Selective laser sintering has always had a second half that nobody puts in the marketing renders. You pull a warm cake of powder out of the machine, then spend the rest of the day depowdering, blasting, and — if you want parts that look like products rather than prototypes — shipping the batch to a bureau that owns a five- or six-figure vapor smoothing cabinet. Sinterit's answer landed this week, attached to a printer it introduced earlier this year: the BIANCO2, a €47,000 CO2-laser SLS system. The news is less about the printer than about what sits next to it — Sinterit will now sell DyeMansion's industrial post-processing hardware directly, as part of the same offering.

The deal, and why it is unusual

Reported by TCT Magazine's Sam Davies on 22 July 2026, the arrangement makes Sinterit a direct sales channel for DyeMansion's VX1 vapour smoothing system and DM60 colouring system, sold as part of the BIANCO2 offering. The VX1 runs DyeMansion's proprietary VaporFuse Surfacing (VFS) process — a solvent-based treatment the company describes as safe and sustainable, producing high-gloss, water-repellent surfaces with consistent, repeatable results. 3D Printing Industry describes the resulting finish as comparable to injection moulded parts, and the DM60 as an automated colouring system for industrial polymer parts.

The word doing the work there is "repeatable." Hand-finishing sintered nylon is possible, and plenty of small shops do it. What they cannot easily do is guarantee that part number 400 matches part number 1. A sealed vapour process is the difference between a finish and a spec — much of what has kept small SLS owners out of end-use production work.

"This partnership brings together Sinterit's accessible and flexible SLS 3D printing ecosystem with DyeMansion's leading industrial post-processing technologies, enabling companies to configure complete manufacturing solutions tailored to their specific needs," said Łukasz Adach, Sinterit's CFO. DyeMansion CEO and co-founder Felix Ewald framed it around reach, noting that Sinterit "has built an impressive customer base across 80 countries in the last 10 years," and pointing to the compact Powershot — launching at Formnext 2026 — as part of making industrial-grade surface quality accessible to every customer regardless of production scale.

Both bring installed bases. Sinterit, founded in 2014 and focused exclusively on SLS, reports customers in more than 80 countries and over 3,000 engineering projects supported, per 3D Printing Industry's coverage of the partnership on 23 July. DyeMansion reports more than 1,300 installed machines across over 500 customers worldwide, with more than 50 of those having adopted the VX1 by Formnext 2025. Neither is a startup betting on the other; this is two established vendors deciding that the SLS purchase decision is a chain, not a box.

The printer underneath

BIANCO2 is Sinterit's compact powder bed fusion system, built around a sealed metal tube RF CO2 laser — 30 W at 10.6 μm, rated beyond 20,000 hours — with a galvo scanner and dedicated water chiller included in the package. It is aimed at white, natural and colourable powders, hence the name — a machine tuned with the DyeMansion end of the chain already in mind, since colour takes very differently to a part that started life bright white.

Pricing is €47,000 standard, with a launch preorder at 15 percent off — which works out to €39,950 — limited to the first 30 preorders and requiring 50 percent prepayment. First deliveries start in Q4 2026. That is a real commitment for a machine nobody has in hand yet; weigh the discount against the deposit.

The materials list is broader than the "white powders" framing implies: PA12 in ECO, Smooth and Industrial grades; PA 11.5; PA11 in Onyx, ESD and Carbon Fiber variants; polypropylene; Flexa Performance for flexible parts; and PBT Optimal. ESD-safe and carbon-filled nylons turn a prototyping machine into a jig-and-fixture machine, and PP remains one of the more interesting SLS materials for living hinges and chemically resistant housings.

137 parameters, and an open posture

The spec experienced operators will care about is in the software. Sinterit Studio Ultimate offers a "Full Open Parameters" mode with up to 137 adjustable printing parameters, and the platform accepts third-party materials alongside Sinterit's own portfolio. Powder bed machines are traditionally the most locked-down category in additive manufacturing: narrow thermal windows, expensive failure modes, and a vendor response of welding the profile shut and selling you qualified powder. Exposing 137 knobs is a different bet — that the people buying a €47,000 SLS machine want to develop their own material profiles, and that letting them do so grows the platform faster than locking it down protects it. For anyone who has fought a closed system on third-party powder, this is the headline feature.

The peripheral list on the product page reinforces the theme: alongside the DyeMansion hardware, Sinterit lists its Sandblaster SLS, Vapor Smoothing PostPro SFX, Depowdering PostPro DPX, the Multi PHS powder handling system, an ATEX vacuum cleaner, CADmix II, the CADgen PRO nitrogen generator and the Peel 3D scanner. That leaves more than one vapour smoothing path — the VX1 through Sinterit's channel, or the PostPro SFX. Sinterit publishes no comparison between them, so ask which is validated against which materials before committing.

What It Means for Makers

For the small shop, the practical change is procurement, not physics. Nothing here is a new process — VaporFuse and DyeMansion hardware were both already on the market. What changes is that the finishing hardware now shows up in the same quote as the printer, from the same vendor, with a path (VX1 for smoothing, DM60 for colour, Powershot as the compact option after Formnext) mapped out. That removes a common reason small SLS operations stall: the owner buys the printer, discovers that saleable surface finish needs another capital purchase nobody budgeted for, and settles for outsourcing or parts that look sintered.

Be clear-eyed about the numbers, though. Neither company has published VX1 or DM60 pricing, and industrial vapour smoothing hardware is not a rounding error against a €47,000 printer: treat the machine price as the floor of the conversation, not the total. And "first deliveries in Q4 2026" means nobody outside the two companies has run a BIANCO2-to-VX1 workflow in production yet. The strategic logic is sound; the validation data does not exist publicly.

The more durable signal is directional. Compact SLS spent its first decade competing on printer price, producing machines that could sinter but left owners stranded at the finishing step. Pairing an open-parameter printer with a sealed, repeatable finishing process, sold through one channel, is what the category looks like when it stops selling capability and starts selling output.

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