When prototyping we scrutinize our models to look for any small defects or to see how things are aligning.
This is a visual perception question, what color would be easiest to scrutinize a print? I know it is sort of an oddball question, but has anyone considered this?
In general any of the silk, metallic, shiny filaments will have a way of showing defects. Even bambulab basic in gold would work. So my preference would be some shiny PLA that is mid-range in brightness. Both white and black have a way of hiding defects IMO.
I guess it’s a bit subjective. I like gray in regular PLA and latte brown in matte for showing surface detail. For my old eyes the shiny stuff hides defects.
But definitely have considered it. Only problem is if the material is too different from what you’ll be doing final prints in, optimizations may not be the right ones.
Just what I was going to post.
This is not as oddball as you may think. It comes up from time to time.
I would concur, black, as my high school shop teacher used to say,“covers a multitude of sin” and white isn’t much better as it reflects too much light. Grey is the goldilocks zone in that it has sufficient contrast to pick up subtle defects that are more readable by the human eye.
However, that being said, there is no substitute for adequate lighting. For this purpose, I have a desk lamp/magnifying glass combo for exactly this purpose. For detailed inspection, I use a lighted loupe which is especially helpful when inspecting calibration tests.
I guess it depends a lot on what you’re prototyping. From the other posters it sounds like they are doing more “artsy” projects where surface consistency is important. For me almost all of my personal designs so far have been practical to solve real world problems. For me the color doesn’t matter. What’s cheap and on-hand is what’s best. Alternatively something close to the final product so that if no more iterations are necessary then I can just go with what I have. Your mileage almost certainly will vary. Good luck and good printing.
Thanks for the input everyone, I’ll be going with gray, and probably using the gray also for filament cartridges.
The type of project I am working on has tight tolerances, think of a sleeve fitted over a cylinder, with a helix on each acting like a “screw”. Is it catching on the inside of the threads? A seam? Was it just a hiccup in the extrusion? Having good “contrast” when assessing is very beneficial, and also as mentioned, good lighting and a pair of 4x reading glasses.