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![]() Lenticular Imaging: Differentiating Printing To Another Dimension
By Louis M. Brill
Passerby's stopped to check it out, watching the car doors open and close continuously. When a printing format has its viewers stopping once and looking twice to make sure what they see is what they saw at first glance, that's printing at its best. What they see is lenticular graphics that present either three-dimensional images floating in space or flipping back and forth revealing several different scenes in the same display.
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As sign makers continue to seek out new business opportunities and new value-added services to provide their customers, lenticular imaging periodically emerges as a candidate printing process for new market opportunities. What it does is allow printers to offer their clients a competitive difference in an advertising format that gets their messages noticed and remembered by passerby's who see them.
The lenticular process is an optical enhancement to conventional printing that transforms a hard copy poster, sign board or direct market mailing piece into eye popping three-dimensional or animated images for point-of-purchase, trade booth, or bus shelter graphics.
Sign makers can get involved with lenticular printing in one of several ways; they are either a full service center that accepts jobs from customers and produces them as finished ready-to-go posters and advertisements. Or they can act as a Value-Added Reseller (VAR). Working in tandem with a lenticular service center, they can offer the process, book a desired printing project and pass the work order on to the lenticular printing house that produces the job and turns it around to the VAR for delivery to their customer.
Essentially lenticular imaging is an optical process that takes advantage of how we see in three dimensions, mimics this viewing characteristic and duplicates it as a printing process, which when combined with a proper three dimensional lens, will allow the printed graphic to also be viewed in 3D.
Lenticular imaging as a printing/optical process creates a new design relationship in maximizing a sign's viewing presence. With this process, the image becomes a kinetic viewing experience where depth and motion become the dominant part of an image composition. There is also a certain intimacy of viewer involvement because as people look at lenticular signs they move around to watch its motion. If it projects into space, the temptation is to touch the image even though they know it isn't there. Market placement for lenticulars include trade shows, point of purchase displays, direct mail pieces, collateral marketing, movie posters and bus shelters. Its latest success is vehicle graphics with placements on taxi tops as promotional displays.
Creating a lenticular display has four requirements, a) it needs good artwork that will translate into a lenticular effect, b) an optical grade, high quality lenticular lens, c) a high resolution printer and d) a dimensionally stable printing material. Making lenticular images is very straight forward and utilizes tools already available as a significant part of any modern sign shop including computers, software, printers, sign display cabinets and a certain amount of brain power in making it all happen. Once an interlaced image is printed and laminated to its lens, it's like any other conventional sign, where the lenticular is mounted to a sign frame or placed in a light cabinet and ready for display.
Lenticular Image and Tri-Tech Graphics, two established lenticular print bureaus, discussed their unique approaches to this printing format and how they work with print shops and end-users in creating lenticular advertisements and displays for their customers.
McDonald succeeded by establishing high quality technical processes to make lenticular imaging a standardized printing process both with the use of good interlacing software and access to properly formatted lenticular lens. The software, which he designed, is known as Lenticular F/X and used for converting photographic imagery and computer graphic output into lenticular displays. The lenticular lens of choice is Toppan Lenticular lens of which he is also the distributor. Software and lens can be purchased through Lenticular Image and are the same materials and processes that are used by the company to create their own client projects.
McDonald emphasized that the secrets of good lenticular displays are using consistent, highly repeatable (guaranteed standards) lenticular lens and high quality printers for clear, crisp graphic output. For his print shop, he uses as his 'work horse' an HP 5000 with 1200 x 600 dpi with UV inks. The HP is used for large format graphics with any job project from 11 x 14 inches to 48 x 120 inches. For smaller projects or something needing high resolution (like video animation), he uses a LVT film recorder by Durst Dice America. This system has a resolution of 2,032 dpi and can print up to 16 x 20 inches in sign area.
For any printing shop or service bureau just beginning to become familiar with lenticular printing, a good way to start out is as a sub contractor working in tandem with a lenticular service bureau. McDonald says a lot of print shops do this, "they can sell the process, but don't have the expertise in-house to create the actual product, or to calibrate their printer for a lenticular project or to mass produce the cutting of their lenticular lenses to size for each job."
Just about every application of lenticular displays becomes a showstopper, "lenticular displays in trade booths are a sure bet for increasing booth traffic by at least 50%," says McDonald. In competing with 2D graphic images, McDonald noted that size doesn't always count, "We've seen that an 11 by 14 inch lenticular display has usually had more of an effect on an audience than a 30 by 40 inch 2D print. Why? Because people like to see motion or depth - it engages their attention and bingo! They’re remembering your advertisement.
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As advertisers use conventional outdoor printing processes to reach their customers, there's always a need to break through all the 'message clutter' on the streets and as Gould points out, "lenticular printing allows our clients to have 'a new look' in how they show off their products. Typically the business base for lenticular advertising is movie studios, food companies, cosmetic companies and large retail companies all looking to maximize their contact with their customers." "We work in large format and on a lenticular level, our smallest large format size is about 28 inches by 40 inches in lens size and from there we've produced images as large as 48 inches by 72 inches. Our lenticular production runs are a full range from a release of as few as 50 units for one customer to as high as 4,000 units of a single image for another client."
One aspect of Tri-Tech's approach to lenticular printing is that we utilize a 'direct to lens' approach in creating our images. This is as opposed to the more traditional lenticular production process of first printing to a translucent materiel that is then registered to a specific lenticular lens and then laminated to that lens as a final display piece." We prefer this approach because first, there is the convenience of eliminating the preliminary step of transferring the interlaced image to coated stock for registration with the lens. Second, Gould pointed out that in doing large production runs (in excess of 100 or more units), "we prefer screen printing, again because it's faster than an equivalent digital print process. For printed output, our preferred system is a Svecia Jumbo Screen printing press." Lenticular animation is successful because it's an easy way for viewers to ascertain a visual difference in advertising and Gould cites some recent lenticular projects Tri-Tech did, "For the Dr. Pepper - 7-Up beverage company we created a three-image flip showing off three brands (7-Up, Sunkist and A & W Root Beer). This sign was done for a soft drink vending machine company and for this, we printed the sign direct to lens, of which we did several thousand. This project was somewhat complicated because the sign display had a built in curve, which we had to take into account in finalizing the interlacing of the images. In the end, it worked out and was a great advertisement for the vending machine."
Louis M. Brill is a journalist and consultant for high-tech entertainment and media communications. He is also writing a book on the history and future of film entertainment. He can reached at (415) 664-0694 or lmbrill@earthlink.net
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