Creality has announced a new multi-color filament system called the Creality Filament System (CFS) that appears to be a major step forward for the capabilities of their 3D printers. While the CFS isn’t available yet and we don’t have all of the details, we’ll give you an idea of what to expect from this upcoming Creality product.
Creality recently hosted a livestream event for their 10th anniversary, and they used that event–all 2+ hours of it–to show off several new products in their lineup. Of these, the new K2 Plus 3D printer and CFS accessory were by far the most anticipated announcements. We’d seen a few vague rumors about a new multi-color 3D printer from Creality, but the recent event was the first time we were able to see the new printer and find out a few of its key specs. Let’s take a closer look.
The K2 Plus has a build volume of 350 x 350 x 350 mm.
Creality K2 Plus: The New High-End Creality 3D Printer
The K2 Plus is an upgraded version of the Creality K1 series with a few key improvements such as a heated build chamber, improved auto bed leveling, and AI camera features to detect print failures. However, perhaps the most notable feature of the printer itself is its size. The Creality K2 Plus has a 350 x 350 x 350 mm (13.8” x 13.8” x 13.8”) build volume, making it capable of printing larger items than even the K1 Max. We’ve all been wanting to see one of these newer enclosed CoreXY printers in a larger size, and it looks like Creality is going to deliver.
What is the Creality CFS?
But what most of us were really interested to see was the CFS multicolor add-on. We’ve been speculating for a while that Creality would release a product like this to compete with Bambu Lab’s popular Automatic Material System (AMS) unit, and the CFS appears to be Creality’s answer for multi-color and multi-material printing. The CFS was announced alongside the K2 Plus, but as we’ll discuss later in this post, it may be compatible with some of Creality’s other 3D printers as well.
The Creality CFS is designed as an enclosed box that holds four filament spools. During printing, it can switch between each of the four spools, allowing you to print in multiple colors or with multiple material types (for example, you could print support material using a water-soluble filament for easy post processing). If you want, you can even daisy-chain up to 4 CFS units together to print with a total of 16 colors or materials. Similar to Bambu’s AMS, the CFS also has an RFID reader for each of the filament bays, allowing it to auto-detect Creality filament spools and configure its settings properly. Fortunately, there’s no indication that this will prohibit the use of third-party filament, so we’d expect you to be able to use any filament brand you want in the CFS.
The Creality CFS is a multi-color add-on that allows you to print with up to 4 filament spools at once.
The CFS also appears to be designed to act as a dry box for storing filament, and includes a temperature and humidity display on the front of the unit. However, it’s unclear whether this is just for informational purposes, or if CFS includes a heater or dehumidifier to replace the use of a filament dryer.
On the software side, Creality demonstrated that you can use the touchscreen on the K2 Plus to configure the filament colors and materials in the CFS, with an interface that looked very similar to what we’ve seen on Bambu Lab’s 3D printers. They also discussed upcoming slicer improvements, which will be necessary to allow users to more easily configure multi-color prints. They didn’t show too many details on this yet, but this is going to be a key area to keep an eye on. In our experience, the software experience makes a huge difference in how easy it is to actually take advantage of multicolor 3D printing, so Creality will need to provide a good experience here to make the CFS a compelling option.
How Does the Creality CFS Compare to the Bambu AMS?
The Bambu AMS looks….very similar to the Creality CFS.
We’ve mentioned the Bambu AMS a few times here because it’s an obvious competitor to the CFS. The two products look very similar and share the same broad feature set, although there are a few differences. The Creality CFS includes a temperature and humidity display on the front of the unit, while the Bambu AMS has a humidity sensor but does not visually display its value (it’s only visible in the Bambu phone app, and only as a very rough measurement shown as a series of water droplets). Additionally, the CFS appears to integrate the spring-loaded filament buffer component inside its enclosure, making for a slightly cleaner installation, whereas the AMS has the filament buffer mounted to the back of the 3D printer. This likely isn’t a major difference between the two, but we did make note of it.
Although it’s not surprising Creality chose to mimic Bambu’s proven design from their AMS, we find ourselves wondering if they should have considered a different design, or perhaps modeled the CFS after the newer Bambu AMS Lite. While the enclosed design has the benefit of acting as a dry box for the filament, it can sometimes cause compatibility issues with filament spools–for example, the AMS doesn’t always feed from cardboard spools reliably. We’re hoping Creality has addressed some of those problems with the design of the CFS, but we’ll have to wait until we can test one to find out.
Creality announced that the Ender 3 V3 would work with the CFS, but we don’t know if that includes the Ender 3 V3 SE or Ender 3 V3 KE.
Which 3D Printers Work With The Creality CFS?
Although the Creality CFS was announced as part of a combo kit with the K2 Plus printer, it appears that it will work with some of Creality’s other 3D printers too. Creality specifically announced that the K1 series of machines will support the CFS, which is welcome news for owners of those models.
Creality also stated that the Ender 3 V3 series of printers will support the CFS, but we’re not clear on whether that includes the lower-end Ender 3 V3 SE and Ender 3 V3 KE models, or only the higher-end Ender 3 V3 and just-announced Ender 3 V3 Plus. It’d certainly be very exciting if the CFS works with the V3 SE and V3 KE, because this would enable a huge number of existing Creality owners to add multi-color 3D printing to their setup. We’ll report back if we hear any news in this area.
Creality has also said that future 3D printers will support the CFS, but didn’t give us much information about what future printers to expect. They did mention that there will be more printers in the K2 series, but we don’t have any details on which models may be coming next.
Price and Availability of the Creality CFS
Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait a bit to try the CFS for ourselves. Creality has announced the release date of the K2 Plus and CFS as July 31, 2024. Hopefully, they’ll be able to hit this release date, although we won’t be too surprised if it ends up getting pushed back by a few weeks.
Creality hasn’t released pricing for the CFS, so we aren’t sure what to expect on that front. With the Bambu AMS being priced at $350, we’d expect the CFS to come in at the same or a lower price. Creality often has aggressive pricing, so our guess is the CFS will be notably cheaper than the AMS.
We also don’t know yet what the pricing of the K2 Plus would be, although we’d expect the price of that printer to be fairly high since it is a larger and more capable printer than the K1 Max, which has a MSRP of $900. Our guess is that the K2 Plus could have an MSRP in the $1200-1300 range.
Creality is going to be releasing a combo kit of the K2 Plus paired with the CFS, and we’d expect a discounted price for the combo.
The Creality K2 Plus and CFS at Creality’s 10th anniversary celebration.
Looking Forward
The announcement of the CFS has us excited about the potential for a multi-color 3D printing option with Creality printers. Although Creality has produced dual-extruder 3D printers before with the CR-X series, we’ve had better success with the newer approach used by products such as the Bambu AMS. If Creality can combine the reliability and capability of the AMS-style filament system with their hallmark affordable prices and upgradeability, it could make for a very compelling 3D printer that gives us multi-color printing at an affordable cost.
We’ll be staying on top of the news surrounding the CFS and will acquire one for testing as soon as they’re available, so check back on this site for continued updates.