Prints on clear acrylic

[nolanola]

Hello forum.
We have a task to produce some prints on clear acrylic installed with standoffs.
What would be the best way to produce these? Or is the a wholesale coompany for this?
I've red about printing in reverese on clear vinyl and backing with white vinyl with wet application. Does this work?
We have an HP latex printer and a laminator.

Thank you.

 

[Stacey K]

Following.

I've only used solid cut vinyl on acrylic so I'm interested to hear about printed vinyl.

 

[petepaz]

cheapest way is to print direct to the acrylic.
you can print on clear and then mount to the acrylic but you will probably need to also back with white vinyl for opacity .
reverse/backwards print on clear vinyl, mount white vinyl then mount to the acrylic panels

 

[P Wagner]

Hello forum.
We have a task to produce some prints on clear acrylic installed with standoffs.
What would be the best way to produce these? Or is the a wholesale coompany for this?
I've red about printing in reverese on clear vinyl and backing with white vinyl with wet application. Does this work?
We have an HP latex printer and a laminator.

Thank you.

 

[P Wagner]

Yes, printing in mirror to a clear film, and then backing with a second piece of white vinyl would likely work.

If you have a Latex printer with white (7/ 800 W), you could mirror print to clear and overprint with white, producing with a single piece of media.

 

[nolanola]

Thank you.
Can you recommend a vendor to print on clear acrylic?
Yes, we have 700w, so we mount it wet or with a laminator? I can't imagine mount vinyl straight exactly where you need it with a laminator. Probably having 1//2" bleed will help.

 

[JBurton]

Yes, we have 700w, so we mount it wet or with a laminator?

Either way, but make sure to try this out in house with something for yourself. The results are almost never perfect, and you can obviously see any trash under the vinyl. You may even consider trying p95 finished acrylic for the face side, to minimize blemishes and reduce glare.

 

[cbdigital]

We just purchased a flatbed UV for this very purpose. We can do up to a 24x36 I’m house and the prints look absolutely amazing.

 

[Pauly]

Yes you can print on clear and apply it. but it's not the same as direct printing to acrylic.

 

[Select Bulgaria Service]

You can do what you do. But you can also print directly on this material. Look for someone with a Canon Arizona printer or just buy a used one.
These printers exist in two variants, large and small table. You will be able to dress up columns or make kitchens. If you decide to print bathroom walls you will simply need to cover the ink with a paint that is moisture stable of water and moisture.
You can also slightly change the details of the picture by lighting the material from behind.

 

[DChorbowski]

We do alot of this, we print on 3M IJ8150 Optically clear vinyl with our HP700W. Printed in reverse with a overflood of white ink and with a 1/4" bleed. Prints are then laminated for protection and strength. Plastic is cleaned with sticky rollers several times and prints are either applied with soapy water or with the rolls roller flatbed applicator depending on their size. If applied wet, they are allowed to dry for a bit before trimming. Before we had the ability to print white, we would back with a white vinyl, or in some cases a reflective vinyl for a metallic look.

 

[White Haus]

We've done thousands of prints like this.

Reverse print on Oracal 3651 clear, back w/ white ink or 651 white vinyl, mount to clear acrylic w/ laminator. Add 1/4" bleed and/or cropmarks for alignment.
Make sure your shop is super clean, keep humidity high, shine a light along the edge of the acrylic as you're mounting the print and blow off any dust that (will) land on the piece before it gets encapsulated in there.

Run an olfa knife along the edge to trim bleed and voila, you're done.

And get your blank(s) cnc cut w/ pre-drilled holes. Make sure you use someone that knows how to cut acrylic and produce nice edges.

Make sure you know the stand off specs and make holes the right size so you have a bit of play.

 

[Superior_Adam]

I would find a local shop that has a UV printer and sub that out. A direct print will look much better than applying clear and then backing with white.

