Color is, without a doubt, important in 3D printing. After being sent new filament colors from Toner Plastics, hosts Tom and Tracy Hazzard share their experience printing their newest tones. They have four new colors – Rose Tan, Black Raspberry, Red Delicious, and Teal. These colors are available in PLA and ABS, which you can find on their website. Tom and Tracy note some positive aspects to the 3D filament shop’s tones. These variations are something you, too, can be excited about!

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New Filament Colors from Toner Plastics

We are going to do something different, it’s not your typical Tech Tuesday subject, but we had new filament colors and new filament delivered to us as samples recently, and we want to share the information with you. We had some fun printing these coffee sleeves in new filament colors, so these new filament colors were sent to us from Toner Plastics. We have had them in our show a long time ago, and we talked about filaments. I think it was a year ago. We didn’t even ask for these new colors. They just sent them unsolicited, and we appreciate that. We got some new colors, and we tested it out. We printed a bunch of things with it.

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They have four new filament colors, one of them they call Rose Tan which has a cool color name. It is kind of like a cream and off white color to me. It’s a really rich creamy cream. If any of you have seen it on Instagram or Facebook, this is the color that we used to print the polar bears, in the picture of our daughter Lannea with her polar bear project. Polar bears aren’t pure white evidently, which is a fun fact that we learned in our research project. It actually comes out to be a really nice color for that. It was nice and creamy and off against the white of the cotton balls. It is a really pretty color and I haven’t seen a color like that out there. I really like it.

Rose Tan was the perfect shade for our daughters polar bear school project.

I think this is a much needed color, and one of my favorites of the new colors. The thing about white is that white is not always just white. There are so many flavors of white. The most common ones are the pure snow white and it’s a cool color and a cool temperature-wise. It’s a cold color with normal white.

But with this one, I really like how this cream color looks like. It’s warmer, and it’s an ivory-type color. If you were to print certain types of objects such as figurines that are meant to be more classical looking, they will look more real and less plastic like in a color like this. Sometimes when you print the PLA white, and because of the texture it tends to have a plaster look to it from a distance when you photograph, because it absorbs the light. It doesn’t look like shiny plastic. It looks matte plastic. And you get this sparkly little thing inside the house with the light. Sometimes, it can also have a sort of plaster-like appearance or ceramic appearance in some cases. But this one has a really much more natural look to it. One would certainly get to say, “Oh! What was that made in? That is really an interesting color. I see it is plastic.” These are the usual occurrences in your mind as you are looking at it.

I think it is not an obvious plastic looking color. The other place that I think it could be useful is as a substitute for flesh tone. The flesh tone colors out there are the ugliest colors, I have seen. They are like peach and it is not just a good color tone. It looks unnatural. With this one, it doesn’t looks like everybody’s flesh tone for sure. This doesn’t look unnatural. It has a really natural feel to it, so I think it would be a good substitute for that than those peaches and other things that they have out there. I am a fan of this color, and I need to get one. You definitely need to have some colors.

I have to go with Lannea’s favorite color. They call it Black Raspberry. It is a really good name, as it reminds me of this great Black Raspberry ice cream. This has a quality to it, because it’s not so chromatic that it looks unnaturally pure. It has a little bit of a great tone to the purple. It’s more like an Ona color, which is frozen. I can see why Lannea loves it because it is just perfect. It’s a great color and I think that it is really a good compliment to the bright purples that we have and the hot pinks. We don’t have anything in this realm. I think this new filament colors hit a gap in filament, especially in PLA color offerings today.

Coffee cup sleeve 3D printed in the Red Delicious filament color

My next favorite color is the red one that they produce. They call it Red Delicious, which I think is a derived name. It is also more brick red. The color is itself is unique. It is a unique red. Back a year ago, we were looking at doing some unique filament colors and we shared our color with them. These are similar and they are all in the same kind of targets of different colors that we are after. But they are not exactly the colors that you want in the red, as it is on its way to a Crimson kind of red. I think the issue was when we chose a red color; we chose a more burgundy-ish color which shows the crimson kind of think. We found a gap in that collegiate market which got a lot of burgundy. In all sports, there is burgundy all the time. There really wasn’t a burgundy filament. There wasn’t really a burgundy. That’s what we are going for. I think this is just a little great out. It’s a little brick-like that I have mentioned which is not really bad. I just think it doesn’t fit the gap that we saw in the market place. There is still that gap there. But what I do like is that it hits a different color for the holidays. For the holidays, everything was just like so Coca Cola red. This is a nicer subdued red for that purpose, and I think that could have a really nice look.

I agree, and I think that this is a really good filament that for doing things at the holidays this year coming up, and such. I also think that it is a nice compliment when you put it on that rose tan, because you are going to have this nice kind of things that you might want to put out on your patio, as it has a kind of feel of the tiles or things like that. You could have a kind of interesting thing going on with the colors. I think that would be what I would call a sophisticated color pairing. I think it is well done. We’ve been doing so many businesses things lately where Ross Halleck has been there and doing his wine tasting. He also talks about wine pairings. This was a sophisticated color combo, and I was elevating it with wine to a sophisticated wine pairing. Maybe it’s a stretch, but I like the color combination. I think they’re rich.

From left to right: Black Raspberry, Red Delicious, Teal.

I guess I am having bad 80’s flashbacks with this one. It reminds me of my first car, the Saturn. It has this kind of like Saturn Cayman colors. It’s not even that deep of a teal. It is a blue green teal kind of color. What it is, is that it’s another color that fits on the Elsa color scheme. No kid is going to be fooled that that looks like Elsa because it’s not blue enough. It needed to have more on the Tiffany blue side and it missed the mark there. I think this is going to be their lowest seller out of the other colors. It missed the mark and you can tell. It has a dirty green color to it and that is the problem right there. I just don’t see where that color fits in anyw