For some would-be 3D printing customers, the barrier was watching half the filament go into the trash.

I’ve been coveting a multi-material 3D printer for a while.

Then I watched videos of those machines producing piles of purge waste every time they changed colours or materials.

Printer poop.

Bins of it.

That was enough to spook me off.

The problem is inherent to single-nozzle multicolour systems. Whenever the printer switches filament, it has to push all the old material out, ’til the new colour runs clean.

Even Bambu Lab describes significant purging as a compromise of that architecture.

So Snapmaker’s U1 took a totally different approach.

Instead of feeding four materials through one nozzle, it keeps four separate toolheads loaded… and swaps the entire head in about five seconds.

That means way less purging between changes. Snapmaker claims up to 85% less waste, and says conventional multicolour prints can sometimes discard even more filament than ends up in the finished object.

Speed helps too. Snapmaker says the U1 can print at up to 500 mm per second.

That’s half a metre every second, or about 1.6 feet of print-head travel. Obviously, a real object won’t print at that maximum speed continuously, but it gives some scale to how fast these machines have become.

For a category that has always asked consumers to trade time for customization, that changes the equation further.

The U1 also brings its architecture down to a much more consumer-friendly price. An article I read has it at US $699 for Black Friday, versus tool-changing machines that historically sell well above $2,000.

That 1-2 punch is huge.

Multicolour 3D printing was already impressive stuff. But the waste, cost, slowness and complexity gave folks like me perfectly good reasons to stay out.

A product category can improve dramatically without creating much fresh demand if the remaining annoyances are still crappy enough.

But remove one or more of those crappy annoyances and the addressable market changes.

Now the conversation is less about if I can tolerate the waste and more about what I’d make with four colours, rigid and flexible materials, or dissolvable supports, all in one speedy print.

That’s a much funner question for a product to make me ask.

And way less poop.

If you’d like help creating and marketing products people feel compelled to buy, the product marketing consultants at Graphos Product can help.