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Six lasers, 450mm bed: EOS brings the M4 Onyx to North America as the beam-shaping FLX nears. EOS brings its six-laser M4 Onyx to North America at IMTS 2026 in September, but the real story is the M4 Onyx FLX due Q3 2026 - four kilowatt-class beam-shaping lasers betting that a smarter, bigger spot beats adding more spots. Plus a live spec discrepancy between EOS and the trade press. 2026-07-16 · By FilamentFeed Staff Photo: René Volfík, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) EOS will bring its M4 ONYX metal laser powder bed fusion platform to North America for the first time at IMTS 2026, September 14-19 at McCormick Place in Chicago - but the machine on the stand isn't the interesting part. The M4 Onyx has been shipping since Q1 2026, and was unveiled at Formnext 2025 in Frankfurt before that. The genuinely new thing is a variant that hasn't shipped: the M4 ONYX FLX, due Q3 2026, which throws out the six-laser architecture and replaces it with four kilowatt-class beam-shaping lasers. That swap is a bet worth understanding even if you will never be within a hundred meters of a titanium powder handling station. Two ways to go faster. Metal LPBF has a throughput ceiling, and everyone knows exactly where it comes from. A laser melts a pool of powder, and that pool has to be small - a few hundred microns - because melt pool physics gets ugly fast when you dump too much energy into one spot. Keyholing, spatter, porosity, evaporation of the low-boiling-point alloying elements. So you get a small, well-behaved spot and scan it across a 450 mm bed one hairline at a time. The build takes days. There are two obvious escapes. The first is the one the industry has run for a decade: add more lasers. Two, then four, then eight, each with its own galvo scanner scanning its own patch of the bed. This is brute force, it works, and it brings second-order problems - overlap stitching where two lasers meet at a zone boundary, cross-contamination when one laser's plume drifts into another's optical path, gas flow that must sweep condensate off the entire bed uniformly, and calibration that must hold all those optical trains in agreement over a 450 mm square. The standard M4 ONYX takes this route with six 400 W lasers, and EOS claims 50% higher throughput than its previous systems as a result. The second escape is the one the FLX takes: stop making the spot smaller and start making it smarter. Beam shaping means actively controlling the spatial energy distribution of a single much larger spot - rings, cores, arbitrary profiles - instead of accepting the Gaussian your fiber laser wants to give you. Done well, you can run a kilowatt-class laser without the melt pool tearing itself apart, because the energy lands in a distribution the pool can absorb rather than a single scorching peak. Four lasers at 1.5 kW each is 6 kW of optical power against the six-laser machine's 2.4 kW, through fewer optical trains with fewer boundaries to stitch. If it works, it is a cleaner answer than adding a seventh and eighth laser. If it doesn't, it's four expensive lasers producing porous parts. EOS has published no process data either way, and the FLX is a quarter away. A specification discrepancy worth flagging. Two numbers in circulation don't agree. VoxelMatters, reporting the IMTS debut on July 15, gives the build volume as 450 x 450 x 360 mm and describes the FLX as using four 1 kW beam-shaping lasers. EOS's own press release gives 450 x 450 x 400 mm - explicitly footnoting that the figure includes the build platform - and specifies four 1.5 kW beam-shaping lasers on the FLX. Filamentfeed is going with EOS's numbers, since they come from the manufacturer, and the footnote suggests the Z discrepancy is a measurement-convention difference rather than an error: 400 mm including the platform and 360 mm of usable Z are not necessarily contradictory. The laser power gap is harder to reconcile - 1 kW and 1.5 kW are different machines - and neither source explains the difference. Treat the FLX's power figure as provisional until the machine ships. The rest of the claim sheet. EOS's release is dense with numbers, and they're worth the appropriate amount of salt, because they are vendor claims without published methodology: a 30% reduction in part costs; up to 97% system availability (OEE), which EOS explicitly conditions on full-service contracts; more than 90% powder material recovery; up to 50% reduction in QA expenses via digital fingerprinting; automated job changeovers in under 30 minutes through a Grenzebach Dual Setup Station; and software that cuts order-to-print lead times by up to 30%. EOS also says Smart Fusion minimizes supports and enhances surface quality, and credits its beam-control capabilities with doubling build speeds. Materials at launch are titanium, nickel, and stainless steel, with more on request; VoxelMatters additionally lists aluminum alloys. The 97% OEE figure tells you what this machine is for. Nobody quotes overall equipment effectiveness to a shop that runs one printer. That number is for a customer running a floor of them on production contracts, where an hour of downtime has a dollar figure attached and the service agreement is part of the product - precisely why EOS attaches the full-service-contract condition. VoxelMatters quotes EOS marketing director Patrick Boyd on working "closely with customers and partners