Why the laser etched picture is too light inside crystal?

When your received your order from the “photo crystal” vendor, you find sometimes that the image was too “light” or “vague” inside. What caused the problem?

The first thing I would do is to go back to your desk and check the image quality that you sent to photo crystal vendor. 90% of the times you would find out the image may not be “clear” at the first place. Meaning the resolution is too small ( less than 100dpi)

If the image looks all good, the next step is to check with vendor. It may cause either by not having enough “points” for the image during image converting process (from your normal jpg or tiff file to machine readable format), or by weak power of laser beam to blast “dots” inside glass. The picture inside crystal that you see, is actually consisted of millions of “point”, or laser blasted dot, that created by laser engraving machine. If number of the points is less than needed to represent the clear, it will be too “light”. If the laser power is not strong enough to blast enough points, it will create a “weak” image too.

How to tell the quality of crystal?

High quality crystal should have good clarity and smooth surface.

A piece of fine crystal has good clarity and the ability to reflect light. Although nowadays the majority of the commercial crystals are man-made (also known as Optical Crystal), the clarity should not be compromised. In fact, with today’s technology and precision processing, the man-made crystal should have better purity than natural crystal. The optical crystals allow the light to reflect through the crystal when it is put in direct sunlight.

Besides superior clarity, the crystal should also have no surface scratches. The scratches usually happen in the polishing or finishing process. Sometimes scratches are caused by improper handling.

3D Laser Color Photo Crystals

The so called “3D color photo in crystal” or “3D color picture in glass” generated a lot of buzz recently. Some even called it “revolutionary” technology. In fact, the laser engraving working process is nothing special, just the crystal or optical glass material is different, meaning the chemical ingredient is different than the “normal” crystal material.

I have seen a few samples from China or US based companies, as far as I can tell, this "Coloring" technology is not stable yet, mainly because the crystal material is not as clear as lead K9 crystal (K9 is the buzz word for high quality crystal). Sometimes you will also find the color difference or unevenness. The color is kind of "dull". Overall I don't think it worth the money (usually it is more expensive than "black and white" photo crystal)