Bambu Lab’s $2,499 H3C 3D printer swaps between nine heads in under six seconds

Bambu Lab’s H3C is the company’s first desktop 3D printer built around a tool changer, and that changes the maths of multicolour printing. Instead of purging filament at every colour change, it keeps nine separate print heads loaded and heated and swaps between them in under six seconds, according to Bambu Lab.

The company’s X1 and P1 printers, which arrived in 2022, made multicolour printing dependable but slow, because a single nozzle had to unload and reload filament for every switch. The H3C’s Swaptek system reads the upcoming G-code and starts heating the next nozzle while the current one finishes, so the new head is at temperature by the time it docks. As Notebookcheck points out, the heads take turns rather than printing at once.

Flexible filament is the other big promise. A FlexFeed extruder takes both 1.75 mm and 2.85 mm filament; the thicker strand buckles less under pressure, which Bambu says allows up to three times the flow of a conventional printer and reliable prints in TPU as soft as Shore 75A, the kind of material used in shoes and soft robotics. The nine spools sit in a sealed AMS 3H unit whose dryer reaches 85 °C, and hooking up another AMS raises the total to 24 materials.

Different nozzle sizes can also share one job, with a 0.2 mm nozzle for fine detail and a 0.4 mm one for the bulk of the part. At $2,499, though, the H3C is aimed at serious hobbyists and small studios rather than first-time buyers.

The H3C AMS Combo is sold through Bambu Lab’s online store. The Bambu Station base cabinet and the E1 Air Purifier, which starts filtering automatically when a print begins, are sold separately.

Reported by Bambu Lab via PR Newswire, Notebookcheck. Compiled with AI tools.