are also more reliable for a wide range of filaments.
The amount of purging will vary depending on the machine you use, but you always have to purge to remove old filament from a single nozzle that pushes all materials through.
Let's move on to toolchanger systems, where each color has its own hotend, so there's no color contamination, and thus no purging needed, right?
By default, the Prusa XL's slicing profiles include a wipe tower.
When you switch to a new tool head, the XL purges a small amount of material from it before starting to print the actual part. This purge is much smaller than the "poop" or tower generated by typical Bambu Lab prints.
For example, with our worst-case test (a cylinder requiring three tool changes per layer), the finished print weighed only 9.1 grams, while the wipe tower added about 4.6 grams.
This is only 12% of the waste we saw on the Bambu machine. But there is still some waste.
Why? Well, even when parked, the tool remains heated.
The temperature is lowered to reduce oozing, and the nozzle orifice is covered, but the plastic in the melt zone slowly degrades due to being in a hot chamber.
If you've ever preheated a hotend to change filament, then forgotten about it for a few minutes, and then loaded new material, you probably know what I'm talking about.
The remaining filament becomes soft and degrades from the heat.
If you pick up that tool and immediately start printing without any purging, you'll get a lot of stringing and inconsistent extrusion.
I did this exact test with a warthog model and found the difference to be quite significant.
The version printed with a wipe tower was very clean, while the version without a wipe tower was covered in stringing and had holes due to degraded filament not printing correctly.
So, the main purpose of the wipe tower is to remove "bad" plastic so you can start printing again with reliable material.
In a way, Prusa's wipe tower is a conservative approach – designed to work with a wide variety of filaments.
However, with the right precautions, it is possible to skip the wipe tower and still get good results. In my experience, you just need to dry your filament.
Lower humidity leads to less oozing and hydrolysis at high temperatures, so plastic can maintain its performance longer in hot environments.
I put a spool of PLA in a filament dryer overnight, and the next day, I printed the exact same G-code on the XL – just with dry filament this time.
The results were fantastic. The warthog model looked as clean as the one with a wipe tower, and I saved 26.5 grams of filament and reduced the 9-hour print time by 50 minutes.
This brings us to our next important topic: print time.
Print Time
Yes, every tool change takes time, and a print can involve hundreds or even thousands of tool changes.
On the Prusa XL, a tool change takes approximately 7-9 seconds, plus 5 seconds to purge on the wipe tower, depending on the distance between tools.
Each color swap takes a total of about 12-14 seconds.
Meanwhile, on the Bambu Lab X1, a color change can take 1 to 3 minutes, depending on the amount of purging required.
Here's why: first, the nozzle is cleaned, then the filament is cut and retracted all the way back to the AMS, and finally, the new filament is fed in.
This last step alone takes another 20 seconds before printing can resume.
To put it in perspective: if you have 500 color changes, and each takes an average of 100 seconds, that means nearly 14 hours are spent just on color switching and waste generation.
This is truly insane, and it also explains why color printing on multiplexing systems takes so long.
On the XL, each change takes about 12 seconds, so you'd spend only 1.5 hours changing tools for the same job.
Now, an interesting fact is that the time per filament change remains constant regardless of the size of the print or the number of parts being printed.
If we look at the test part on the Bambu X1, printing just one takes 213 minutes. If five pieces are printed at once, the total time increases to 266 minutes, which means only 53 minutes per piece, a 75% reduction in print time per piece.
If the entire plate is filled, the time per part can be reduced to 27 minutes, an overall reduction of almost 90%. This is because while color changes remain constant, you're distributing them across more parts.
On a toolchanger like the Prusa XL, the benefits of printing multiple parts are not as significant.
Printing one takes 40 minutes, and printing five takes 23 minutes per piece – beyond that, there isn't much saving.
Because the XL changes tools so quickly, it doesn't waste much time on unnecessary color changes.
This means that even single-part jobs can be completed quite quickly, and the difference between single-color and multi-color printing is relatively small.
Print Quality
Before we move on to multi-material printing, let's take a quick look at the print quality of these machines.
Early Prusa XL reviews often mentioned layer shifting, stringing, and many were dissatisfied with the initial performance.
Fortunately, things have changed a lot over the past year. When the XL first shipped, Prusa included a 0.6mm nozzle, believing that a larger machine should have a larger nozzle.
Eventually, they switched back to the 0.4mm nozzle, which is essentially the industry standard.
My XL arrived about a year ago with the 0.4mm nozzle already installed, but I still encountered some issues. Some of these may have been due to quality control problems: my tool head malfunctioned, and the belts were very loose out of the box.
After fixing the issues, I still tried to print a full set of multi-color Catan for my brother's birthday on the XL, but even with a wipe tower, the small "sheep" models didn't turn out very well.
So I switched back to my Bambu X1 to finish the job.
However, over the past year, Prusa has updated the firmware and improved the slicer profiles. So, I decided to reprint my favorite Catan tiles to see if there had actually been a change – and the difference was impressive.
The new prints had a lot of detail and very few defects.
I even ran them without using a wipe tower and with fresh, dry filament.
They still looked great! Larger models also looked impressive – hundreds of tool changes and perfectly aligned layers.
The only issues I encountered were some nozzle misalignments when I forgot to clean.
