Welcome to the ColorFabb Filament Review. This is a review of the entire company, but test results are coming soon.
These filaments are extremely high quality. ColorFabb nGen, metalfill and woodfill filaments are superb exotic filaments. They might be the best filaments in their respective categories.
ColorFabb Filament Review: Introduction
ColorFabb is a high quality filament producer from the Netherlands. The company was launched in 2012 when the filament market at the time was dominated by cheap filament companies.
The founders of ColorFabb recognized the need for high-end, premium quality filament in the filament market, and created ColorFabb to meet the demand. They produce all of their filaments in house on six production lines.
They also package, store and ship their filaments from their factory and warehouse. ColorFabb’s operations are state-of-the-art and all of their filaments are high quality with very little variance in diameter.
Of course, as a producer of premium quality filaments, ColorFabb filaments are more expensive than other filament brands. You can expect to pay double or triple what you would pay for filaments from other popular filaments.
Why is ColorFabb popular?
ColorFabb has massive customer loyalty. Once customers find it they almost always come back for more.
ColorFabb has achieved this level of popularity because ColorFabb filaments are so high quality that printing with them is a dream. Paying a few extra dollars for a spool is well worth it when it saves time and energy that would otherwise be spent unclogging your extruder or finding printer settings.
A lot of serious ColorFabb customers order higher volumes of their filaments for wholesale prices that reduce the individual spool.
For instance, ColorFabb from offers a customizable 16 pack of their filament spools. These can be shipped to the US in under a week.
This brings the entire cost of each of these fantastic spools down by 25% or more.
For serious 3D printer enthusiasts, ColorFabb is one of the best filament brands available. While not necessarily great for large prints given the steeper price, ColorFabb is easily one of the best filament brands to print with and everyone should try it at least once.
ColorFabb Filament Review: Quality and Color Range
As a premium filament producer and distributor, ColorFabb filaments are top of the line.
Appropriately, the price is not as cheap as other brands, but the quality that you get for spending a little bit extra is undoubtedly worth it.
Color On Demand
ColorFabb offers all of the standard primary colors and different shades of many colors, such as 3 shades of red, 2 shades of orange, 4 shades of green, and several shades of blue, purple, yellow, and brown.
ColorFabb offers a similarly impressive range of colors for other specialty filaments such as nGen and ColorFabb XT.
For other types of specialty filaments such as wood and metal filled filaments, ColorFabb offers one of the best ranges of colors and tones available today. From cork, bamboo, and regular wood filament to bronze, brass, copper, and gold, ColorFabb easily blows the competition out of the water in terms of the number of different types of wood and metal filaments available.
But perhaps the most interesting thing that ColorFabb offers is a service called Color On Demand. With this service, you can order any color filament you want.
Prints: Strength and Texture
Prints using ColorFabb filament are always excellent. There are almost no problems except for some occasional clogs depending on how fast you are printing.
Sometimes when printing at very high speed filament can become compressed inside the extruder and block the flow of filament through your machine. This only happens rarely with ColorFabb but it’s worth considering as a possible cause for any blockages you might experience if you’re printing fast and at high temperatures.
The prints tend to have a matte finish with not so much shine as other filaments. But the overall texture is very nice and pleasing to the touch. The prints are also fairly strong.
ColorFabb mixes in PHA with their PLA, which improves the strength and durability of the filament.
Materials
ColorFabb produces some of the highest quality filament available on the market today. All of its filaments have exceptional quality standards and print extremely well.
They are also consistent from one spool to the next so you don’t have to worry about whether or not the next spool you use will be a dud. The diameter is in general fantastic and there are very few reports of any clogging with any filament.
When there is clogging, it’s usually user error and not a result of problems with the filament.
Here’s a run-down of the filaments ColorFabb offers:
PLA/PHA
The PLA from ColorFabb is very good. It has a matte finish and it’s not very shiny but it feels very good to the touch.
You can see the quality straight out-of-the-box. It looks good and it’s packaged well.
ColorFabb PLA has a very even flow through the printer and it’s wound around the spool well so that there is no problem feeding the filament into your extruder.
ColorFabb adds some PHA to their PLA, which helps give it a bit of extra strength. Just how much of a difference the addition of PHA makes is hard to judge.
Also, this PLA is harder to compare to other brands simply because there aren’t too many other filament brands that add PHA to their PLA.
That being said, this PLA mix is strong and well worth the money.
ColorFabb PLA is the go to filament for many experienced and beginner level 3D printer enthusiasts.
Wood / Metal
The wood and metal filaments are the most expensive filaments offered by ColorFabb with the exception maybe of the carbon fiber PLAs. However they are some of the best wood and metal filaments available.
These wood filaments look convincingly like wood when compared to other wood filaments available.
Other metal filament makers usually stick with silver and bronze, but ColorFabb makes a few other types of metal filaments as well. You can use them for functional parts given the fact that they’re slightly stronger than other PLAs.
You can usually pass them off as metal even though they have a slight matte finish because you can polish them up with a little bit of post-processing to give them a better shine.
nGen Co-polyester
In conjunction with Eastman Chemical Company, ColorFabb offers several copolyester materials for 3D printing called nGen, nGen_xt, colorfabb_HT and nGen-flex.
