Ten colours on one 1 kg spool? In February 2021 I printed my way through Xingtong Zhi Lian's (XTZL3D) multicolour PLA from start to finish to see every shade. It wasn't what I expected, but it was a lot of fun.
Not your usual rainbow spool
As always with this brand, the spool came vacuum-packed and very well done. But I was expecting something different. Many multicolour filaments repeat the full range every 15 or 20 metres. This one doesn't: it starts with one colour and slowly shifts to the next along the whole spool. So I had to use it all to see every variation.
From orange to electric blue
It started orange: a Benchy, the CaliCat (perfect, as always) and a couple of my articulated piranhas. Then it moved to dark orange, then brown and a kind of gold, where I printed one of the best vases I'd ever made, in vase mode with 0.8 extrusion width and a bit slower than usual.
Next came bronze. My kid asked for something from the movies, so I printed a small Darth Vader, very detailed even at 0.2 mm. I also finally managed a Julius Caesar bust that kept detaching from the bed in my previous review. This time it worked (removing the raft was hard, but that was my bed levelling).
From bronze it drifted to purple. A Klimt-style vase took 16 hours. I was worried, so I lowered the temperature and played with retraction, and it looks really good. Then dark, shiny purple, a low-poly fox for my sister, a grey section, and finally a sudden jump to a beautiful electric blue. That's where I printed a skull, a bowl for lollies and a scary-looking fish, just to finish the spool.
Who should buy it
All in all I counted around seven or eight different colours on one spool. If you want a single dragon that shifts colours, you'd need to print a huge one and you'd probably see only one or two. Where this spool shines is for beginners: when I bought my printer I didn't want to spend money on many colours, and this lets you try lots of them for the price of one spool. The PLA quality itself was excellent; this brand was what I used for all my blacks and whites at the time.