Desktop 3D printing has always promised “anything you can imagine,” but in practice, that usually means single-color PLA, lots of tinkering, and a trash bin full of purge towers. The gap between colorful renders and what actually comes out of most desktop printers has been wide enough to make many designers quietly give up on FFF for anything beyond simple prototypes. AtomForm’s Palette 300 shows up at CES 2026, trying to close that gap.
AtomForm Palette 300 is a 12-nozzle, enclosed 3D printer built to combine up to 36 colors and 12 materials in a single print. It uses a rotating OmniElement automatic nozzle-swapping system, where each nozzle stays dedicated to one filament. AtomForm claims that the approach cuts filament waste by up to 90% by avoiding constant purging, while still hitting 800 mm/s print speeds and 25,000 mm/s² acceleration in a 300 × 300 × 300 mm enclosed cube.
Designer: AtomForm
Most multi-material printers either swap entire toolheads or force a single nozzle to purge every time you change color, which costs time and plastic. The Palette 300’s turret of 12 filament-dedicated nozzles can jump from one to another without constant reloading, so complex color and material changes do not feel like a penalty. That means a product prototype can have brand-accurate colors and soft-touch grips in one pass.
The 350°C hotend and 300mm cube volume give headroom for engineering filaments and larger pieces, not just small decorative figures. A prototype sneaker with flexible soles and rigid eyelets, or an architectural mock-up that mixes translucent windows with textured facades, can happen in one job instead of several glued-together prints. That kind of integration changes how much iteration fits into a day and how confident you can be that parts will actually fit together.
Reliability is where the AI and sensing layer come in. The Palette 300 uses more than 50 sensors and four AI-powered cameras to watch the print in real time. Those systems automatically calibrate nozzle alignment across all 12 extruders and look for defects before a long job is ruined. For complex, multi-hour prints, that is the difference between trusting the machine to finish and spending the afternoon hovering nearby.
The studio-friendly details matter just as much. The fully enclosed design, ≤48 dB noise rating, and built-in air filtration make it plausible to run the Palette 300 in a shared office or classroom instead of a back room. It can connect to up to six RFD-6 filament boxes that keep 36 spools dry and ready, so a full color and material library can stay loaded instead of living in cardboard boxes.
AtomForm Palette 300 is an attempt to move multi-color FFF from novelty into something designers can rely on. It is a first-generation machine from a new brand, so long-term reliability and software polish still have to be proven. But the combination of 12-nozzle hardware, AI-assisted oversight, and a thought-through filament ecosystem makes it one of the more interesting 3D printers to come out of CES 2026, especially for people tired of choosing between detail, color, material diversity, or speed.
