In a world increasingly obsessed with images that are moving and often – in the case of cinema and sometimes television – 3D, the latter packs a bigger punch. While this could be a cause for concern for printers worried about the steady rise of digital media, in fact the aforementioned kiss campaign is a good example of the power of print. Specifically, the power of lenticular printing.

Not that lenticular is anything new. Lenticular animation, morphs, flips and stereoscopic ‘3D’ have been around for years, with the medium always seemingly on the verge of a breakthrough. Every few years a new technology comes along that seems to have the potential to make lenticular more practical or cheaper to produce. This time around it’s wide-format lenticular that looks set, thanks to improved UV flatbed printer resolutions, to receive a boost.

The vast majority of the large amount of lenticular print currently produced can best be described as novelty kitsch: bookmarks and kids’ bedroom posters, for example. But it is possible, as with the Burberry kisses campaign, to create fabulously inspiring lenticular images too. Some customers will spend serious money for fine art or attention-grabbing displays. 

The drawback is that no specialist machines exist for the process. “Lenticular is such a small application that manufacturers will not produce special machines for it,” points out Daniel Pierret, managing director of DP Lenticular, the European agent for the US manufacturer Pacur’s Lenstar material.

This means that printers have two choices. They can either print the image onto paper and then carefully align and laminate it to the back of the lenses, which is a time and labour consuming stage. Or they can go down the more cost-effective route of printing directly onto lenses. This, however, requires a process that prints onto plastic, further limiting the viable technology options.

Until recently this has proved less of an issue for the small-format world than for wide-format. For small-format, UV litho presses can handle long runs printing directly onto lenticular, while HP Indigos and UV-capable DI offset presses such as Pressteks and old KBA Karat 74s, can handle the shorter.

Flatbed issues

But historically the only direct-to-lenticular printing process available in the wide-format world was flatbed inkjet. And while the UV inks used here stick well to plastic, until recently the flatbeds on the market have been limited to comparatively low native resolutions and large drop sizes. This limited the viability of lenticular because this sort of print demands high resolutions in order to fit enough detail into the interlaced strips. It’s also vital to place the printed image very accurately, which means a flatbed where the lens can be taped to a fixed bed.

Until now, then, those wanting to produce wide-format lenticular may well have ended up going down the route of using a wide-format inkjet to print onto paper and then laminating it. This is even more fiddly for wide-format than small, points out Pierret. “For large formats, UV flatbeds are the only realistic option, as lamination is very slow,” he says.

Fortunately for wide-format printers, UV flatbeds are now becoming a genuinely realistic option. The latest flatbed UV inkjets are getting better at printing high resolutions, with smaller drop sizes, at realistic production speeds, with manufacturers now often listing lenticular as one of the applications.

For instance when Canon announced its Océ Arizona 6170 XTS at last month’s Fespa Digital show it displayed 3D lenticular images printed by Vogt Druck in Germany. Fujifilm sells its own version of Arizonas with different software, called the Acuity family. At Fespa it launched the latest Acuity F flatbed and also showed lenticular samples. 

Agfa also had lenticular samples, printed on its new Titan HS flatbed. It has sold some Jeti flatbeds for lenticular work in Europe, though not so far in the UK. 

Meanwhile Flatbed maker Swiss-Q also showed lenticular samples on its stand at Fespa, and Screen was printing lenticular work created by the Dutch company Pixel.nl, using the high-speed, high-resolution Truepress Jet W3200UV flatbed. Durst, meanwhile, makes flatbed UV presses of increasingly high resolution, and says its Rho P10 family can match the Lambdas for quality and accuracy and would be suitable for lenticular (although nobody uses them for this in the UK).

Certainly those already in the wide-format lenticular market are taking advantage of flatbed UV advances. Reflex Printed Plastics, which already offered lenticular UV printing on its custom-built Komori B2 offset presses, installed a Fujifilm Acuity 3545 HS UV flatbed in 2011 to handle larger formats. It can output at a respectable 40m2/hr at photographic quality. 

