【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 specifically analyzes the pros and cons of AMS and toolchanger systems when handling multi-color/multi-material printing.Let's take a look!
Here, I want to provide you with all the details of these two multi-color printing solutions and help you decide which machine and process are right for you.
In today’s test, I chose the Bambu Lab X1 with AMS and the Prusa XL with a 5-tool module – these are the two printers I’ve used the most in the past year, giving me enough 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, the same method used by Creality, Anycubic, and Prusa’s MMU.
As for toolchanging systems, besides Prusa XL, there are almost no other off-the-shelf solutions on the market.
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, meaning multiple filament inputs feed into a single nozzle.
For example, with the Bambu Lab X1, there are multiple spools of filament in the AMS, and each filament can be fed into one hot end in the print chamber.
This is a relatively simple and inexpensive system because you only need one extruder/hot end assembly.
However, when switching filaments, many machines will cut the loaded material in the hot end to avoid pulling soft plastic remnants back into the feeder – this can easily cause clogs or blockages.
The downside is that the remaining filament in the hot end 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 next to the actual part.
When a tool is not in use, it is parked on its dock, and the printer's motion system picks up the tool needed at that time.
The biggest advantage is that you don't need to purge between color changes - there's no material mixing, so no mixing within a single hot end - greatly reducing filament waste.
However, this adds complexity: you need not only multiple complete extruders and hot ends and the toolchanger system itself, but all of this requires more space, making the machine larger.
Each nozzle must also be precisely aligned in the X and Y directions, as well as in length, so that the parts they print align perfectly 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.
And if you're using multiplexing like 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 impact print time, material waste, print quality, and material compatibility. The goal is to give you an understanding of which method is best suited for your needs.
Let's start with material waste, as this is one of the biggest discussion points.
Material Waste Comparison
Bambu Lab printers are known for the so-called "poop" they produce every time they switch filaments.
Each color change generates 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 horizontally divided 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 produces a "poop" on the tower and some extra purge material.
Some people suggest "flushing" the filament into the 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.
Besides the number of changes, two factors affect the amount of material purged. 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 a “smart purge amount” setting that automatically adjusts the purge amount based on color changes.
If you enable 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 also increases the chance of color contamination.
I tend to set it around 0.5, which usually keeps colors clean. If you’re always printing the same few colors, you can run a calibration test to fine-tune it and save even more.
Most people, however, 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 affects reliability.
As a result, the default profiles on Bambu Lab printers typically generate slightly more waste, but they are also more reliable across a wider 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.
Let's move on to toolchanging systems, where each color has its own hot end, so there's no color contamination, and therefore no purging needed, right?
By default, the Prusa XL's slicer profiles include a wipe tower.
When you switch to a new tool head, the XL will purge a small amount of material from it before starting to print the actual part. This purge is much smaller than the "poop" or towers produced 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 approximately 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 hole is covered, but the plastic in the melt zone slowly degrades from being in the hot chamber.
If you’ve ever preheated a hot end to change filament, then forgot about it for a few minutes, and then loaded new material, you probably know what I'm talking about.
The remaining filament becomes gooey 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 the warthog model and found a very significant difference.
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 the degraded filament not printing correctly.
So, the main purpose of the wipe tower is to remove the "bad" plastic so you can start printing again with reliable material.
To some extent, 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 great results. In my experience, you just need dry filament.
Lower humidity means less oozing and hydrolysis at high temperatures, so the plastic performs better for 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 this time using dry filament.
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 shaved 50 minutes off a 9-hour print.
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 about 7-9 seconds depending on the distance between tools, plus 5 seconds to clear the wipe tower.
Each color change takes a total of approximately 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.
The reasons are as follows: 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 resumes.
To put it into perspective: if you have 500 color changes, each taking an average of 100 seconds, that's nearly 14 hours just for switching colors and generating waste.
This is crazy, and it also explains why color prints on multiplexing systems take so long.
On the XL, each change takes about 12 seconds, so you only spend 1.5 hours changing tools for the same job.
Now, an interesting fact is that the time spent on each filament change remains constant regardless of the print's size 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, or just 53 minutes per piece, meaning a 75% reduction in print time per piece.
If the entire plate is filled, the time required per part can be reduced to 27 minutes, an overall reduction of nearly 90%. This is because while color changes remain constant, you spread them across more parts.
On a toolchanger like the Prusa XL, the benefit of printing multiple parts is not as significant.
Printing one piece takes 40 minutes, and printing five pieces takes 23 minutes each – beyond that, the time savings are not substantial.
