Hardware news · Prusa Research

Prusa's "+" Refresh: What Actually Changed on the XL+, Core One+ Gen 2, and Core One L+

Three flagship printers got a mid-cycle update — a nozzle wiper, new belts, and a toolhead calibration sensor Prusa says is roughly twenty times faster. Prices stay put, and existing owners are promised upgrade kits rather than a trade-in. Here's what each machine gained, and our read from the repair bench on who should actually order a kit.

Dreaming3D Inc. · Carmel Valley, San Diego · Print · Repair · Teach · ~11 min read · August 13, 2026

This is a refresh, not a replacement

Prusa Research has refreshed the XL, Core One, and Core One L rather than retiring them. The company is framing all three as evolutionary updates on machines that stay in the lineup, and — the part that matters most if you already own one — it plans full upgrade paths instead of restricting the new hardware to new printer purchases.

That framing is worth pausing on, because it is not how this usually goes. The standard playbook in desktop 3D printing is a numbered successor that quietly orphans the machine you bought eighteen months ago. Prusa's alternative is a plus sign and a parts kit. Whether the kits turn out to be good value depends on pricing nobody has published yet, but the intent is the friendlier one.

Everything below is Prusa's own description of its hardware, reported at announcement. We haven't had a "+" machine on the bench yet, and where a number is a manufacturer figure, we've said so.

What all three machines get

An integrated nozzle wiper

Every refreshed machine now has a wiper that removes stray filament from the nozzle before a print begins. If you've ever pulled a first layer with a hard bead of yesterday's PETG dragged through it, you know exactly which failure this is aimed at. Ooze accumulates on the nozzle between jobs, and the first thing a printer does on a fresh start is smear it across your build surface.

This is one of those upgrades whose value is invisible when it works. It won't rescue a badly tuned first layer, and it isn't a substitute for the periodic manual nozzle clean that every FDM machine still needs — our FDM maintenance guide covers what that actually involves. What it should do is remove a recurring, annoying, entirely mechanical cause of ruined first layers.

New GT1.5 belts

All three machines move to what Prusa calls GT1.5 belts, which the company says reduce the visibility of fine, repeating surface artifacts — the faint regular banding that shows up most clearly on large flat walls under raking light.

We'd treat this one with measured expectations until independent testing lands. Belt profile genuinely does influence tooth-frequency artifacts, so the mechanism is plausible. But surface finish on a CoreXY machine is a system property: frame rigidity, belt tension, pulley concentricity, input shaping, and what the printer is standing on all contribute. Belts are one input among several, and a belt change on its own rarely transforms a print. If you're chasing artifacts on a machine you already own, the cheaper diagnostics usually come first — belt tension and pulley grub screws are the classic culprits, and we walk through the whole diagnostic ladder in our guide to layer shifting.

XL+: the biggest overhaul of the three

The XL is Prusa's toolchanging flagship, and it collected the most substantial changes in this round.

The headline mechanical addition is a 360-degree part cooling system, closer to what the MK4S and Core One family already use. Prusa says the revised arrangement pushes more air, distributed more evenly around the nozzle, with the expected benefits landing on bridges, overhangs, and small features. Part cooling is one of the few areas where a hardware change reliably shows up in the finished part, so this is the upgrade on the XL+ we'd most expect to see in side-by-side prints.

The change with the biggest workflow payoff, though, is the Tool Offset Sensor. Multi-tool XL+ machines get a permanently mounted eddy-current sensor that measures each toolhead's alignment automatically during setup, replacing the older procedure that used a removable pin. Prusa claims the new process runs roughly twenty times faster.

If you have never run a toolchanger, that claim sounds like a spec-sheet flourish. If you have, it isn't. Toolhead offset calibration on a five-head machine is the tax you pay every time you swap a head, change a nozzle, or knock something out of alignment — and because a bad offset shows up as misregistered material boundaries rather than an obvious failure, you tend to discover it several hours into a print. Making that calibration fast and automatic changes how willing you are to reconfigure the machine at all. Prusa also says the sensor will support its forthcoming silicone toolhead.

Beyond that: high-flow nozzles are now standard equipment, and the enclosure has been redesigned with higher chamber temperatures in mind. Prusa's figures are roughly 50°C from the printer's own waste heat, with a planned active chamber heater intended to reach 60°C. That heater does not have an announced ship date, so we'd treat 60°C as a roadmap number rather than a capability you can buy today.

