Hello! First of all, sorry for my horrible english! I created a Full Color Sandstone map with diferent colored textures and the results were awesome!! You can see this results attached (the digital model and the shapways model). But the region with aeria photography (which needs a lot of resolution) don't seems as good as I wish. My question is: Will Shapeways improve the full color sandstone resolution in the future? Thanks you very much and sorry for my bad english, EsCos
Probably depends on availability of improved printers - as far as I know, they are using the (ex-)zcorp zprinter 650, now sold by 3dsystems as their projet x60 product line (600x540 dpi). The related projet 4500 - similar process but using plastic instead of gypsum, 600x600dpi , CMY ink so no true black, is what is used in the current "full color plastic" pilot program. (Things have gone a bit quiet about that one after initial mixed results). Shapeways has also promised to become a beta customer of HP's "multijet fusion" color printer that is currently in development, but not much is known about that machine.
Thank you for your answer!! Did you mean that the Full Color Plastic resolution is better than Full Color Sandstone resolution? Best regards, EsCos
Just some dots more, but one (important) ink less. To achieve darkness, instead of using a bit fo black, it has to mix all the other three.
Well, slightly better, 600 vs 540 dpi in one axis (and on the other hand the 4500 cannot print true black, so all grays and black must be dithered from the available colors, which will not help with resolution). My main point was that these printers are - unfortunately - the current state of the art. (Even the competing Objet Connex printer models by Stratasys, which shapeways does not use, appear to have the same resolution.) I wonder if anything could be gained from matching the resolution of your aerial image texture to the size of your model, assuming 600dpi (but I could be talking nonsense here, never tried this myself)
And a different post by stannum reminded me to mention that I was talking nominal resolutions here (printhead dimensions and positioning accuracy), while the effective resolution seems to be much lower (e.g. due to bleeding of ink into the surrounding gypsum material). So making the map match the nominal resolution is probably not going to help at all. Not sure if the Objet models I mentioned fare better in this regard, as they use dyed liquid photopolymers more like shapeways' "frosted ultra detail" acrylics instead of "white solid + dyed glue" - one drawback appears to be that they can provide only a preselected section of the full color palette in a given print run.
Thank you for your answers!! When Full Color Plastic is available, I will try to make an aeria photo map to test it! Gretings, Pere
From what I've seen full color plastic doesn't have better results than the Sandstone, and in some cases the absence of true black makes it look worse.