Laser Etched Photos of your Reptiles

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Would you get this if we made it available?

  • Yes

    Votes: 23 82.1%
  • No

    Votes: 5 17.9%

  • Total voters
    28
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As well as the shot glasses in the other thread, we are also thinking of custom laser etched glass photos of your reptiles. Something along the lines of you submitting your photo(s) and we etch into a panel of glass mounted in a frame. A unique way of displaying photos of your pets.

Examples shown below:

glass-panel-2-w400_zpsab315c62.jpg


laser-etch-glass-photo_zpsead06aeb.jpg


We haven't done any testing as yet but the machine we have access to is capable of this. We haven't figured out how much it costs but this will depend on how we source the glass panels.
 
yes depending on price

The laser can travel at 3m/sec so depending on testing we could potentially run at max speed which will reduce processing time immensely. I have managed to source wholesale picture frames with glass and frame for about $2.50 so I would imagine these to be very affordable. The wholesaler is in Victoria so keeping purchases in Australia is something we always try to do :)
 
i recon its a great idea especially wen you lose a pet to get one of these glass photos as a keep sake, something special to remember them by.

and their name engraved under the photo would be awsome.
 
My birthdays coming up lol i know what ill be asking for lol

Sent from my LG-P690f using Tapatalk 2
 
I don't know. I sounds like a great idea, but my sister got me a photo laser etched into a fake-zippo one year, and the picture was not that great to begin with and was just fuzz within the first couple of months. I get that being in a frame it wouldn't get damaged, but what would the picture quality be like? Would there be a way to at least get a rough idea of what the final product would look like before going ahead with it?
 
I don't know. I sounds like a great idea, but my sister got me a photo laser etched into a fake-zippo one year, and the picture was not that great to begin with and was just fuzz within the first couple of months. I get that being in a frame it wouldn't get damaged, but what would the picture quality be like? Would there be a way to at least get a rough idea of what the final product would look like before going ahead with it?

Rick, the fellow letting us use his Laser, showed us glasses he had etched frogs into several months ago and their quality had not lapsed. Essentially all the laser is doing is melting a small pit into the glass. The pit cools and becomes a permanent feature in the glass.

A Zippo is typically made from metal and as you have said it is a "fake zippo" I could guess that the surround wasn't solid metal but a cheaper metal plated with chrome or the like. While the laser would have etched the surface, it likely etched the plating which can rub off.

Similarly, if we etched into stainless, the laser is changing the molecular structure of the stainless and the etched in effect becomes a permanent feature of the surface.

I have already purchased two frames to hopefully do some testing early next week. If not, then certainly upon my return from Japan on the 12th of August. I will ensure we thoroughly test the machine and it's capabilities.

We will likely show plenty of examples in a thread on here to get feed back.
 
Sounds like and interesting idea. I would definitely be interested. The only thing is I don't have any nice photos of my gorgeous pets, well not ones I'm happy to keep forever.

I might have to remedy that.
 
This is a good example of the type of photo you would want to submit. Sharp (depth of field is ok, just not an entirely out of focus photo), high contrast and close up detail. Colours are not important as the image is lasered based on Black and White. This image was sourced from google and is not our snake, though I wish it was...

GTP_Original_zps8d2a6dcd.jpg
 
So we went to use the laser for the first time and now I know how to use this awesome piece of equipment :)

We tried to do the photo above and were having troubles getting enough detail in. We were making some progress and we ran out of time and so I went back home to further tweak the artwork. I thought I would look online to see if there were any tutorials on how to prepare photos for laser etching - and there were.

Turns out I was doing it all wrong and the hardest way possible - lol. So now what was a 1 hour process time per photo, becomes a 10sec process time. Before knowing this, I thought, man I will have to really ramp up the price of these photos, the labor time is nuts!

Good news is, the price we have planned for these hasn't sky rocketed and provided all goes well with tomorrow's testing, we will be looking at a good R&D for this new product offering.

We will likely take orders on APS exclusively before we put these on the website as there is some backend dev with submitting photos.
 
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So after the testing today we have come up with this. However we are not totally happy with it.

The main problem is getting the settings absolutely right for it to etch the right density of dots. Also having the image prepared in the right manner greatly depends on how it will finally look. We require high contrast in the image and we feel it is problematic, especially when we start getting images from the public. We thought we didn't have to edit the files, but it turns out we have to.

This weekend's testing was rather expensive and we are not sure where to go from here. The image shown doesn't give it justice due to the phone camera, however the etch isn't as clear as we want it to be.

This image is 250 x 150mm and took about 13mins to etch. Coupled with the edit time, it would mean one photo would be roughly $100 (cost to the customer).

We may instead make glass that has different designs like branches, leaves, etc and you would have to get the photo printed at a print shop. This would be a cheaper and less unpredictable solution.

Thoughts?
 
1fd160f3-87ed-4dfc-ae1e-a025777f8d8a_zps301e73a7.jpg



So after the testing today we have come up with this. However we are not totally happy with it.

The main problem is getting the settings absolutely right for it to etch the right density of dots. Also having the image prepared in the right manner greatly depends on how it will finally look. We require high contrast in the image and we feel it is problematic, especially when we start getting images from the public. We thought we didn't have to edit the files, but it turns out we have to.

This weekend's testing was rather expensive and we are not sure where to go from here. The image shown doesn't give it justice due to the phone camera, however the etch isn't as clear as we want it to be.

This image is 250 x 150mm and took about 13mins to etch. Coupled with the edit time, it would mean one photo would be roughly $100 (cost to the customer).

We may instead make glass that has different designs like branches, leaves, etc and you would have to get the photo printed at a print shop. This would be a cheaper and less unpredictable solution.

Thoughts?

Purely from my thoughts of this as a business opportunity I would think it is a waste of time and resources on your side. The market is going to be very limited (my experience with selling products on online forums is that there's a very low amount of completed transactions from commitments made in threads like this, in fact usually <10%). You are also looking at a price which is about 10 times that of a quality printed normal photo framed in colour with more detail. I think that really says it all!
 
Is there a way we could edit our photos before sending them in to cut down on labour costs? Such as this? Not sure how much time is spent editing for you guys as opposed to time spent calibrating.

14n2yro.jpg
 
Is there a way we could edit our photos before sending them in to cut down on labour costs? Such as this? Not sure how much time is spent editing for you guys as opposed to time spent calibrating.

14n2yro.jpg

I think something like this would come out a lot better than the GTP trial, simply because it has more stark colour variation ie black to white.
 
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