 

[DL Signs]

3 options: 1. farm it out to a shop with a flatbed/ 2. do like you were thinking, reverse print on clear, mount, then overlay white/ 3. print to a film or photo paper, apply an optically clear mounting adhesive film to the face, and lay it. The flatbed option is the quickest & lowest cost, the rest have more labor & materials involve, and as another pointed out taking care in making sure the environment you do everything in is clean. Back mounting on acrylic isn't very forgiving, if you have any dust or don't lay it perfect you're starting over. The place I used to be at did a lot of them, and printing to film and applying the transfer adhesive was the method we used, and used a laminator to apply the prints to the acrylic. They finally bought a flatbed, and we never looked back.

 

[nolanola]

Thank you!

 

[Gino]

What we've done over the years for this kinda situation is to print on the backside of clear acrylic in reverse and back up with a thin piece of almost anything, unless it's gonna be backlit, which I don't think your application calls for. This is by using a flatbed. The other printing machines do it, but I think this looks the best..... and the thicker the piece of clear acrylic, the nicer.

 

[signheremd]

3 options: 1. farm it out to a shop with a flatbed/ 2. do like you were thinking, reverse print on clear, mount, then overlay white/ 3. print to a film or photo paper, apply an optically clear mounting adhesive film to the face, and lay it. The flatbed option is the quickest & lowest cost, the rest have more labor & materials involve, and as another pointed out taking care in making sure the environment you do everything in is clean. Back mounting on acrylic isn't very forgiving, if you have any dust or don't lay it perfect you're starting over. The place I used to be at did a lot of them, and printing to film and applying the transfer adhesive was the method we used, and used a laminator to apply the prints to the acrylic. They finally bought a flatbed, and we never looked back.

We've used all three options as well. One thing I remember, when we did option 3 we one found that when you get near the end of a roll of the optically clear mounting adhesive, sometimes it would have a ripple/impression from where it had been taped to the roll and this would transfer to the finished piece. If you looked carefully, you could see it before applying it to the print. This was never a problem when using it to mount onto foamcore, but when reverse mounting it to acrylic it was.

 

[DL Signs]

We've used all three options as well. One thing I remember, when we did option 3 we one found that when you get near the end of a roll of the optically clear mounting adhesive, sometimes it would have a ripple/impression from where it had been taped to the roll and this would transfer to the finished piece. If you looked carefully, you could see it before applying it to the print. This was never a problem when using it to mount onto foamcore, but when reverse mounting it to acrylic it was.

Yeah, there was a lot that could go wrong with it, and such a pain, and we did hundreds of them... Was so happy when they finally broke down and got the flatbed.

 

[FlorenceC]

We've run a fair amount of custom interior wayfinding here lately and have found the clearest result comes from mirror printing directly to acrylic, then backing it up with an opaque white layer, either of ink (rather fragile) or (preferable/more durable) white vinyl with white adhesive backing. I do find the whole deal rather fragile, however, and if you are putting together multiple shapes and spacers as we did for this particular job, there can and will be pieces which pull off in part or whole just due to the fact that the acrylic is so smooth, so handling and sometimes duplicates are necessary.

We do a bit of mirror printing on clear vinyl here too, but I find that still tends to trap too much air between the vinyl and acrylic, even if applied on a roller table and it's super noticeable.

 

[ColorCrest]

We have a task to produce some prints on clear acrylic installed with standoffs.
What would be the best way to produce these?

You've posted an image of what is considered a "decor" photography product as opposed to a sign product. Most of the face-mounted decor is produced from aqueous printers because of their high resolution and wide color gamut. Some of the best examples are printed to a white polyester film and mounted with optically clear adhesive in a rather clean environment onto high quality acrylic, all designed for the job. Before inkjet printers became the norm, the process was (and often still is) to use a photographic polyester media with the other same components.

"Decor" does not often use standoffs but locking french cleats instead. Signage, on the other hand, has already been mentioned and flatbed printing can be great for that purpose.