Once I cleaned off the gunk and recalibrated, everything was back to normal.
So, it seems they have addressed most of the early adopter issues.
In my opinion, the XL now offers the best multi-material print quality on the market, comparable to and sometimes even better than the quality I get from Bambu Lab machines, if you want to compare.
Up to this point, we've primarily been discussing multi-color printing – using different colors of the same material.
But a major selling point of toolchangers like the Prusa XL isn't just faster color changes, but also multi-material printing capabilities.
What's the difference here?
When you print multiple colors using the same filament (e.g., PLA), it's easy because everything operates at the same temperature and has similar material properties.
This is great for decorative or aesthetic projects. But in multi-material printing, you might combine a PLA body with flexible TPU hinges or gaskets, or use other support materials that peel away more cleanly. Here, AMS-based or multiplexing printers will start to run into difficulties, especially when printing with flexible materials.
Feeding soft, flimsy filament through long tubes can cause clogs, and although Bambu Lab recently released their own AMS-compatible TPU, it's quite stiff compared to typical flexible materials.
There's also a bigger problem. Some materials simply don't work well together. For example, PLA and PETG. If you've ever switched from PETG to PLA and wondered why the first layer peeled off, you've seen this issue firsthand. They don't bond or fuse.
So, on a multiplexing printer, if you don't purge every trace of PETG from the nozzle, the adhesion and strength of your PLA layers will be severely compromised – right where the residual PETG contaminates the print.
And this is where toolchanger systems really shine.
You never swap materials through the same hotend, so there's no residual contamination and no need for massive purging.
This means you can use pure PETG supports for PLA prints, which peel away easily and result in ultra-clean undersides.
The challenge here is more about bed temperature, as each material might prefer a different build surface type and temperature.
Getting two materials to bond correctly can be tricky, and honestly, that's the biggest challenge.
However, multi-material printing is still an area where toolchanger systems excel.
In the past, I've printed rollers with integrated IGUS DryLin bearings, hooks with foam TPU cushioning, and articulated PLA hands using TPU for joints, but these things are simply impractical with an AMS setup.
This isn't to say that toolchanger systems are without problems. For example, I tried to use only PETG support interfaces on a PLA part but encountered issues with PETG not adhering to PLA.
Also, if you print at PLA's temperature settings, PETG on the bed might detach. So, you still need to fine-tune your process for each material combination.
But if you can get it right, you can produce some impressive prints.
Remember, the Prusa XL in its standard form is an open-frame 3D printer. It's great for PLA, PETG, TPU, and other materials that don't require an elevated print chamber temperature.
Prusa also offers their PCBlend, which I really like for printing technical parts, and it's designed to print without an enclosure, but even so, it would benefit from a higher print chamber temperature.
They do sell an enclosure for the XL, but if you strictly print ABS, ASA, nylon, or polycarbonate, then a smaller enclosed printer like the Bambu Lab X1 or P1S might give you stronger parts out of the box – albeit only in single-material mode.
Cost becomes a major factor here.
The XL's enclosure alone costs $649, almost as expensive as a Bambu Lab P1S with AMS.
So, deciding which printer to buy depends not just on its features or how much purge waste each printer produces – it can also depend on your budget.
Conclusion
From my personal experience, if you compare a fully functional Prusa XL side-by-side with a Bambu Lab X1 Carbon, you'll find very few things Bambu can do that the XL cannot.
Bambu's biggest advantages are its slightly faster speed and the ability to connect up to 4 AMS units, offering 16 colors.
And the X1 is enclosed by default, which makes printing with high-temperature materials simpler.
Beyond that, the print quality is excellent, and the large print bed is very convenient. Its tiled heating system, while complex, remains efficient even for smaller prints.
In my opinion, the Prusa XL is a business-grade printer.
The single-tool version starts at $2,000, with the option to upgrade with more tools later.
The assembled five-tool version costs about $4,000, and if you add an enclosure and some dry boxes, the total can go up to $5,000.
So, you either need deep pockets or a very specific reason to own one.
Perhaps you're doing multi-material work with PLA, PETG, or TPU in a single part.
Or you're a professional where time is money, and the XL's toolchanging capability saves you countless hours when printing multi-tool parts.
Finally, Prusa machines are manufactured within the EU; they have excellent customer support and a clear emphasis on their machines keeping your data safe, which can be very valuable to you.
They don't force you to use the cloud, which can be a big deal if you value privacy or run a business.
Personally, I love using the XL. This machine is operational out of the box with minimal adjustments, has a robust ecosystem thanks to PrusaSlicer, and after significant firmware and profile updates, delivers impressive results.
Also, if you already own a Prusa printer, I hear the MMU3 is finally working well and can even print 5 colors at once (though I haven't tried it myself yet).
All in all, we now have a truly wide range of options, which is fantastic. I hope this gives you a clearer understanding of how different systems compare and which might be suitable for your projects.
Toolchanger systems are undoubtedly the most efficient method, but they add complexity and cost – hence the XL's higher price and few competitors.
If you can leverage its true multi-material capabilities or save time, it's an excellent choice.
But if not, then a multiplexing-based solution might be all you need.
Of course, AMS printers are slower and waste more material, but how many people actually print enough to justify the XL's extra cost?
If you're really concerned about waste, perhaps multi-color 3D printing isn't the best option.
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