If you're weighing a toolchanger against the other approaches to multi-material printing — AMS-style single-nozzle systems, IDEX, and full toolchangers all trade off differently on waste, speed, and complexity — we've laid the architectures out side by side in our piece on IDEX and tool-changing systems.

Core One+ (Gen 2): the one that changes your day

The Core One+ Gen 2 received the most meaningful changes among Prusa's smaller enclosed machines, and they are aimed squarely at dead time.

A redesigned heatbed mounting system lets the bed reach temperature and stay flat without a separate soak period. For PLA, PETG, and anything else printed with a bed at 85°C or below, Prusa says the "absorbing heat" step is simply gone. Higher-temperature jobs should start sooner too, even if they don't skip the step entirely.

Heat soak exists for a real reason — an aluminium bed that heats unevenly moves, and a bed that moves after the mesh was probed gives you a first layer that's tight in one corner and floating in another. Removing the wait means the mount now handles that thermal expansion mechanically instead of asking you to wait it out. That's the right way to solve it.

In practical terms, for a shop this is the most valuable change in the entire refresh. A few minutes of dead time per job sounds trivial until you multiply it by a queue. If you run twelve short jobs a day, minutes-per-start compounds into a meaningful slice of a working afternoon — and unlike raw print speed, you get it back without touching quality.

Gen 2 also adopts the snap-on top panel that debuted on the larger Core One L, removable without tools, and Prusa says the automatic top-vent mechanism underneath it has been strengthened. Small thing; large quality-of-life difference on a machine you open regularly to swap materials or clear a failure.

Core One L+: the light touch

The Core One L+ gets the most modest refresh of the three: the shared belts and the nozzle wiper, and that's essentially the list. It already had the snap-on top panel that the Core One+ is now inheriting, and it isn't a toolchanger, so most of what's new elsewhere simply doesn't apply to it.

That is not a criticism of the machine. The Core One L was a strong large-format option at launch, and we went through the case for it against the obvious alternatives in our breakdown of the Core One L versus Bambu Lab. It does mean that if you own one, this refresh is the least urgent of the three by a wide margin.

Prices, shipping, and the upgrade kits

Prusa says the refreshed machines go on sale without price increases. Customers with existing unshipped orders for an XL, Core One L, or Core One+ will automatically receive the corresponding refreshed version — so if you have an order in the queue, there is nothing to do.

On timing, Prusa's stated plan is that assembled Core One+ Gen 2 and Core One L+ machines ship first, with assembled XL+ printers following later in August. Upgrade kits for existing owners are expected in the order Core One+, then Core One L+ and XL+ around late August into early September. Those are the company's projections at announcement, and ship dates in this industry move.

The software and ecosystem announcements around it

The hardware refresh arrived bundled with a run of ecosystem news, some of it shipping and some of it still in testing:

• INDX automatic toolchanger: Prusa says the first INDX systems for the Core One+ are close to shipping and will be fully compatible with Gen 2 machines. Customers who already ordered a Bondtech INDX Conversion Kit are to receive the Gen 2 hardware upgrade at no extra cost. INDX is also being tested on the larger Core One L.
• Automatic Pressure Advance calibration: in testing, not shipped. Prusa describes using the load cell to characterise the loaded filament and adjust extrusion as flow rates change, rather than relying on one fixed Pressure Advance value. If it works as described, that's a meaningful improvement over per-filament manual tuning.
• PrusaSlicer 3.0: the first alpha is due within weeks, per Prusa. Because PrusaSlicer supports machines across the whole portfolio, this one isn't limited to buyers of the refreshed printers — it's the announcement with the broadest reach. Our 2026 slicer comparison covers where PrusaSlicer currently stands against OrcaSlicer and Bambu Studio; we'll revisit it once 3.0 is out of alpha.
• HT Hotend: planned for the Core One and Core One L families in September, developed for high-temperature engineering filaments. If you're weighing whether those materials are worth the hardware, our filament guide covers what each one actually buys you.
• Prusa Connect Local: being prepared as a replacement for PrusaLink, offering Connect-style management entirely over a local network with no cloud dependency. Early access is aimed at users comfortable compiling and testing software themselves — so this is a developer-preview timeline, not a consumer one. For anyone who bought Prusa specifically for the offline-first posture, it's the most interesting item on the list.

Our take: who should actually order a kit

We repair FDM machines across San Diego County every week, Prusa included, and the question we expect to field for the next month is some version of "is the kit worth it for mine?" Here's how we'd triage it — with the caveat that kit pricing could change all of this.

