this regards PLA, mostly silk,
i read somewhere that someone answered this question in a scientific-method way and the answer was “heck yes”;
what they did was use different colors to test the strength of the resultant print;
then they ranked them; red was the worst;
there was more-than-a-small difference in the overall range of the tensile stength numbers;
obviously there are different additives used for different colors ( and just as obvious we cant know what they are as they are buried in chinese factories);
so what i detected was different artifacting depending on the color used;
same g-code,same-printer,same filament dryness…
the first 2 photos are the overall models ( just to provide some context);
the 2nd 2 focus on the artifacting; the silver artifacted quite a bit less than the gold;
Yes the color will have an impact on the printing performance, although spools of filament have way more variables which can affect the prints other than just the color. The quality can be affected by the temperature, filament diameter, raw materials, cooling, retraction, age, moisture, machine slop, etc.
Even though these may not cause super big impacts on their own, when you start to stack them together they can have a fairly decent impact on the print quality. Even 2 rolls of the same color from the same brand can print a little bit different. Best practice is to run flow rate, temperature, cooling, and extrusion multiplier tests for each spool of filament you get. These are not very hard and can be done in less than an hour, and use a very little amount of filament. Then you can create slicer profiles for each filament in the slicer and this will result in much better quality prints.
Yes for sure. In addition to physical changes glossy filaments will highlight more imperfections than matte which hides them better. silks also contract a lot exacerbating the issue. Whites wear faster than other colours (most opaque white uses Titanium dioxide and it is very abrasive) Every filament and every colour has slightly different handling. I prefer matte filaments they also look smoother and cleaner even if they are not.
yikes, that is exactly what i feared and didnt want to hear;
tests on each spool;
and then there is also inconsistency within a spool, correct ?
note the following:
while some might consider them ‘pretty’ and surely ‘unique’, they are anomalies which i doubt i could reproduce;
can anything Other than intra-spool inconsistency explain this ?
Yes that is correct, making filament is far from perfect and is still in its infantile stage.
There is actually another thing which can explain this issue that you are having though… If you are running a direct drive extruder there will be extremely small variations in the gears which feed the filament into the extruder, these inconsistencies are fraction of a mm across the diameter of the gear and are usually caused by the gear not sitting perfectly centered on the shaft of the motor. As these gears spin around they make a tiny amount of difference on the pressure of the filament going through the extruder. This causes large inconsistencies in the overall surface finish of the parts.
There is a great video by MirageC where he delves a little deeper into this topic and even provides somewhat of a solution to this issue. Definitely worth a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6JmCdovE0U
