If you’ve ever dreamed of owning a Van Gogh but don’t quite have tens of millions of dollars to spend on your obsession, Fujifilm has a more affordable alternative — kind of. Working with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the company has developed a 3D scanning and printing process that accurately reproduces the artist’s most famous pieces. Including the frames, the canvases, right down to the individual brush strokes. All for a slightly cheaper $34,000 price tag.
The process, called Reliefography, took Fujifilm seven years to develop, and is so detailed that only three copies can be produced a day. But given even the torn labels and hand written notes on the back of a canvas are perfectly recreated, it’s understandable why the process is so time-consuming.
To date, recreations of five different Van Gogh paintings have been produced, limited to 260 copies each. But more are planned for the future. And while the Van Gogh Museum has an exclusive three year deal with Fujifilm, other galleries are interested in the technology once that partnership expires.
Of course, as accurate as they are, the copies still won’t fool an expert. But for collectors and enthusiasts on a limited budget, this is as close as they’ll ever get to having one of these paintings in their home.
[FujiFilm via The Guardian via Slashdot]