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Posts Tagged ‘Printing’

Lenticular: A funny word indeed, strange & unfamiliar to most people.

A lenticular is a series of images (minimum of two) that are combined or interlaced into one final file and then printed on a plastic lens. The lens has tiny tactile ridges that refract light in such a way as to create motion or depth effects when the lenticular is turned.

How does a lenticular differ from a hologram?

Lenticulars are currently much more common in the medium of print advertising. But many customers, when searching for a lenticular printer, will use the more familiar term “hologram”. Unfortunately, this is a misnomer. A hologram is typically monochromatic and created with laser light reflected onto an emulsion. The finished product needs to be properly lit to achieve the ideal effect.

On the other hand, lenticular printing reproduces full color, photographic-quality images in a range of effects from morphs to animations to 3D Depth.

So what effects are available?

1. Flip: Perhaps the most basic (and popular) effect, this lens flips from one image to the next with a quick turn of the wrist.Flip lenticulars are also typically the most affordable as the set-up includes only 2 images.

2. Animation: This effect offers up to 12 frames of animation. All frames should be designed with continuity & fluidity. For example, 12 frames consisting of completely different designs would not reproduce accurately.

3. 3D Depth: This effect is the equivalent of creating real 3D Depth on a card without the use of 3D glasses. This is currently very popular with the recent influx of 3D films.

4. Zoom: Zoom images leap out at your audience in stunning 3D.

5. Morph: This effect offers a more detailed flip, where one image literally transforms into the next.

Where have I seen lenticular printing?

Chances are you’ve seen lenticulars hundreds or even thousands of times. Many gift cards use a “flip” or “3D Depth” effect. Visit any major retailer and scan the DVD section, you’ll see a good percentage of these are produced with lenticular covers. Many film releases are now promoted with large lenticular posters and lobby displays. The Guinness Book of World Records® certified a 98-feet long by 13-feet tall lenticular mural in the Mandalay Bay Casino to be the largest lenticular piece ever.

How expensive is lenticular printing?

New advances in technology have brought down the prices of lenticulars tremendously. Most manufacturers, until recently, offered minimum quantity orders of 2500 pieces starting at around – each. Minimum quantities and pricing has dropped significantly over the past decade. Lenticulars are now full color offset or digitally printed in quantities starting as low as 250 pieces. In addition, pricing has dropped to as low as.18 each on larger quantity orders of lenticular business cards.

What other advances have been made?

Years ago, lenticulars were on much thicker lenses and the clarity was substandard. Printers advised against using much text on the lenticular side, as most likely it wouldn’t reproduce accurately. Contact info was generally printed on the reverse side, if required. Today, with new technological advances, the clarity of lenticulars has improved greatly. Text reproduces more accurately and image sequences are clearer. In addition, today’s lenses are thinner and not so awkward or bulky (so they’ll fit better in your wallet).

How long do lenticulars typically take to produce?

Most manufacturers advertise a minimum of 3 weeks to produce professional, offset printed lenticulars. The set-up and interlacing is time-consuming & labor-intensive and typically a full gang run has to be filled before your lenticulars can be produced.

Lenticulars are available in a variety of sizes, from 3D business cards to 3D postcards to full size posters.

Are they worth the price?

Professional marketers are constantly looking for new ways to stand apart from the plain, the mundane and the boring. Nondescript, one-color business cards & flyers are quickly going the way of the Dodo bird. From foils to plastics to metals, printing is moving into the 21st century. Making 3D lenticular printing a part of your overall marketing plan is surely a savvy decision.

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Fargo ID card printer solutions are considered to be an eminent source of professional publishing. They are an expert manufacturer of secure identification systems for schools, colleges, small businesses or large enterprises. As plastic cards printer has become an essential ingredient of work-oriented corporate environments, Fargo continuously works to evolve its product range of ID card printers.

The Fargo card printers & encoders are designed to provide convenience with their user-friendly interface. You can publish anything you want in terms of plastic cards like ID badges , guest cards , member cards , health cards etc.Fargo presents its customers to choose between two different card printing technologies. These are High Definition Printing (HDP) or Direct To Card printing (DTC). One can experience superb print quality with High Definition printing. It uses dye-sublimation technology to produce sharp & vibrant 300 dpi images on the cards. The technology makes it possible to create highly secure cards with increased durability.

Determined to provide ease of use, Fargo ID card printers can be used to print proximity cards, contact & contactless smart cards. An ID card carries your photo, bio-data, signature & all the important, useful information. So they need to be protected against replication. A Fargo card printer is capable of presenting various levels of security. It has got printer models which allow you to print cards with standard or custom holographic images. Watermarks can also be added. Durability is yet another factor that is to be considered while getting a card printing system. It is not economical to publish ID cards on and on again. However, due to daily usage your ID cards start to wear. That is why Fargo ID card printers provide lamination facilities so that your printed cards may last longer. There are also separate card lamination modules available so that you can easily upgrade your simple printing system to a device which will print & laminate your ID cards .The Fargo ID card printer models are built to extend their functionalities to go with your printing requirements.

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The Fargo card printer range is specialized to provide incomparable security features. Some of the vital security options are magnetic stripe encoding, bar coding, biometric options etc. Its great visual security solutions like Holographic foil cards; Holographic Overlaminates & Holographic HDP® Film makes it impossible to alter the card details. Various software tools have been laid down by skilled designers which permit you to personalize ID cards. There are even network tools specially designed for corporate sector so that they may access a common database while using different workstations within the organization. Whether you wish to publish one sided printed card or you want to accommodate more data by printing on both sides, Fargo has it what it takes to bring down the exact desired results.

