Is It Better to Print on Acrylic or Metal?
- Print On Acrylic or Metal - What They Have In Common
- Choosing to Print On Acrylic
- Choosing to Print on Metal
- Metal Prints Have Another Option: Brushed Metal
- The Advantage of Frameless Size
- Print On Acrylic or Metal - Final Thoughts
- Recommended Photography Gear
- How To Give Your Photos a High-End Look
- 3 Tips for Turning Your Photos Into Beautiful Wall Art
- 4 Tips for Creating Photos that Grab People’s Attention
I am a huge fan of the extremely high-quality prints, photo books, and other photo items Saal Digital makes from my digital photography files. Whether you print on acrylic or one of their fine metal prints, you know you’ll get an outstanding photo print.
With so many options available, how does one decide between metal prints, acrylic prints, canvas prints, or one of their fine art papers?
Some photography styles or specific images look better on either acrylic or metal.
Canvas has a real draw, too, as does a fine art paper print for other types of images.
When you print on acrylic or choose metal prints, you’re doing so because you think that medium will work best for that image, regardless of the photograph. That’s your choice, and when using Saal Digital, it will look amazing either way.
Table of Contents:
Print On Acrylic or Metal - What They Have In Common
A photo print on acrylic or metal has a couple of things in common with each other. They have a richness to the blacks, colors, and other tones reproduced in the print, and they have a very durable finish, retaining their vibrancy and color fidelity for years.
Acrylic and metal prints have a quality that gives them a Wow! factor, the ability to be displayed without any frame or any additional matting.
More on that in a bit. Let’s first look at the characteristics of metal prints and acrylic prints.
Choosing to Print On Acrylic
Acrylic Prints from Saal Digital are a fantastic display method for photographic images.
When you print on acrylic, the image is on the back side of the acrylic plate. Then, an opaque film is attached to the acrylic plate so you don’t see through the finished print.
The acrylic is 0.2” thick and is optical grade. The edges are polished to a fine finish for an added touch of elegance. Saal Digital uses a 7-color ink printing method instead of the regular 4-color inks, providing more depth to the lighter, brighter colors.
This all means that Saal Digital Acrylic Prints give an extreme sense of color depth with any type of image. The image's sharpness is what you would expect from any professionally printed photo. In other words, superb.
Here is a YouTube video from the Saal Digital channel explaining some of the finer points of making a print on acrylic:
Choosing to Print on Metal
These are made by direct UV printing with a 7-color UV ink process on a high-quality aluminum composite panel, especially for photographic art. The 0.1” thick panels are a high-tech blend of two aluminum sheets sandwiched on either side of a polyethylene core.
Metal prints are weather- and fade-resistant and have excellent color fidelity and sharpness. Saal Digital metal prints are exceptionally lightweight while maintaining their rigidity, a definite plus when deciding whether to print on acrylic, which is a little heavier than metal prints.
Here is the Saal Digital YouTube video covering metal prints:
So now you’ve seen some of the details that can help you decide if you will print on acrylic or order a metal print!
Metal Prints Have Another Option: Brushed Metal
But wait, there’s more! Saal Digital has another option, Brushed Metal Prints.
Regular metal prints have a white base layer, reproducing your images in an exact form representing your colors and image sharpness. Brushed metal prints are made with a slightly different intent.
Brushed metal prints have either a silver or gold brushed aluminum surface instead of that white base layer of regular metal prints. Still made with the 7-color UV ink process, but now the brushed metal makes the brightest parts of the image shine through with a hint of the base metallic color. Darker colors will have more of a matte appearance.
Watch this Saal Digital YouTube video comparing their standard metal prints and brushed metal prints:
The Advantage of Frameless Size
One thing that all three of these methods have in common is that Wow! factor I mentioned earlier. The wow factor comes from a couple of acrylic and metal print properties.
A print on acrylic and any style of metal print already has excellent sharpness, and the color reproduction from the labs at Saal Digital is out of this world. So, you’ve got that depth of color from light to dark with superb contrast levels.
Add to that the impact of seeing metal or acrylic prints in person. That depth inherent in the image is displayed on a super thin sheet of material. With the mounting options available from Saal Digital, these large, thin works of art can appear to float just above the wall's surface.
When others see your images displayed as a large, extremely sharp, deeply colored print without any frame needed for the super thin substrate, the viewing experience is pretty extreme. That’s the Wow! factor.
Print On Acrylic or Metal - Final Thoughts
So, what else do you need to know to decide whether to print on acrylic or as metal or brushed metal prints?
Well, you might consider the type or style of image, the depth of color, shooting in Black and White, the wall space you’re using, or if you’re going to offer these prints as a stand-alone product or as part of a larger package.
I wondered about all those things the first time I tested Saal Digital metal and acrylic prints, too. The surface sheen and the weight of the final print are part of my decision-making process.
What will YOU choose for your first Saal Digital print?
