Polymaker has announced CymphoniK, a color mixing system for pellet-fed large-format 3D printing that lets a studio produce custom colors on site from six base pellet materials and an online mix-ratio tool, instead of ordering a custom masterbatch for every brand color.
Studios printing large-format pieces for brand clients have had two ways to hit an exact corporate color, according to Luke Taylor, Polymaker’s creative director: paint the part after printing, or order a color masterbatch compounded to match. Paint chips in busy retail spaces, he says, and masterbatch comes with minimum order quantities and long lead times when a job may need only tens of kilograms. On pellet-fed large-format printers, that has made every new color a new material order.
The material side is six pellet SKUs: cyan, magenta, yellow and black, the CMYK model borrowed from print, plus white and natural. The natural key is the uncolored base PETG, which Polymaker fills with glass fiber for strength and printability, turning the transparent resin a milky natural tone. Mixing in a screw extruder is subtractive, Taylor explains, so cyan and magenta together come out darker; the white and natural keys pull the result back toward the lighter end of the spectrum. The approach is comparable to color mixing on desktop FDM printers, at pellet scale. The first formulation is built on Polymaker’s PETG-1213 R50, and the company says it has validated more than 100 colors on it so far, with translucent colors to follow.
Mix ratios come from CymphoniK Palette, a web tool with a library of pre-tested formulations and a prediction model for custom targets entered as CIE Lab values, RGB or CMYK sliders, or with a color picker. Palette is in a pilot phase behind a login for now.
Polymaker says it checks the formulations with Delta E measurements of printed samples against the digital target, and that it has validated the mixing on pellet extruders from various large-format system makers, none of them named, to show that consistent mixing is achievable across different screw and extruder designs.
“With CymphoniK, we wanted to eliminate the traditional tradeoff between color precision and operational agility in large-format 3D printing,” said Deborah Claxton, PolyCore Business Development EMEA at Polymaker. “Large-format studios no longer need to order thousands of kilograms of single-use masterbatch pellets or compromise on a brand’s exact pantone.”
Taylor told 3DPrinting.com that in his earlier career in retail model making, jobs were won or lost on color matching and availability. Pellet printing is turning up in more retail spaces, he said, and custom color is a key selling point for any brand.
The first CymphoniK pellet series and the Palette platform will be shown at Formnext 2026 in Frankfurt, November 17 to 20, with a display of case studies and live software demonstrations at the Polymaker stand (Hall 12.1, C21). More information is at cymphonik.com.
Source: polymaker.com
