Scratch Holograms FAQ (1996)

Building a good-enough optical table relatively cheaply isn't too hard. Use cinder blocks for legs and then alternately layer plywood and carpet, with a layer of spaced out wheelbarrow inner-tubes midway through. You can even add a final layer of sheet steel if you're using magnetically mounted optical components. You can test the stability by reflecting a laser-pen off a dish of water and watching the reflection on a piece of paper/wall. Most important is to be away from traffic etc...

Maybe, but holograms are a tall order. The resolution required would make things difficult.

I wonder if that would work, or if the sharpness is necessary? (Assuming you’re talking about a normal desktop printer and not the laboratories that use electron microscopes to print at nanometer scale, which will clearly be capable of this)

And in any case, I’d like to take one sentence to extol the benefits of laser cutters over 3D printers for things like this: they’re way faster when you basically want a mostly flat plane with a custom edge and/or stuff etched into the surface.

There's at least one example of this I've seen which, typically, is now evading my YouTube search skills. It's pretty much exactly as the article describes, a "floating points of light in a box shape" sort of thing. Very low resolution, but might have some uses.

3d printers have too low resolution for this, maybe 0.1 head would manage some crude plates, but much easier idea - mount a dulled needle and drag it over plastic plate in required shapes. That should work better, but watch out for needle skipping over surface.