Multicolor printing has always come with an asterisk: every color change means purging the old filament somewhere, usually into a prime tower that can eat as much plastic as the model itself. Prusa's new toolchanger appears to have mostly solved that problem, and Tom's Hardware's review of the Prusa CORE One+ INDX, published September 20, 2026, rewarded it with a 4.5-out-of-5 score and an Editor's Choice badge — a rare combination for a printer add-on that costs more than many complete machines.
INDX stands for Induction Dynamic Extruder, and it's the product of a partnership between Prusa and Bondtech, the extrusion specialist Prusa has worked with since the original MK3 in 2017. Built on top of the CORE One+ Gen 2 platform, INDX turns Prusa's CoreXY machine into a genuine toolchanging system: instead of a single hotend feeding multiple colors through one nozzle (as Prusa's older MMU system did, and as AMS-style buffer units still do), each color gets its own dedicated tool that docks and undocks from the print head as needed.
That architecture isn't new — Prusa's own XL pioneered toolchanging years ago, and competitors like Bambu Lab have their own multi-tool systems. What's new is how INDX handles the moment a tool swaps out. Traditional toolchangers and MMU setups still have to clear old filament from the nozzle before a new color can print cleanly, typically by extruding a purge blob into a prime tower positioned off to the side of the build plate. According to the review, INDX instead relies on a wiper mechanism that cleans the nozzle mechanically, so each color change produces waste weighing only around 13 milligrams — smaller, the reviewer notes, than a grain of rice. Multiply that across dozens of color changes on a complex print and the savings in both material and print time compound quickly, since prime towers also add extra head travel and layer time on every single layer that touches a color swap.
How It Stacks Up Against the Competition
The review didn't take Prusa's efficiency claims at face value — it ran INDX head-to-head against the Bambu Lab H2C, currently the most prominent rival multicolor toolchanging system on the market. In that comparison, the reviewer found the Prusa system both faster and less wasteful, a notable result given how aggressively Bambu has iterated on its own multi-material hardware over the past several product cycles. Beyond the waste comparison, the review also credited INDX-equipped machines with CoreXY-class print speed, quiet operation, and the ability to run entirely offline — a detail that will matter to makers who've grown wary of cloud-dependent print farms and companion apps.
None of that comes cheap. A complete eight-tool CORE One+ INDX unit lists at $2,119, positioning it well above single-tool CoreXY machines and squarely in prosumer territory. For people who already own a CORE One+, Prusa is offering a four-color INDX conversion kit for $749, which Prusa estimates takes five to six hours to install — a serious afternoon project, not a five-minute bolt-on, but a meaningfully lower barrier to entry than buying a whole new printer. The review also flagged two real limitations: the system doesn't yet have an official Flex filament profile at launch, so TPU and other flexible materials require an unofficial, self-written profile with inconsistent results for now, and the price tag itself is the most obvious barrier for hobbyists who print in multiple colors only occasionally.
Prusa Research had already laid the groundwork for this review with an official blog post on August 20, 2026, confirming that INDX had begun shipping and that complete CORE One+ INDX printers were now open for order. That timeline matters: it means the Tom's Hardware review isn't evaluating a prototype or a limited pre-order unit, but hardware that's actually reaching customers, which lends extra weight to an Editor's Choice call.
What It Means for Makers
For anyone who has fought with a prime tower — watching a print's estimated time balloon, or scraping purge waste off the bed after every multicolor job — INDX represents a genuine architectural fix rather than a software workaround. Reducing purge waste from the gram-scale blobs typical of prime-tower systems down to roughly 13 milligrams per swap changes the math on multicolor printing in a way that MMU firmware tweaks never could. It also narrows one of the last practical gaps between single-color and multicolor workflows: less wasted filament means less wasted time, since every purge cycle also costs machine minutes.
That said, the $2,119 price point (or $749 for existing CORE One+ owners) keeps this squarely in the realm of makers who print multicolor work often enough to justify it — small businesses producing multicolor figurines, prop makers, or hobbyists who've simply had enough of prime-tower waste. Casual users who occasionally swap filament colors for a single print may find the investment hard to justify against cheaper AMS-style solutions, especially with an official Flex profile still unavailable. But for the segment of the market INDX is aimed at, a reviewer finding it both faster and less wasteful than Bambu's H2C in direct testing is a meaningful signal that Prusa's decade-long partnership with Bondtech has produced something more than an incremental update — it's a legitimate shift in how toolchangers handle the color-change problem.
