Prusa adds glitter-speckled TPU for flexible parts and visible designs

Prusa has taken one of 3D printing’s most workaday materials and dressed it for the parts that stay in sight. Prusament TPU 95A Galaxy Black is a glitter-speckled black flexible filament aimed at RC tires, phone cases, shock-absorbing inserts, grips, and other end-use parts where a print has to bend, survive, and still look finished.

The new colorway comes in a 25 g sample and a 500 g NFC spool, and Prusa is pricing it in clear enthusiast territory. The Galaxy Black 500 g NFC spool is listed at $34.99 on Prusa’s product page, while the TPU 95A category page shows 500 g NFC TPU 95A colors at $37.99. Either way, this is not being sold like a commodity spool. It is being positioned as a premium material with a polished surface finish and the company’s usual production control.

That practical side still does the heavy lifting. Prusa launched TPU 95A in May 2025 after saying it had spent serious effort solving flexible-filament diameter consistency problems. The company says the material is manufactured to a tolerance of ±0.06 mm, and its TPU pages keep emphasizing in-house production, online spool inspection, and compatibility with the Nextruder. Prusa also lists the filament as a good fit for O-rings, spacers, rugged housings, sports equipment parts, cable protectors, grips, cleaning air blowers, and tires.

On the materials side, Prusa says TPU 95A has very low moisture absorption, high hydrolysis resistance, strong impact resistance even at temperatures as low as -50 °C, and good chemical resistance, mostly to oil and grease. It also carries a heat deflection temperature of 78.6 °C at 1.80 MPa, which keeps the conversation grounded in real functional use rather than just appearance. In other words, the sparkle is not replacing the engineering. It is riding on top of it.

The spool story matters just as much as the filament story. In October 2025, Prusa introduced OpenPrintTag, a redesigned, reusable, open-source NFC tag system for its Prusament spool. The company said the new spool design brings easier refills, slimmer dimensions, improved thermal resistance for drying, and a path toward automatic material recognition, fewer user errors, and better remaining-filament tracking for print-farm inventory. For a material like TPU, which often gets reordered for the same few practical jobs, that kind of workflow polish is part of the appeal.

So the answer is not that Prusa simply put glitter on a flexible filament and called it new. Galaxy Black looks like a cosmetic upgrade, but the more important change is that it lets TPU show up on visible parts without giving up the properties that made hobbyists trust it in the first place.