Essilor hard coat help?

[snowmonster]

Can somebody (likely Pete) tell me the difference between the following hard/scratch coats?

-PDQ
-GLC
-NTPC

Can you quickly tell me the basic differences between the three coatings as far as how they are cured and durability?

Thanks!

-Steve

[snowmonster]

Not even one reply?

[Jedi]

You only gave it one day. Many people are likely getting ready for Thanksgiving, Pete has already left a post stating he wasn't going to be around until after the holiday. The board will probably be a little quiet for a couple of days. Have patience, someone with get back to you, in the meantime try Google.

[AWTECH]

Where did you get the combination of letters for each of these coatings?

Coatings for lenses fall into three basic catagories:

1-Thermally cured hard coatings (cured in a oven from 1/2 hour to three hours)
2-UV cured hard coatings (cured using ultra violet light, quick cure)
3-PECVD hard coatings (these are applied in a high vacuum chamber using Plama Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition).

The third method is new to our industry and I do not know of anyone in the US currently using this method for lenses.

Hard coats are one of the main keys to successful AR. The material and the process are critical to a good result. Two labs can have the same equipment and same materials yet one hard coating is excellent and the other could fail.

Hard coatings are not quite as simple as ABC, however a good lab with good proceedures using quality materials properly processed will produce excellent results. Price is not the answer when trying to compare green AR from lab "A" to AR from lab "B". Quality control and process control take time and effort which costs to do properly.

My advise is know that the lab your are dealing with knows what they are doing and cares about you the customer.

[snowmonster]

Sorry about the lack of patience, normally stuff seems to get responses at light speed and I hadn't seen the post from Pete.

Nevertheless... I am inquiring about stock single vision lenses from Essilor with factory hard coats that were applied before they ever left the Essilor manufacturing facilities, so individual lab variability should not be an issue. I'm not really talking about uncut lenses, where my local lab is surfacing and then coating.

I got the different acronyms from the www.lenstock.com which is where we will need to get some of our stock lenses from since our local Essilor lab only keeps certain powers of stock lenses on hand. When we get into the situation of a high power, we will likely order from this place. So I was searching on their site to check availability and pricing, and the hard coat options listed for the various Essilor stock lenses were PDQ, GLC and NTPC.

I'm wanting to order whatever it is that gets me a TD2 type of hard coat.

I thought I knew a reasonable amount of stuff, and that I was pretty good with web searches, but couldn't find a thing to tell me the difference between the hard coats.

Thanks...

-Steve

[QDO1]

PDQ means "Pretty damm quick", and is a tintable hardcoat - usuall found on Poly

GLC means ‘glass like coat’, and isn not tintable, and is often forund on Poly

NT is a dip coat, PC means poly - so it is a dip coat for Poly

[snowmonster]

So if I want a TD2-like hard coat, I want the GLC, right?

Thanks once again!

-Steve

[QDO1]

So if I want a TD2-like hard coat, I want the GLC, right?

Thanks once again!

-Steve

Yep - The Essilor TD2 is similar to Gentex GLC

[snowmonster]

Allow me to be confused yet again.

So I look on lenstock.com's website and I can get the following:

• Essilor Airware polycarb spherical with GLC or NTPC coating (GLC costs more)
• Essilor Airware polycarb aspheric with NTPC (no GLC offered)

So why is no GLC offered on the aspheric lens? Is the NTPC coat a dip followed by a thermal cure or is it just a dip coat that will likely scratch much more easily than the GLC?

And then which type of hard coat are the putting on the 1.67 stock lenses?

Pete, are you out there?

-Steve

[AWTECH]

I would contact Essilor and ask for specific test results, such as Taber tests, for all of there hard coats. I know they have extensive tests performed and they should be able to make these available to you to compare one product to another.

[snowmonster]

Will do.

Thanks again...

-Steve

[Chris Ryser]

I thought I knew a reasonable amount of stuff, and that I was pretty good with web searches, but couldn't find a thing to tell me the difference between the hard coats.

You will not get a real answer from anybody...................

Hard coat formulas are kept a secret. You can find out about curing methods but not the exact ingredients as competition will copy if you give away all the details.

Most manufacturers do by their coating materials from a specialised company making them............and most of these time these items are used in other industries also.