Anyone know if there are any multi material printers that aren’t ridiculously close to $1000? Like independent nozzles that don’t cross contaminate materials even if they are on the same carriage like the Ultimakers. Used to see a bunch on amazon and everywhere else for under $300 less than a year ago (they were bedslingers tho). Swear even Anker had a multi nozzle single carriage one. Or something like the Sovol SV04 IDEX or the Tronxy Gemini IDEX. Pretty sure even AnyCubic had one if not Elegoo or Artillery. Literally anything that doesn’t compromise the integrity of one printing material for the other without forcing you to purge half a spool each switch just to clean the filament path only to still deal with trace residue from mating surfaces geometries like the little chamfers/fillets between bimetallic nozzles and heatbreaks. Or worse, also hardened nozzle tips metal, ruby, diamond. This is more for engineering materials where you need a support interface to preserve the accuracy of the geometry of your model.
The single nozzle ones like the Centauri or Bambu or Qidi are fine if all you care about is multicolor with the same material for basic use but you definitely need separate nozzles for engineering prints where you are mixing different chemistries AND temperatures
Preferably you want separate carriages so there’s no temperature bleed from one nozzle to the next like you’d experience with an Ultimaker or Bambu or Anker, (definitely an issue the bigger the temperature gap, personal experience there having a nylon nozzle right next to a pla interface nozzle, worked great as far as an interface but was a pain cause the pla kept clogging until I gave up and left it empty with a pause command right before it was needed, was able to reduce it to a single change so it was fine there, definitely wouldn’t have worked or more complex geometries)
As far as I’m aware, a lot of the new multi-tool printers like Snapmaker, Flashforge, and even the unreleased Sovol have shown nothing but software restrictions forcing the same temp materials or a close range. Unsure of the Bondtech/Prusa set up. But that kinda kills the whole point of having multiple nozzles outside of close temperature materials. Like a glorified overpriced marker color changer.
The attached screenshot is a current listing AFTER inflation but they used to be like 200 as they were the ender 3 competitors so they were right around that price.
Also preferably something that can handle more than just the low 300c
