We were promised sneakers and dinner at the push of a button, and instead we got tchotchkes.

3D printing has not yet lived up to the hype heaped upon it, which we can mostly chalk up to the technical challenge of consistently printing multiple materials, and in multiple colors at once.

But Stratasys, the largest 3D-printing company in the world, says its newest industrial printer does both, marking what it says is an “industry breakthrough.”The J750 can print different materials in up to 360,000 different color shades, all in one print job. If the user is a footwear company that wants to print a prototype of a new shoe, the printer can run off the entire thing, from rubber sole to plastic eyelets, in one go. Without that ability, designers and engineers would need to continually reset their machines to print out different components, and then assemble them to get a finished product.

Beyond time saving, 3D printing allows you to create objects that can’t be created through traditional manufacturing methods, like shapes that can’t be achieved by screwing two pieces of machined metal together, or objects made from two different materials fused together. The future of manufactured goods, some suggest, will look a lot more organic because of 3D printing…

Source: We’re closer to a future where we can 3D print anything – Quartz