Decorative
applications of a holography
Prof. V.A.Elkhov and Dr. Yu.N.Ovechkis (NIKFI), Moscow
Several decades have
passed since the photography had been invented (40-s of the 19-th century) until it had
been widely applied. What was natural for the slow last century is not typical for our
days. One should remember the rapid development of semiconductors, lasers, computers, etc.
But in the case of holography we see again that this invention slowly finds its place in
our life. Having been discovered in the middle of the century and realized with the aid of
lasers appeared in the beginning of 60's the process of holography is not widely used till
now.
However, this is not
related to all applications of holography. The iridescent holograms become popular.
Millions of people use business cards, bank notes, certificates, telephone and credit
cards with holographic images to encode the information, struggle against fakes, to
improve the design etc. Some journals start publishing holographic illustrations. Many
companies use the iridescent holograms as labels and tags.
The field of
holography, which could be called as "pictorial" holography, possesses obvious
advantages in realistic reproduction of 3D objects but it is still a wonder that strikes
visitors of exhibitions of holograms.
The point is that to
bring a completely new product into the market one should overcome the natural
conservatism of customers. Aggressive advertisement, proper organization of sales and
training of personnel would help greatly.
But all of this must be
preceded by perfect elaboration of quality and performance of the goods. The customer must
clearly see the advantages of the new product as compared with ordinary goods, it must be
easily and conveniently used, possess modern design, have a wide range of types to fit all
tastes and at the same time it must be relatively cheap. Those purposes can be only
achieved by developing the production technology and quality control of raw materials.
In Russia works on
pictorial holography have been started in the beginning of 70's. They were carried out as
a part of the works on holographic cinema and independently. The accent was made on the
development of production of refracting holograms by the Denisyuk method as the most
prospective from the point of view of simplicity of reproduction by the common light
sources. For the problem was rather new the works were carried out in a series of adjacent
directions:
development of high efficient photographic materials for holography
and the procedures of pouring them on glass substrates including the big ones (up to
600x800 mm);
development of photo-chemical processing of holograms to provide the
high diffraction efficiency (40% to 50%) at low noise level;
development of methods to control the holographic materials
including measurements of holographic performance;
development of methods of recording and copying of small and big
holograms;
development of specifications for sources of white light to be used
for reproduction of holograms
development of holographic materials and the methods of
recording of color holograms.-->
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