across the defense and aerospace supply chain," which is the same sentence from the other direction. The supporting cast reinforces the read: an RFS Pro powder-recovery unit EOS says cuts hazardous waste by up to 90%, and a Volkmann closed-loop powder handling system. Neither is a printer feature. Both answer what it costs to run twenty of these continuously - the only question at this tier. No pricing was disclosed in either source, which for a machine in this class roughly means "if you have to ask." What it means for makers. Directly, nothing. You are not buying a six-laser LPBF system, and the FLX will not be showing up on a Kickstarter. Indirectly, the FLX is a live experiment in a tradeoff you already argue about. More heads or a faster head? It's the IDEX-versus-toolchanger debate, the same question every time throughput hits a wall. The desktop FFF answer has largely been "make the single head better" - high-flow hotends, better melt geometry - because coordinating independent heads over a shared workspace costs more in complexity than it returns in speed. Toolchangers exist, but they solve a materials problem, not a speed one. EOS is running both experiments at once, on the same frame, with the same bed, where the economics are brutal enough to settle the argument on evidence rather than forum opinion. The standard machine brute-forces it with six spots. The FLX bets that larger, actively shaped spots beat adding spots. Which architecture EOS is still selling in 2029 will tell you whether the "faster head" answer generalizes past desktop plastic. Worth watching, even from the cheap seats. Sources. In this story: EOS Also covering this space: Cosmic Herald - space & astronomy news.

EOS loves it too, yeah! Aluminium CP1 for all. EOS is adding Constellium Aheadd CP1 to its materials offering. In EOS-land, the material will be called EOS Aluminium Constellium CP1. In addition to the new CP1, Constellium's Al5X1 material will also stay in the portfolio, renamed to the snazzy EOS Aluminium Constellium Al5X1. The company also hopes that newer aluminium materials will enter into service on the back of this development. The two firms have made validated process parameters for the materials. What's more, you can now get help from EOS's Additive Minds team to scale up production in these powders quickly. Ludovic Piquier, Senior Vice President, Manufacturing Excellence and Chief Technical Officer at Constellium, stated, "This partnership represents a unique opportunity to bring next-generation aluminium alloys into industrial additive manufacturing at scale. By combining Constellium's alloy development expertise with EOS' leadership in AM, we aim to accelerate innovation and unlock new high-performance applications for customers worldwide." EOS CTO Joachim Zettler said, "With EOS Aluminium Constellium CP1, EOS Aluminium Constellium Al5X1, and our partnership with Constellium, we are setting a new benchmark for aluminium in additive manufacturing. Together, we are enabling higher performance, greater productivity, and faster industrial adoption for our customers." This is great news for $8 billion revenue aluminium giant Constellium. It's also yet another sign of the rise of what 3dprintboard call "designer aluminiums." In a deep dark past, we had something called AlSi10Mg. I called this "stupid aluminium" because someone would ask me if we had something called the 6000 series, which by the way is not some BMW from the future or a graphics card, but a material. I would then feel kind of stupid when I told them that all we had is something called AlSi10Mg, which they would have invariably never heard of and not understand. They would ask about things like "six oh six one," and I'd then kind of take the conversation back to titanium. Subsequently, people figured out that rather than being some niche thing, it could be super useful because 3dprintboard could do magical things with it. Beyond wrapping sandwiches, you see aluminium can be made to run super fast on LPBF machines, which makes it cheap. You can also have some that will let you anodize it or make post-processing easy and cheap. Slowly 3dprintboard has been coming around to this fantastic stuff with proprietary, unique flavors of it, like the Equispheres version. Now CP1 is surging ahead as the most desired one. SLM's Behrang Poorganji loved the material and predicted that it would get into more production applications at the beginning of the year, STELIA and Constellium wanted to use it for fuselages, America Makes paid SLM to make a dataset for it, and REM developed a specific finishing process to get it from out of deep pockets in complex channels. EOS says that it likes EOS Aluminium Constellium CP1 because of its elongation, better strength, and thermal stability. The material's lack of Mg and Zn help for "stable processing at high laser power and increased productivity," and it also has good corrosion resistance and thermal conductivity. It's also easy to anodize and polish electrochemically with easier heat treatment without quenching. These last few factors mean that it's cheaper to process, taking out some process steps and making part failure less likely. The company thinks that people will use it to make semiconductor heat sinks and wafer carriers, lightweight parts, and parts for corrosive places like plants. It also mentions heat exchangers, and this is likely where a lot of the excitement is