KBA Seminar Explores Lenticular Printing Potential

KBA North America has staged a five-day seminar exploring the issues surrounding basic lenticular printing.

KBA North America has staged a five-day seminar exploring the issues surrounding basic lenticular printing.

The seminar held at KBA's USA headquarters brought together KBA's lenticular, printing and marketing personnel with owners and press operators of the KBA Genius 52 UV press.

KBA said that lenticular printing is a special technique that involves printing an image on the back side of lenticular plastic, allowing the eye to simultaneously view alternating sections of multiple images to give the impression of 3-D, flip, or motion.

Eric Frank, KBA North America vice president of marketing, presented a section of the seminar on markets and other options.

He said: "Lenticular printing continues to be one of the most sought-after techniques to attract a customer's eye and provide value-added services to a printer's bottom line.

It is always one of our most popular print samples and is an area in which we can assist our customers in moving forward to differentiate themselves in their marketplace." The five-day seminar was broken in to segments, beginning with a history of lenticular printing, describing the different animation effects and moving in to the various lens options.

Jack Minton of Pacur, a lenticular lens manufacturer in Oshkosh, Wisconsin (USA) gave multiple presentations and discussions.

Minton has more than 14 years of related experience and is well known for his expertise on lenticular printing and interlacing, added KBA.

A lengthy portion of the seminar was devoted to exploring pre-press, including the art requirements and file preparation needed to produce a successful lenticular piece.

Under the guidance of KBA lenticular specialist Rob Rudeski, the delegates learned about interlacing, the process of striping and arranging printed information to a given pitch to match a lenticular lens; available software; pitch testing, in which the exact count or number of lenticules per inch (lpi) is measured and mechanical pitch - the exact and true physical pitch of a lens.

Once the attendees had basic knowledge of lenticular printing, they were ready for hands-on production on the Genius 52 UV press.

Bruce Hathaway, KBA corporate demonstrator, commented: "We were able to explain, in depth, the printing issues that participants might encounter with lenticular techniques.

We showed them the correct feeding and register techniques with a 10-sheet make-ready.

Then we demonstrated how to finish their lenticular jobs with opaque white or lamination and how to die cut particular projects.

Probably the most exciting part was for the group to actually produce some unique lenticular jobs on their own." Those jobs included a 3-D lenticular marketing piece for KBA and multiple animated 3-D pieces.

Delegates also had the opportunity to use the latest video motion technology, which requires 32 images on one lens to reproduce a six-second video.

The seminar also turned to new markets for lenticular printing, such as packaging, point-of-purchase, direct mail, collectibles, premiums, magazine covers and inserts, art posters, and large format jobs.

Eric Frank explained: "We wanted to show our customers that the Genius 52 UV press can produce any type of lenticular job.

Any type of marketing campaign can include a lenticular job and can be easily produced yet set the printer apart from its competitors." Motion Imaging, a Farmingdale, New York 3-D motion lenticular product manufacturer, sent four of its employees to the seminar.

Beth Humphrey of Motion Imaging, said: "Going through the lenticular printing process from start to finish really helped me to understand all that needs to be done.

Having the team of experts on hand was great." A colleague of hers, Chris Aarseth, commented: "I will definitely be able to apply what I learned in class.

KBA has given us several new things to try and a better understanding of why we were having difficulties." KBA presented the seminar with a number of its vendors, including Lenstar, Pacur, Toray (a digital waterless plate manufacturer) and Kodak.

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