What is the highest rated ceramic coating?
There really isn't a highest rating, as there is no good way to rate them.
There is "the pencil test" which is a hardness scale, for industrial coatings, however all ceramic coatings are rated H9 which is the hardest.
So it comes down to durability, but this is very hard to measure as there is no standardized test. Some manufacturers rate their products as 5-year, or 8-year, but this is subjective, environment dependant, and only really tells you how long they are willing to guarantee the product for, and is not an actual rating.
We saw the first demonstrations of ceramic coatings almost twenty years ago, and so they have been around a reasonable amount of time. This means it is not really a new technology, and all the manufacturers have the formula worked out by now. Which in turn means the top products are all pretty similar.
However, in theory, products which contain synthetic diamond nano-rods should be stronger because of their shape.
Alternatively, there are graphene coatings, with graphene, under certain circumstances, being far stronger than silica dioxide used in ceramic coatings.
Ceramic coatings could be rated on shine using a glossmeter. However, most of the shine effect comes from the polishing, not the ceramic product, and it is likely that variation in underlying paint finish would be greater than the variation in ceramic coatings, which its self is likely to be imperceivable to the human eye.
Written by Danny Argent. Last updated 19/01/2023 15:28