Optical properties of prusa filament.  

RE: Optical properties of prusa filament.

I wonder if anyone is interested in this topic?

RE: Optical properties of prusa filament.

I print all my lithos standing up for greater detail (using filament, not resin).

I usually go 3mm thick and i usually put a 4mm border for free-standing and no border for inserts.

I have used generic white, generic grey and generic beige. With grey require a little bit more light behind it.

These filaments are non-translucent. I tested a translucent red, but the details got lost in the greyscales.

Resin lithos; https://forum.prusa3d.com/forum/original-prusa-sl1-how-do-i-print-this-printing-help/printing-lithophanes/

RE: Optical properties of prusa filament.

Posted by: @forcestatus

I wonder if anyone is interested in this topic?

I've done a grand total of one lithophane on the Prusa, but it came out quite nice.  It was a gift to my wife, mounted in a backlighted spherical viewer. It was a photo of her favorite (late) cat.  I used four frosted LEDs for illumination, powered by a 5v 'brick on a string' and 220 ohm resistors in series with each LED.

I used Hatchbox white PLA, and experimentation showed that it came out best if printed vertically.

I really don't know of any standards for opacity of various filaments.  Of the white filaments, I know that Hatchbox and Overture have about the same amount of pigment and roughly the same opacity.  Solutech, on the other hand, obviously uses less white pigment and is more translucent.  If we wanted to get technical we could do some test prints of varying thickness (step grayscale in PLA) and measure them with a densitometer, which I do not have access to.

RE: Optical properties of prusa filament.

@jsw

Beautiful presentation Jsw. Thanks for letting me know about a densitometer, the look like quite an expensive bit of professional kit.. but you never know what you can find on FB buy swap sell these days ;p. 
‘I was looking down the wrong path at histogram light measurements.

I would indeed like to get technical on this front. There are other people developing tools in this area but information & data  is not readily available.. which I would like to see in the future.

RE: Optical properties of prusa filament.

I just thought i'd put in a picture when i experimented before christmas.

The light is an IKEA glass lamp with a 4w led frosted bulb.

The insert is a 0.2mm red translucent pla sheet.