What retrofits actually cost you, beyond the kit price

The thing we'd want anyone to weigh before clicking order: an upgrade kit is not just a part, it's a bench session. We say that as the shop that gets the follow-up call.

• Belt work invalidates your tuning. Any kit that touches belts means re-tensioning and re-running vibration compensation afterwards. Skip that and you've tuned the printer to a belt tension that no longer exists — which produces exactly the artifacts the new belts were supposed to reduce.
• A heatbed mount change is a bed-level change. Expect to redo first-layer calibration, and expect the first couple of prints afterwards to be verification prints, not production.
• Don't install on a deadline. The single most common way a good upgrade turns into a bad week is installing it the day before something is due. Give it a low-stakes afternoon.
• Firmware and hardware have to match. Version gaps after a hardware change produce symptoms that look like mechanical faults and send people chasing the wrong problem entirely.

None of that is an argument against upgrading. Prusa's kits have historically been well documented, and plenty of owners will fit these without incident. It's an argument for scheduling it honestly.

The bottom line

This is a competent mid-cycle refresh that goes after workflow friction rather than headline specs: calibration time, print cleanup, maintenance access, cooling, and surface finish. None of it is revolutionary. All of it is the kind of thing that annoys you on a Tuesday.

The genuinely notable part isn't any single feature — it's that Prusa committed to upgrade kits so owners of existing machines aren't required to buy another printer to get them. That commitment is only as good as the pricing, which hasn't been published. But in a market that mostly solves this problem by releasing a new model number, choosing to sell people parts for the machine they already own is worth acknowledging.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to buy a new printer to get these upgrades?

No. Prusa says it plans full upgrade paths for existing XL, Core One, and Core One L owners rather than restricting the new hardware to complete printer purchases. Kits are expected in the order Core One+ first, then Core One L+ and XL+ around late August into early September. Kit pricing had not been announced at the time of writing, so the value question is still open.

I already ordered an XL or Core One. Will I get the "+" version?

According to Prusa, yes — customers with existing unshipped orders will automatically receive the corresponding refreshed version at no extra cost. If your order hasn't shipped, there's nothing you need to do. Confirm directly with Prusa for your specific order if the timing is tight.

What are GT1.5 belts, and will I actually see the difference?

GT1.5 is the belt profile Prusa is moving to across the refreshed machines. Prusa says it reduces the visibility of fine, repeating surface artifacts, which show up most clearly on large smooth walls. Belt tooth profile does influence those artifacts, so the mechanism is plausible — but surface finish depends on tension, frame rigidity, input shaping, and what the printer is standing on as much as on the belt itself. We'd wait for independent side-by-side testing before treating it as a transformative change.

Is the Tool Offset Sensor worth it if I only run one toolhead on my XL?

Not really. The sensor automates alignment measurement across multiple toolheads, so its benefit scales with how many heads you run and how often you reconfigure them. On a single-toolhead XL you would mainly be buying the new 360-degree part cooling plus the shared nozzle wiper and belts — a much weaker case for opening up a working machine.

Should I install an upgrade kit myself or have someone do it?

Plenty of owners will fit these without trouble; Prusa's kit documentation has historically been thorough. The parts worth taking seriously are that belt work requires re-tensioning and re-running vibration compensation afterwards, a heatbed mount change means redoing first-layer calibration, and firmware needs to match the new hardware. Budget a low-stakes afternoon rather than installing the day before a deadline. If you'd rather not do it yourself, that's what we're here for.

Does Dreaming3D service Prusa printers in San Diego?

Yes. We provide mobile 3D printer repair across San Diego County and work on Prusa alongside Bambu Lab, Creality, Elegoo, and most other FDM brands — belts, pulleys, motors, hotends, wiring, and calibration, diagnosed at your machine in the environment it actually prints in. We also offer one-on-one tutoring if you'd rather learn to do the work yourself. You can request a repair visit here.

SOURCE & ATTRIBUTION: Reporting on Prusa Research's August 2026 product announcement, as covered by All3DP (Carolyn Schwaar, "Prusa Upgrades Three of Its Most Popular Printers," 13 August 2026). All specifications, performance figures, pricing statements and ship-date projections in this article are Prusa Research's own claims at announcement and are identified as such. Dreaming3D has not independently tested the XL+, Core One+ Gen 2, or Core One L+. Ship dates and pricing move — verify with Prusa before purchasing.