What’s the difference between our white acrylics? Make the right choice!

Posted By Capucine Lonjon on Nov 9, 2016 | 1 comment

Acrylic is one of the four materials we offer for laser cutting, with plywood, MDF and cardboard. Acrylic being a light-sensitive material, it can be hard to imagine what the material looks like only with the pictures you find on our acrylic material page. Many of you have asked for more precision to make the difference between our three ‘white’ acrylics, and choose wisely for your next laser cutting project. Here it is!

Acrylic is plastic. There are two techniques to fabricate it. Either the continuous cast process or the extrusion process. At Sculpteo, we provide acrylic sheets that were manufactured by the continuous cast process. In fact, thanks to this process, they are more resistant and translucent. Learn more on those two processes.

In this article, we focus on clear and white acrylics. What difference is there between each one? You can order your design in those materials directly on our website.

Difference between clear, translucent, diffuse LED and opaque acrylic

To make it clear, we’ve taken pictures with the different acrylics on a screen. The pictures don’t have the best quality but at least, the difference between our clear & three ‘white’ acrylics is obvious. The pattern on the screen appears more or less depending on the acrylic.

clear acrylic: it is as transparent as glass. It can be used for displays.
translucent white acrylic: light goes smoothly through.
diffuse LED white acrylic: light goes through at 30%. It can be used for signage and displays.
opaque white acrylic: light doesn’t go through the material at all. It can be used to reflect light.