Metal Prints

by Joseph T. Sinclair.com

I vis­it­ed Magna Chrome (http://magnachrome.com) recent­ly in their Con­cord, Cal­i­for­nia facil­i­ty to inves­ti­gate how they make met­al prints.

The process is an inter­est­ing one. They first print the photo’s reverse image on a 5‑ft wide Epson print­er on spe­cial paper with spe­cial ink. Then they take the sheet of paper to a heat-press where they place the met­al plate (alu­minum) over it. The press com­press­es the print and the plate under one ton of pres­sure and 400° of heat.

The met­al plate has a translu­cent coat­ing on it which gives the print its back­lit effect. The spe­cial ink under pres­sure and heat goes from a sol­id to a gas bypass­ing the liq­uid state (sub­li­ma­tion). The gas pen­e­trates the coat­ing and fus­es direct­ly with the met­al leav­ing the translu­cent coat­ing on top. Then they cool, trim, and smooth the edges of the plate. They attach a mount­ing appa­ra­tus to the back with adhe­sive. The print is ready to be shipped.

Magna Chrome invent­ed this process sev­en years ago. It has sup­plied the tech­nol­o­gy and designed and built the heat press­es for sev­er­al large nation­al full-ser­vice pho­to ser­vices. Magna Chrome itself remains small and spe­cial­izes in just met­al prints. Because Magna Chrome is small, it prides itself on the extra care it takes in mak­ing met­al prints.

Besides being beau­ti­ful the met­al prints have an archival life of 330 years so long as they are kept out of direct sun­light. In addi­tion, you can clean off the sur­face using alco­hol. For that rea­son, hos­pi­tals are using a lot of met­al prints because they can clean them reg­u­lar­ly for hygien­ic purposes.

I like met­al prints because their cost is low­er than hav­ing a pho­to print­ed on paper and then cus­tom framed. Even with ready-made off-the-shelf frames, the met­al prints are com­pa­ra­ble in cost but less trou­ble. How­ev­er, none of this would make any dif­fer­ence if the met­al prints did­n’t look so good. They are high res­o­lu­tion and dazzling.

In my opin­ion, framed prints and met­al prints don’t mix well on the same wall. But in a room with just met­al prints, the met­al prints look nat­ur­al and a nat­ur­al part of the room.

Besides MagnaChrome, you can have your pho­tos print­ed on met­al by Ado­ramaPix (http://adoramapix.com) or Bay Pho­to (http://bayphoto.com). The prices are com­pa­ra­ble to Mag­a­naChrome. Bay Pho­to even goes so far as to pro­vide dig­i­tal edges and dig­i­tal frames that you can choose to make part of the pho­to­graph so as to give the effect of being framed on the wall. Indeed, I saw met­al prints in a down­town San Fran­cis­co gallery that had such a fram­ing effect, and they looked pret­ty good.

All in all, this is a dra­mat­ic new way to dis­play pho­tos. I expect these met­al prints to become com­mon­place in the next few years. Give met­al a try!