Lenticular film

Microsharp optical film production capabilities enable it to design and manufacture bespoke lenticular film for controlled angle of view diffusers, autostereoscopic displays and other applications.

Lenticular Diffusers

Diffusers are used for a variety of purposes: to hide a light source or to eliminate the image of its filament; to make the appearance of a viewing screen more uniform; or to spread the light from a source into a defined angle.

Lenticular films defocus collimated light sources. A suitably designed lenticular film can act as an asymmetrical diffuser to generate wide angles of view in a chosen dimension. Lenticular films can be overlaid to control diffusion in both dimensions.

Autostereoscopic Displays

Transparent lenticular film material has a very long history in its usage in autostereoscopic imagery - the production of images with a different appearance when viewed from different directions. The results are achieved by printing strips of alternating imagery under the lenticular film which projects the different strips in different directions. Therefore, each eye is able to see a different image, and the images seen change as the viewing direction changes.

The following figure illustrates the effect.

To form an autostereoscopic picture, part of the light diffused by the picture is seen only by the left eye while the right eye perceives a different part of the picture so the viewer can appreciate the depth. The use of lenticular lens to achieve such autostereoscopic effect is long known. As shown in Figure 1, the lenticular lens is employed as an angular filter to direct distinctly the light of the left and the right image.

There has to be a match between the size of the lenticular elements and the width of the image strips, and the thickness of the material should be such that the lenses focal point lies in the plane of the print. In many applications there is no need for a perfect alignment between the lenses and the underlying image stripes.

Advanced, aligned high precision ink-jet printing is capable of putting pigments or additional ink-jet printed optical elements onto the lenticular film, aligned with the lens structures.

Microsharp are capable of using its optical design capabilities to generate a lenticular pitch and profile matched to a clients application with pitches down to 20 microns.

Development and Supply of Lenticular films

Microsharp's competitive capabilities are associated with microstructured lenticular films - that is films with a pitch of 150 microns down to 20 microns to the client specification. Microsharp is able to design and specify such films to have specific diffuser characteristics or to be autostereoscopic.