“We didn’t want to buy a digital printer when they first hit the market just because it allowed us to churn out print quickly,” says sales director Kevin Lynch. “We believe you are only as good as your last piece of print, and despite the advantages of digital, we never saw it as a real competitor to litho quality-wise.”

The high-resolution Acuity HS changed minds at Reflex. “When three of the most respected print buyers I know all said that the Fujifilm Acuity produced the best quality digital print they had seen, we decided to take a closer look. We showed samples to our clients of lenticular and 3D print produced on the Acuity and received comments including ‘I thought you said you were doing this on digital!’” reports Lynch.

It’s a similar story at Riot of Colour in London, one of the UK’s most active large-format lenticular printers. Up to 40% of its work is lenticular, says director Andrew Roblett, with the majority being for window displays or fine art work for galleries. The company started in lenticular after installing a Durst Lambda colour film recorder in 1997. Roblett says that all lenticular work is now printed directly onto the lens, as it was found that laminated film would shrink and buckle after a number of years, which was no good for fine art work or long-term displays. 

Small formats are printed by UV offset, while larger formats are handled by a pair of Canon Océ Acuity flatbed inkjets. In 2010, Riot of Colour produced what it reckoned was the world’s largest lenticular display, a stereoscopic image to promote the DVD release of the 3D movie Avatar in the window of HMV’s store on Oxford Street. More recently it produced the aforementioned Burberry campaign. 

UV benefits

It seems, then, that higher resolution UV flatbeds could be just the thing for wide-format lenticular to finally really take off. And yet it could certainly be argued that small-format hasn’t suffered from quite the same print technology limitations, and still hasn’t really taken off in the UK.

According to Pierret, mass-produced lenticular products tend to come from the US, Eastern Europe or China (although he points out that DVD covers are often printed in the UK). 

“For printers, it’s more important to keep your machine running than to experiment with learning how to do lenticular,” he says, reporting that many therefore send lenticular work to a trade specialist, at most handling some of the creative and image processing stages before handing this over.

And dispensing with laminating only eliminates one of a number of fiddly stages involved. The fact is that printing lenticular can be fiddly at every stage, from image creation or capture, through processing into interlaced stripes with specialised software, to printing and finishing. 

But another obstacle to lenticular printing, that of the lens material required being very expensive, looks set to change. 

For some large-format work it’s possible to use a plain clear plastic instead of expensive lens material, with black lines printed on the top surface. The lines refract the light in much the same way as a round pinhole lens-free camera does. But this low-cost ‘barrier technique’ doesn’t give the same optical quality or viewing range as a lens as the black lines block reflected light so it only works well with backlighting. 

“The barrier technique needs backlighting to work,” says Andrew Roblett at Riot of Colour. “The grid blocks up to 80% of the data so the light is dimmer. It’ll never take off, because like holography you need special lighting. JC Decaux (the large outdoor advertising space seller) also developed it a few years ago, but it didn’t catch on.”

A more promising alternative to conventional lens material was previewed at Drupa 2012 by Scodix, using its specialised inkjets that print very clear UV varnish with a raised ‘embossed’ effect. The process can vary the height of the effect, normally to create textures, but at Drupa Scodix showed a printed lens. 

The Drupa sample’s effect (a flip) was relatively crude, but the company has been working on it since then. Mark Nixon, managing director of Scodix’s UK distributor Conversion UK, says that he’s seen samples printed on the latest Ultra machines that are much improved. 

“The resolution of the lenses is much higher with Ultra, but we need to do more tests,” he says. “We went to a lenticular printer six or eight months ago to see if it was okay and they said it was. I’m going back there soon with the latest results to see if it could be a commercial venture.” 

Going down this route tackles another problem inherent to conventional lens material: inflexibility. Being able to print small lenticular areas onto otherwise conventional substrates with a  Scodix machine would improve flexibility and cut weight considerably.

