Filament is where every FDM print starts, and the right spool decides how a part looks, how it holds up, and how easily it prints. This section collects our filament buyer guides and material deep-dives: pick-by-pick roundups of the everyday plastics (PLA, PETG, TPU, and ABS/ASA), plus category guides to composite, flexible, engineering, and bio-based materials for jobs the standard spools cannot handle.
Not sure which material you need? Start with our 3D printer filament hub, which maps the whole landscape, explains how to choose, and points you to the right guide below. Every recommendation here is independently researched and tested against the printers people actually own.
Maxfilament, the Polish manufacturer of industrial filaments, has teamed up with a leading distributor of Flashforge printers to bring some interesting industrial filaments... read more »
Last week we took a look at some promising research that utilized processed pineapple leaf fibers for the production of biocomposites. Bioplastics and... read more »
Researchers from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and Newcastle University in Singapore have been experimenting with the addition of pineapple leaf fibers to PLA, to... read more »
Canada-based industrial and professional printer hardware manufacturer Dyze Design has announced the release of the Dyze Design Orthus, a new ultra-precise filament monitoring... read more »
You may recall a while back that we did a series of articles on various thermally conductive and electrically conductive polymers suitable for... read more »
Are you based in the Netherlands and looking for some 3D printing hardware and consumables? If the answer is “yes!” then we have... read more »
German automaker Audi has revealed their new in-house upcycling program that takes their own packaging materials and 3D prints them into assembly aids... read more »
When we hear the phrase “3D printed bearing” the first thing that may come to mind are the many videos of YouTubers testing... read more »
Plastic waste is a huge problem for the oceans of planet Earth. Humans produce over 300 million tons every year and at least... read more »
3D printer manufacturers are increasingly directing their attention to professional and industrial users, making their hardware more robust to improve repeatability and reliability.... read more »
In our review of BigRep’s flexible TPU filament, we discovered that the material works remarkably well for making epoxy resin molds and we... read more »
Medical and surgical applications make up a growing share of the professional 3D printing market and some companies are leaning into that fact.... read more »
If a poll was taken of makers around the world asking what one characteristic of 3D printing filament they’d like to be improved,... read more »
The US military is no stranger to 3D printing, having supported and developed a plethora of AM breakthroughs. Though they certainly work with... read more »
Exotic 3D printing materials are great and I’ve had a lot of fun reviewing BigRep’s flexible, high-temp, fast-printing, and transparent materials. Today, though,... read more »
When it comes to 3D printing filament, PETG is probably the third most popular material behind PLA and ABS. It’s generally easier to... read more »
Of all the materials from BigRep that we’re reviewing, I was probably the most anxious about TPU, a highly flexible material. I’ve used... read more »
As previously mentioned, we’re working our way through reviewing most of BigRep’s filament offerings. Today, we’ll be looking at PLX, a PLA-derived material... read more »
BigRep has customers in dozens of countries across the world. To provide the most consistent results for that massive network, they also make... read more »
In our efforts to empower our readers, we’ve reviewed another popular filament, colorFabb XT. This is a product of the Netherlands, a hotbed... read more »
