The Flashforge CJ270 is a desktop-sized material-jetting color 3D printer born from the company’s fast-growing experience in the jewelry space with its wax-jet machines.
The future is colorful, says Flashforge with its statement intro to the in-development CJ270 desktop full-color 3D printer at Formnext last week. The machine sat front and center at the company’s booth, yet cut an understated figure for what Flashforge proclaims as the “world’s first desktop full-color 3D printer.”
Described to All3DP as using similar tech to the material-jet printing employed in Flashforge’s WaxJet series of jewelry printers, the CJ270, Flashforge says, offers 10 million+ colors from its support of CMYK, white, and transparent photopolymer resin materials. Its desktop form, barely larger than a standard-size desktop filament 3D printer, has a build volume of 180 x 120 x 100 mm and is set to cost around $10,000. This is the ballpark figure – the CJ270 is still in development, with many details yet to be finalized and announced.
Flashforge has confirmed that all the color models displayed at the company’s booth were printed using CJ270 prototypes, so the system is much closer to reality than the impression given by the roughly presented demo unit at Formnext – hastily scrawled “do not open” sign sealing the printer shut, firmly in mind.
It’s difficult not to get swept along by Flashforge’s exuberance for color printing, particularly as color becomes an integral component of desktop filament printing. The company caters to this with its recently launched AD5X 3D printer, but the CJ270 signals a different vector for Flashforge, leveraging industrial tech to meet the apparent demand for color head-on.
Water soluble support material lets the system achieve complex geometries, while optional tools like ultrasonic cleaners expedite post-print cleanup. Flashforge outlined that the company’s goal with the CJ270 is to cater to users who don’t have the space or funds for the kinds of floor-standing systems offered by the likes of Mimaki and Stratasys, with that $10,000 price tag, which has yet to be fixed, backing this ambition up.
Flashforge is aiming to launch the CJ270 in mid-2025.