The benefits of having an in-house Plastic ID card printer are diverse. It brings you great savings in terms of money, time & effort. If an employee or a student misplaces his card, you would be able to instantly produce an ID card for him.  These are not only used for identification but also for secure access control.

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Mass goods were finally able to be produced through the Industrial revolution of the late 18th century, thus creating economies of scale which changed society for ever, in a manner that no one could have predicted at the time. A new manufacturing technology has emerged which does the absolute opposite.

Additive manufacturing, or 3-dimensional printing, now makes it just as cheap to produce single items, as it is takes to produce huge quantities. This may have as great an influence around the globe, as the Industrial Revolution did.

A three dimension printer operates by taking a 3D computer file and using it to make a series of cross-sectional slices. Each slice is then printed, one on top of the other, to arrive at the 3D object.

First you have the chance to modify colour and shape where required, before you press the ‘print’ button. The 3D printer commences to build up the article gradually, one layer at a time, either through selectively solidifying a thin layer of plastic, or metal dust, or by depositing material from a nozzle, using tiny drops of glue, or a tightly focused beam.

The object that finally becomes visible could be a spare part for your car, a lampshade, or a violin.

Small articles can be formed by a machine similar to a desktop printer, in the corner of an office, a house, or a shop. Larger articles such as bike frames, aircraft parts, or panels for cars, require a larger machine and a lot more area.

A big number of technologies are available to create 3D printing, the major difference being in the manner the layers are created to build parts. Some processes use softening material, or melting, to create the layers (SLS, FDM), while others lay liquid materials that are treated with different technologies. In lamination systems, thin layers are cut to shape and joined together.

The process is currently possible only with certain materials (resin, plastics and metals) and with a preciseness of approximately a tenth of a millimeter.

The same as computing was in the late 1970s, it is currently the domain of hobbyists and workers in a few academic and industrial niches. 3D printing is spreading rapidly though, as the technology improves and costs lessen. The technology is being used in footwear, jewellrey, industrial design, engineering, aerospace, architecture, automotive, dental and medical industries and construction.

Original articles can be produced by an artist or engineer etc., then duplicated using a 3D Scanner and printed out with a 3D printer, known also as a fabricator or “fabber”, which now costs less than a laser printer did in 1985. The scope of this new technology is merely as limited as the imagination.

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With 3D being on the spotlight in 2010 for the big screens and TVs, advertising and marketing professionals are seeking ways to present 3D on 2D media.

Lenticular printing finds its way to fill this gap.  It is a way to present 3D effects on 2D printed media without the need for viewers to wear any glasses. A piece of plastic called lenticular sheet is used to direct light ray to different directions depending on the viewing angle. Since there is an about 5cm distance between human eyes so for whatever objects we see our left-eye and the right-eye automatically form two different viewing angles. It is this fact that human can see the world three dimensionally. On a lenticular sheet there are many lenticules and each lenticule serves as if a convex lens. With careful calibration and design, the lenticules can present different images to the left-eye and to the right-eye, hence give the human brain the illusion of 3D.

The notion of converting 2D to 3D is actually very simple if you understand the principle of binocular disparity as described in the last paragraph. But the process is somewhat problematical if there is no help from ad hoc lenticular printing design software. Basically the 2D picture needs to go through the layering process. The result is that objects on the 2D picture will be on different layers of a Photoshop file. Once the objects are layered, a plan view of how far the objects are displaced is then drawn. An imaginative line is then drawn between the background and the foreground to represent the focal plane. This is the plane where the left-eye and the right-eye are seeing the same image. With the focal plane and the objects in place, one will use basic high school geometry to find out how much each object should be moved to the left or to the right when it is projected to the focal plane if it is seen by the left-eye. The same procedure is then done for the right-eye. Once these tasks are done one should get two resultant pictures, i.e. one picture meant for the left-eye and one meant for the right-eye.

The two pictures are then sliced and merged in such a way that when covered by the lenticular sheet the left-eye picture will be seen by the left-eye and the right-eye picture will be seen by the right-eye. Photoshop CS4 and up has build-in lenticular design functions. But if you are using pre-CS4 versions of Photoshop you will need to create the interlacing stripes by yourselves. For those who care to know the fundamentals please refer to the 2D to 3D Conversion Tutorial found on vicgi.com. Otherwise using the built-in feature from Photoshop should do the job much easier. In either case, understanding of the principle of binocular disparity is the foundation and is of paramount importance.

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HI, This is my homemade 3D printer at work. This is the head of Walt Disney. It was awesome… and freaky… to see the head being created by the printer. The material is ABS plastic and it took 2h45min to print. There are some imperfections but…hey..this device is a fraction of the cost of the ‘big’ machines.
The design is based on the makerbot open source project. Kudos to the team!!!
Let me know if you are interested and i will build you one

Printing 2 bottles in 48 minutes by UP! Personal Portable 3D Printer. Load STL file, print, get solide model, only 48 minutes!

ThingLab in London shows off their latest work with the ZPrinter 450.

Wow. Demo of 3-D objects that came out of a 3D printer. What’s amazing is that complex objects, with moving parts come out of the printer in one shot (in this case a ball bearing with balls inside).

John Balistreri, Professor of ceramics at Bowling Green State University, explains the rapid prototyping process and BGSU’s patented powder and binder solution as well as its applications to art, industry, and medicine. BGSU is the leader in ceramic rapid prototyping and this video showcases some of the work done by students, grad students, and professors from different fields across the arts and academia. For more information On Bowling Green State University visit www.bgsu.edu – For more information on John Balistreri visit www.johnbalistreriartist.com

I show you the startup and printing process of a 3d printer. Here is the link to the Catalyst EX 3D Print Software video: youtube.com Watch the full build from start to finish of the cup here: youtube.com