Dual-wall dithering for full color prints - genuine breakthrough or just clever marketing?

I ran this comparison on my Artisan a couple months back with a two-tone vase test, same model printed with the dual-wall dithering and with plain single-wall color mixing, both in that translucent PolyTerra cyan. My takeaway matches your suspicion about wall thickness. With two perimeters the inner color showed up as a faint haze behind the outer pattern, almost like a shadow, and honestly it looked nice. With three perimeters it nearly vanished and I was back to reading one color. So yes, bumping the wall count flips the whole look, and if your model has variable wall thickness from the mesh itself you get banding where it changes.

The other thing I noticed is that the improvement in hiding the surface texture is real but small in normal lighting. Under my ceiling LEDs at a meter away I could not tell the prints apart. Side by side under a desk lamp at an angle, the dual-wall version did look smoother, mostly because the two patterns interfere and average out the ridges a bit. Where it fell apart for me was anything with infill showing thru. The inner wall pattern interacts with sparse infill underneath and you get blotches on the outside that no amount of tuning fixed. I would call it a display-piece technique, not something I would trust on a bracket or a handle. Worth trying if you already print with translucent filament, but I would not re-slice a whole project around it.

I want to push back a little on the haze issue though. On my J1s I ran a similar test with translucent orange and white PETG, printing a batch of drawer knobs and a small box lid both ways. With three walls the blend actualy looked smoother to me, not worse. My guess is the middle wall acts like a buffer, so the inner color diffuses through instead of sitting there as a distinct shadow. Those knobs have been handled daily for a couple of months now and the color still reads the same under warm lamps and normal daylight, so at least for chunky parts it survived real use fine. Where it fell apart for me was thin decorative stuff. I tried a sign about the thickness of a coaster and the two dither patterns just muddied into a dull gray. Not enough material between them for either color to come through clean. On the slicer sensitivity, it's real. I keep one profile locked at three walls and low infill for anything color-mixed now, because swapping wall counts on a whim changed the look mid-batch and wasted a spool. My suggestion for anyone testing this is to pick one wall count and hold it for the whole comparison, then judge the parts at arm's length in the room you'd actually display them in, not under a bright bench light.

I messed with this on my Snapmaker J1 a while back using some old translucent eSun PETG that had been sitting open for a year, and the results were all over the place untill I dried it. Wet filament gave me little streaks in the outer wall that I first blamed on the dual pattern itself. After a night in the dryer the blend cleaned up and the color mix actually looked intentional. So before judging wheather the technique holds up, check your filament is dry, becuase moisture noise and dither noise look way too similar. Has anyone else noticed that, or was my spool just particularly bad?

I'm still pretty new to this so forgive me if this is a dumb thought, but when you guys talk about the see-through filament doing the color mixing, does the color change depending on what's behind the print? Like if I print a lampshade-ish thing and it sits near a window, would the sun shining through it make the two colors look totally diferent than in the evening with just a lamp on? I only ask because I printed a little translucent teal holder last month and it looked way lighter during the day and I never figured out why.

I have to disagree with the idea that a third wall acts like a buffer. When I tried adding a perimeter on mine the blend just got weaker, like the outer color was being diluted by more plain plastic behind it. I think what looked smoother was simply extra material filling the surface, not the dither patterns doing anything clever. If that's the case you could get the same effect on a single-wall print by bumping flow or using a slightly fatter line width, no fancy mode needed. Has anyone tested that? Print the same vase single-wall with a wider extrusion and see if people can actually tell it apart from the dual-wall version in a blind side by side.

Tried something similar on a planter last month and the wall curvature mattered more than I expected. The curved sides hid the pattern blending pretty well, but the flat rim at the top just looked dirty, like the colors couldn't decide what they wanted to be. Curves seem to break up the dithering visually, flats don't. Curious if anyone's found a wall count that works okay across both, or if you just have to pick shapes that suit the technique. Also wonder if seam placement messes with it, since mine always seemed to start a visible streak right at the seam line no matter where I put it.