Because the XL changes tools so quickly, it doesn't waste much time on unnecessary color swaps.
This means even single-part jobs can be completed quite quickly, and the difference between single-color and multi-color prints 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, a lot has changed in the past year. When the XL first shipped, Prusa equipped it with a 0.6mm nozzle because they believed a larger machine should have a larger nozzle.
Ultimately, they reverted 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: my tool head malfunctioned, and the belts were very loose out of the box.
After fixing the problems, I still tried to print a full set of multi-color Catan on the XL as a birthday gift for my brother, but even with the 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 its firmware and improved its slicer profiles. So, I decided to reprint my favorite Catan tiles to see if there was actually a difference – and the results were impressively different.
The new prints had a lot of detail and very few defects.
I even ran it without a wipe tower, using fresh, dry filament.
They still looked great! Larger models also looked impressive – hundreds of tool changes and perfectly aligned layers.
The only problem I encountered was some nozzle misalignment when I forgot to clean.
Once I cleared the grime and re-calibrated, everything went back to normal.
So, it seems they have addressed most of the issues early adopters faced.
In my opinion, the XL now offers some of the best multi-material print quality on the market, comparable to and sometimes even better than what I get from my Bambu Lab machines, if you want to compare.
So far, we've mostly talked about multi-color printing – using different colors of the same material.
But a big selling point of a toolchanger like the Prusa XL is not just faster color changes, but also multi-material printing capabilities.
What's the difference here?
When you print multiple colors with the same filament (like PLA), it's easy because everything runs 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 struggle, 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 mix well. 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 problem firsthand. They just don't bond or fuse.
So, on a multiplexing printer, if you don't clear all traces 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 toolchanging systems really shine.
You never swap materials through the same hot end, 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 produce super clean bottom surfaces.
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 to be honest, it's the biggest challenge.
However, multi-material printing is still an area where toolchanging systems excel.
In the past, I've printed rollers with integrated IGUS DryLin bearings, hooks with foam TPU pads, and articulated PLA hands with TPU joints, but these things are simply not practical with an AMS setup.
This isn't to say that toolchanging systems are without problems. For example, I tried using only PETG interface support on a PLA part but encountered issues with PETG not adhering to PLA.
Also, if you print at PLA's temperature settings, the PETG on the bed might peel off. So, you still need to tune your process for each material combination.
But if you can get it right, you can create some impressive prints.
Keep in mind that the Prusa XL in its standard form is an open-frame 3D printer. It's excellent 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 higher print chamber temperatures.
They do sell an enclosure for the XL, but if you're strictly printing ABS, ASA, nylon, or polycarbonate, a smaller enclosed printer like the Bambu Lab X1 or P1S might give you stronger parts out of the box - though only in single-material mode.
Here, cost becomes a major factor.
The XL enclosure alone costs $649, which is almost as expensive as a Bambu Lab P1S with AMS.
So, the decision of which printer to buy depends not only on its features or how much purge waste each printer generates – it may also depend on your budget.
Conclusion
From my personal experience, if you compare a fully-featured Prusa XL side-by-side with a Bambu Lab X1 Carbon, you'll find very few things Bambu can do that the XL can't.
Bambu's biggest advantages are its slightly faster speed and the ability to connect up to 4 AMS units, providing 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 build plate 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 with 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 in a single part using PLA, PETG, or TPU.
Or you're a professional where time is money, and the XL's toolchanging capabilities save you countless hours when printing multi-tool parts.
Finally, Prusa machines are manufactured within the EU; they have excellent customer support, and they clearly emphasize that their machines ensure your data security, which could 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 enjoy using the XL. The machine is ready to run out of the box with minimal adjustments, has a robust ecosystem thanks to PrusaSlicer, and after numerous firmware and profile updates, it delivers impressive results.
Also, if you already own a Prusa printer, I hear the MMU3 is finally working well, even printing up to 5 colors at once (though I haven't tried it myself yet).
All in all, it's great that we now have such a wide range of options. I hope this gives you a clearer understanding of how the different systems compare and which might be suitable for your projects.
Toolchanging systems are undoubtedly the most effective method, but they add complexity and cost – hence the higher price of the XL and its few competitors.
If you can leverage its true multi-material capabilities or save time, it's an excellent choice.
But if not, a multiplexing-based solution might be all you need.
Sure, AMS printers are slower and waste more material, but how many people actually print enough to justify the extra cost of the XL?
If you're really concerned about waste, perhaps multi-color 3D printing isn't the best option.
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