It seems, then, that there is much currently going on in the world of lenticular to make previously less viable wide-format lenticular applications increasingly achievable. High-resolution UV flatbed printers could finally provide a solution for those wanting to dabble in lenticular but less keen on a fiddly print and lamination process.

And in fact activity in this space, particularly Scodix’s raised varnish developments, could make small-format lenticular applications cheaper and more versatile. 

Printers will of course also need to get to grips with the lenticular pre-press processes before going down this route. But they should also take their lead from curious viewers of animations and 3D images, ensuring lenticular is for them too, something not to be overlooked. 

USEFUL CONTACTS

Conversion UK www.conversion-uk.com

DP Lenticular www.dplenticular.com

GBM www.gbm.co.uk

Hive Associates www.hiveassociates.co.uk

HumanEyes www.humaneyes.com

Imagiam www.imagiam.com

LumeJet www.lumejet.com

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS 

Virtual Images in California recently patented a spot lenticular process, although this seems to be a matter of forming lenses in specific areas of an otherwise smooth plastic sheet, rather than the printed spot lenses that Scodix (see main article) has demonstrated. 

LumeJet, the UK start-up that’s developed a very-high resolution (4,000dpi) digital press based on photosensitive paper, has also been exploring lenticular. “We’ve been approached by a number of companies that are interested and it lends itself very well to our process,” says commercial director Miles Bentley. “Unfortunately, we’re under heavy non-disclosure conditions, but people have come to us, rather than us going to them. They’re from the UK, Spain and the US.”

The 305mm-wide S200 press can’t handle large formats, but it could produce a lot of other work up to A4 or small panorama poster sizes. The standard photographic paper could be laminated to the lens material, but Bentley says that LumeJet has been talking to Fujifilm and Kodak with a view to developing a photosensitive coating on the back of the lens for direct exposure in the S200.

SOFTWARE OPTIONS

There’s a reasonably wide choice of dedicated lenticular software on the market at a range of prices and capabilities. It’s normally supplied as a series of modules that handle different stages. Some are the creative processes such as setting up flips, zooms, morphs and the stereoscopic depth effect. 

Then there’s the production stage, which converts the images into interlaced strips with the appropriate measurements for the lens material, printing process, print size, resolution and halftone setting. Normally this is priced at several levels according to the process, size and lens pitch. Low lens pitches and small sizes tend to be low cost, but large formats and high lens pitches are much more expensive. Even if your large-format work is going to be produced at low lens pitches, you’ll probably end up paying top money because of the size. 

It’s just about possible to set up the interlaced stripes using standard software like Photoshop with some fancy scripting, but it’s not easy and it demands a decent understanding of the process in order to calculate the resolution and stripe widths. 

HumanEyes, an Israeli lenticular software processing developer chaired by Benny Landa, is well known in the market due to astute publicity as much as its ease of use. First introduced in 2004, its software costs little for designers (£180) but is comparatively expensive for large-format and high-resolution licenses (£6,000 and over). However Alan Dixon, managing director of UK distributor Workflowz, says it’s available on a rental trial basis. 

Triaxes in Tomsk, Russia, offers Windows-based software in a range of prices, including some separate programs for speciality functions, such as converting stereo pairs to multi-view 3D. Its large-format print preparation software for inkjets is called Legend and costs from £510 to £1,315 depending on maximum output size. 

The Barcelona-based developer Imagiam has been selling its Lenticular Effects modular suite since 2000 and says it is used in demo suites by Heidelberg, KBA and Canon. It runs on Mac OS X or Windows and offers the creation, interlacing and printing of lenticular images with different effects – flip, zoom, movement, animation, 3D, etc. There are three levels: Standard, costing £630 (for lenses up to 80lpi); Pro, at £1,170 (also up to 80lpi but with additional offset printing and imposition features; and Ultra at £1,575 (full feature set with no lens pitch limitation). 

Founder David Garcia says that the entry-level Standard product would be perfectly adequate for large-format inkjet work, but the Pro version adds a few useful features such as PDF export and depth checking.