Multi-material 3D printing has always come with an asterisk: purge towers that can eat a meaningful share of a spool just to keep colors from bleeding into each other on a tool change. In a hands-on review published Sept. 20, 2026, Tom's Hardware tested the Prusa CORE One+ INDX, an 8-tool machine built around Prusa Research's collaboration with Bondtech, and came away naming it an Editor's Choice pick — largely because that purge waste has been reduced to what the review calls "one grain of rice" per color swap.
INDX stands for "Induction Dynamic Extruder," and the name describes the whole trick. Rather than a single hotend that has to be purged clean every time it switches filament, the CORE One+ carries up to eight separate toolheads, each with its own induction-heated nozzle. When the print calls for a color or material change, the gantry parks the active tool, swaps in the next one, and that tool is already at temperature — no reheating, no long purge sequence to flush the old plastic out of a shared melt zone. According to Prusa's own spec sheet, the swap takes about 12 seconds, versus roughly 42 seconds for the single-nozzle multi-material systems that dominate the desktop market today.
The mechanical simplicity is part of what makes that possible. Each toolhead in the INDX system is described by Prusa as having no moving parts beyond the nozzle and the filament path itself — there's no selector valve, no cutting mechanism, no shared feed tube that has to be flushed between materials. That's a meaningfully different architecture from the splitter-and-purge approach used by systems like Bambu Lab's AMS or Prusa's own earlier MMU, which route multiple filaments through a single nozzle and rely on purge volume to keep colors clean.
What the Numbers Actually Look Like
Prusa's product listing for the CORE One+ Gen 2 INDX 8-Tool lays out the machine's specs, while Tom's Hardware's own spec comparison lists an MSRP of $2,119 for the fully assembled 8-tool unit it tested, with a four-toolhead DIY kit starting at $1,699. The review notes a real-world street price closer to $2,249 for the 8-tool configuration — a reminder that official list prices and what you'll actually pay at checkout don't always match, especially on a machine this new. Either way, this sits well above mainstream Core-XY printers, and Prusa is explicit that the toolchanger is aimed at users who need genuine multi-material output rather than the occasional two-color print.
The core specs are otherwise familiar CORE One territory: a 248 x 205 x 270mm build volume, nozzle temperatures up to 300°C, and a heated chamber capable of reaching 55°C. That chamber heat matters for the material list Prusa publishes, which goes beyond PLA and PETG to include ASA, TPU, polycarbonate, PA11 nylon, PVB, and BVOH — engineering and soluble-support materials that benefit from a controlled thermal environment, alongside other non-abrasive filaments generally. Nozzle sizes range from 0.25mm up to a full 1.0mm, and per Tom's Hardware's spec table, the whole machine weighs in at 24kg on a satin powder-coated spring-steel flex plate, with automatic bed leveling handled by a load cell rather than a mechanical probe.
Tom's Hardware's pros list reads like a checklist of what makers actually complain about with multi-material setups: minimal waste, Core-XY print speeds instead of the slowdown that often comes with toolchanging hardware, a first layer the reviewer calls "perfect," quiet operation, the choice of a fully assembled unit or a DIY kit build, and the ability to run the whole thing fully offline — no cloud dependency required to get a print started. The cons column is shorter but notable: the machine is expensive, and at launch there's no Flex filament profile, meaning TPU users may need to dial in their own settings rather than rely on a built-in preset.
For makers who already own a standard CORE One, Prusa also offers a path in rather than requiring a full new machine: a conversion kit starting at $749 for a 4-color configuration. Prusa's own estimate puts the install at 5 to 6 hours, but the Tom's Hardware reviewer reports it actually took most of a weekend — a gap worth keeping in mind if you're planning the upgrade around a single free Saturday.
What It Means for Makers
The headline number here isn't the price tag — it's the purge waste. Multi-material printing has been technically possible on desktop machines for years, but the economics have often been brutal: a complex 4-color print could burn through nearly as much filament in purge blocks as in the actual model. Cutting that to roughly 0.013 grams per color change, per Prusa's figures, changes the math for anyone doing production runs of multi-color parts, cosplay props, or engineering prototypes that need distinct materials in the same print — soluble support next to a structural nylon part, for instance, without wasting most of a spool getting there.
It's also a signal about where toolchanging technology is heading generally. The induction-heated, no-moving-parts toolhead design sidesteps a lot of the reliability concerns that have dogged earlier toolchangers, where mechanical tool-park mechanisms and shared nozzles were common failure points. Whether Bondtech and Prusa's approach becomes the standard other manufacturers converge on, or just one well-executed answer among several, is a longer-term question. For now, Tom's Hardware's verdict is that it works as advertised: fast swaps, negligible waste, and print quality that doesn't take a hit for the added complexity.
The catch, as always with toolchangers, is cost and complexity relative to need. At $2,249 real-world, the CORE One+ INDX is squarely a machine for makers who need serious multi-material capability — not an upgrade path for someone printing single-color brackets. But for the audience it's built for, the review suggests Prusa and Bondtech have closed the gap between "multi-material is possible" and "multi-material doesn't cost you a third of your filament budget."