These materials all use Eastman’s Amphora polymer as their base ingredient. Amphora is a strong and nearly odorless polymer perfect for 3D printing.
ColorFabb created their nGEN filaments using Eastman Amphora with the intention of providing a printer material with high gloss and clarity but also with superior toughness, flexibility, and ease of use.
These copolyester filaments are sold in three grades to meet all of your printing needs. Each grade has different properties and we suggest you check out the ColorFabb website for more information.
However if you want to give one a shot, the easiest one to print with and the best one for beginners is the regular nGen. It is super rigid and doesn’t have a strong odor.
This basic nGen filament is also the most popular of the ColorFabb copolyester filaments due to ease of use.
Website, Packaging, and Spool Design
Visiting the ColorFabb website is a wonderful experience. You basically get to see what a top-of-the-line filament and producer should look like.
There’s a beautiful scrolling display of products you can print with and new types of filament that they offer. Plus there’s always a sale or some kind of deal on the sidebar.
The product listings are also very good with nice descriptions and easy to see pictures. The sign out process is great and you can pay in Euros or dollars depending on where you are.
There are absolutely no English spelling mistakes, which is not surprising at all given the fact that most Dutch people speak impeccable English.
As a European company ColorFabb is clearly oriented towards the global market, but especially the American market. ColorFabb makes it very easy for American customers to buy their Superior Products through their website.
Packaging And Spool Design
It is really a pleasure to receive a Colorfabb spool in the mail and open it up. Whether you buy it through a third-party or from the website, you’ll get a nice box with clear labeling and a beautiful logo.
The box will be shrink-wrapped and the spool inside will be shrink-wrapped as well with a desiccant included. This means that ColorFabb almost never has any problems with humidity or moisture getting inside the spool during delivery.
You can see a nice video on the website explaining the whole process about how the spools are produced, packaged and shipped. The shipping is done mostly by DHL and UPS.
ColorFabb also ships internationally with other package handlers.
The spools are made of a hard clear plastic with a sizable center hole diameter in line with most commercial 3D printers available today. The spools are able to comfortably handle the amount of filament on the role.
There are no tangles or tightness, even as you get to the center of the spool. The spools themselves can be recycled, which is nice because you can make your own filament with them if you have your own extruder.
Or if you simply wish to reduce the amount of plastic waste going into landfills, you can do so by recycling ColorFabb spools.
ColorFabb Filament Review: Who Owns ColorFabb?
ColorFabb is owned and operated by Ruud Rouleaux and parent company Helian Polymers.
Ruud Rouleaux is an additive manufacturing expert and leader in the plastics industry who recognized a need for high quality 3D filament in the filament market in 2012.
Founded the following year in March of 2013 in the Netherlands, ColorFabb is now a multidisciplinary team focused on providing the best quality filament possible to the 3D printing industry.
Where Does ColorFabb 3D Filament Come From? Where Can You Buy It?
ColorFabb filaments are produced at the ColorFabb manufacturing warehouse in Venlo, Netherlands. The warehouse has six production lines and handles all packaging and distribution operations.
The raw plastic itself comes for FKuR, a German plastics supplier. ColorFabb then processes these high grade plastics into filaments.
ColorFabb products are available both on the ColorFabb website and through resellers in various states and countries around the world. To find the closest source of ColorFabb filament to you, simply go on their website where they have a store locator map.
You can also order online from various resellers websites in addition to Amazon. Amazon carries many of ColorFabb’s most popular products.
However, for some of their better deals, such as the 16 filament spool pack, you have to order through their website or a reseller. Resellers often also have deals on colorfabb filament that ColorFabb itself might not be able to offer.
Also, on the ColorFabb website there are often fabulous sales and new limited edition filament materials for you to try. You can also find Value Pack samples, pellets and 3D printers for sale on the ColorFabb website.
ColorFabb Filament Review: The Take-Away
Anyone looking to buy filament from a brand that they know will work every time and provide the best printing experience possible should take a look at ColorFabb. Hopefully this ColorFabb Filament Review showed you why.
But ColorFabb is not not cheap. You will be spending almost double what you would spend on other filaments, such as Hatchbox and eSUN.
But just remember, ColorFabb is totally worth it.
Final Word
The ColorFabb value pack is possibly the best deal on the internet from any filament manufacturer. It offers a customizable set of 16 filaments of your choice.
They will ship it right to your door and international shipping fees included, buying this pack is still a deal in comparison to buying individual spools of colorfabb filament. Buy this value pack now and get the best filament deal on the internet.
The best part about ColorFabb is the overall care that goes into the production and sale of their filaments. Few other filament companies exhibit the standard of customer service, website maintenance, and packaging that ColorFabb does.
After all, ColorFabb was founded fairly recently in 2013 in response to the market need for better filament companies. In recent years, cheap filament has come to dominate the 3D printing industry as companies raced to produce ever larger quantities of low price plastic.
Color Fab aims to offer a higher-end alternative. And it does a great job.
Try ColorFabb today and if you’re not happy with the choice just call them up and send it back or they will offer a refund. But, you will almost certainly have a good experience.
Thanks for reading this ColorFabb Filament Review. Buy your own spool here.