centered on. Heat exchangers are great for 3D printing because they need different geometry throughout the changer, since the material will behave differently at different moments and stages. Thin walls are also important, as is thermal conductivity. You want to make them conformal, as small and efficient as possible, and improve flow with 3D printing. And if you can reduce processing steps and print them quickly, they'll be nice and cheap too. Heat exchangers are everywhere, and they can really affect the performance of an engine, a rocket, a really big machine made in Eindhoven, a complex system, anything really. In a lot of industries, heat exchangers are important. And if you're already working with 3D printing for your wings and seeker, then the heat exchanger could also benefit from 3D printing. In critical applications and applications where mass matters, heat exchange performance separately also often matters. And of course you can get mass and other benefits from making your heat exchanger lighter and smaller. This is the most valuable when the craft is expensive or its performance is critical. So these advantages compound one another. And there are literally millions of heat exchangers in use in quite high end applications. This is a significant opportunity for 3dprintboard. EOS is nice enough to say that "many existing AlSi10Mg applications can benefit from EOS Aluminium Constellium CP1's improved processing characteristics and performance advantages, offering manufacturers an affordable, high-performance solution." So let's totally re-qualify all the stupid aluminum stuff! Meanwhile, "Al5X1 provides a high-strength, high-elongation, and anodizable solution for demanding aerospace, transportation, and motorsport applications." That too has one-step, non-quenching heat treatment, and a "400 MPa and an elongation exceeding 13% after heat treatment." It's kind of better in shocks or with repeated stress maybe? Perhaps it's like a space or satellite material? Or is it just some F1 hydraulics or intercooler thing? Maybe since you can now make 3D printed suspension uprights, it's for that? The FIA has allowed CP1 previously, but seems to be more open to different alloys now, its long term hate campaign against beryllium notwithstanding. And of course, with the proviso that they're not used in heat exchanger bodies. I love this. EOS is opening up to software, adjustments, and materials. Many more people are going to be able to do more with their magic boxes. And CP1 to me just sounds like a perfectly sensible material for the future of additive in mature production applications. Stay up-to-date on all the latest news from the 3D printing industry and receive information and offers from third party vendors.

EOS sets 'new benchmark' for aluminium additive manufacturing with Constellium. "This partnership represents a unique opportunity to bring next-generation aluminium alloys into industrial additive manufacturing at scale." Published: July 07, 2026, 10:22 am EOS has announced a partnership with Constellium to expand access to advanced aluminium alloys for metal additive manufacturing. The collaboration will see EOS add Constellium's Aheadd CP1 to its materials portfolio, which will be marketed as EOS Aluminium Constellium CP1 from Augsust, while EOS's TCT Award-winnning Aluminium Al5X1 will be renamed EOS Aluminium Constellium Al5X1 and added to Constellium's alloy portfolio. In a press release, the companies said users of EOS and AMCM laser powder bed fusion systems will benefit from access to advanced aluminium materials with validated process parameters, and expertise for applications such as heat exchangers, semiconductor heat sinks and wafers, and lightweight structural components with moderate mechanical load requirements. Ludovic Piquier, Senior Vice President, Manufacturing Excellence and Chief Technical Officer at Constellium, commented, "This partnership represents a unique opportunity to bring next-generation aluminium alloys into industrial additive manufacturing at scale. By combining Constellium's alloy development expertise with EOS' leadership in AM, we aim to accelerate innovation and unlock new high-performance applications for customers worldwide." The companies said the partnership will extend further than these two specific materials and aims to build a long-term framework for the development of next-generation aluminium alloys for 3D printing. "With EOS Aluminium Constellium CP1, EOS Aluminium Constellium Al5X1, and our partnership with Constellium, we are setting a new benchmark for aluminium in additive manufacturing," said Joachim Zettler, Chief Technology Officer, EOS. "Together, we are enabling higher performance, greater productivity, and faster industrial adoption for our customers." EOS Aluminium Constellium CP1's is thought to be a suitable material choice for existing AlSi10Mg applications due to its improved processing characteristics and performance advantages, offering manufacturers an affordable, high-performance solution. EOS Aluminium Constellium Al5X1, meanwhile, provides a high-strength, high-elongation, and anodisable solution for demanding aerospace, transportation, and motorsport applications. Head of Content at TCT Magazine, joined the publication in 2015 and is now recognised as one of additive manufacturing's leading voices. Her deep application knowledge and C-suite connections make her industry insight second to none.