if you're into the automotive scene at all you may have heard of these
newfangled ceramic coatings these seemingly
magical paint protectants that are claimed by some to make it so that you
never have to wash your car again and so
that water beads right off you'll also see these coatings advertised as having
9h hardness which makes it sound like they would make whatever you apply them
to a lot more scratch resistant now my
first assumption was that this has to be just snake oil but
what the it's ridiculous but after doing some research
there appears to be some truth to it after this magic coating is applied and
given time to cure it creates a semi-permanent layer that is bonded to
the top of the paint that fills in any pores making the surface very smooth
with the pores filled in there's way less surface area for dirt and water to
cling to and as a result the dirt and the water just fall or beat off now it
might not make it so you never have to wash your car again but it will at least
help it stay clean longer which is all fine and good but this is a tech channel
not a car channel so we wanted to see if you can take this
protectant which is typically used for cars and use it to protect your
smartphone from small scratches fingerprints and
well not water it's still got holes in it where the water can get in but but at
least those other things and this video is brought to you guys by
ifixit the ifixit mahi driver kit includes their quarter inch aluminum
screwdriver handle with a magnetic bit socket knurled grip and swivel top and
48 driver bits check it out at the link in the video description we bought this
kit online and theoretically it has everything that we need to apply it
ourselves so on a car what you would normally do is a complete paint
correction to remove any dirt and contamination that was already present
in the car's paint so that the coating would properly adhere and not lock any
dirt underneath it for us
that can basically be achieved by wiping
down a phone with a microfiber cloth and
some alcohol should get some alcohol where's the alcohol
okay that's better just so you guys know we're using a xiaomi mi 8 just because
we happen to have one lying around it does not have an integrated screen
protector but it does use corning gorilla glass 5 so this should be pretty
representative of the type of glass that you've got on your device if you have
something reasonably modern wow that's a lot of stuff so you've got
a little microfiber cloth you got more like a chamois type thing
so you apparently go like this and you
clean your little just clean do your little cleaning thing
look it's a phone it's smooth already it should be fine
i'm gonna put the gloves on okay
yep i'm swimming in it this is the applicator cloth oh well why am i using
that to clean it dang it Jake all right i will follow the instructions
wow how to apply optimal method wash clay
bar polish ipa wipe simple method wash
ipa wipe okay well we cut that down before we put it on i want to talk about
our methodology my goal is to only destroy one phone in this process so
what i'm going to be doing is applying the ceramic coating to half of the
screen and half of the bag
then i'm going to leave it to cure for 24 hours and come back at it with
ah yes jerry rig everything fans rejoice
we finally got one of these moe's hardness test kits so that we too can
talk about scratches at level six with deeper grooves at a level seven
you guys know the drill so basically the way most scale of
hardness works is the harder materials so the ones with higher numbers should
scratch the softer materials so the ones with lower numbers and the softer ones
should not scratch the harder ones so they've got all these different picks in
here and then they've actually got this handy dandy little scale that shows
which materials my picks should be able to scratch and which ones they shouldn't
diamond comes in at a hardness of 10 so that is the maximum according to mohs
hardness scale and if the specs on this
ceramic coating are to be believed it would be nearly as tough as diamond that
would be very impressive given that gorilla glass 3 is estimated to be
somewhere in the five and a half to six and a half range
i remember we got this test when i was in uh probably grade five or six and the
first question on the exam was read through the entire exam before you begin
and then it was just a normal exam and then the last question was good job you
read through the entire exam before you started do not fill out any of the other
questions just turn it in blank and it was like a test on following
instructions did you do that i did actually turns out i can do it i just
don't okay wipe a thin layer across the car
surface dang it i should have read the whole instructions before i started
all right uh okay
okay stuff stinks
i don't know how to get around the camera bump why did we accept this as consumers let
the coating sit then remove the residue by lightly buffing with a microfiber
towel yeah i can definitely see the excess coming up
i wonder how this differs from the nano coating screen protector that we dragged
behind my motorbike a number of years ago that stuff worked really well though
i was very impressed so maybe i'll be impressed tomorrow
yeah of course the uh the sales materials are different from the
manual the longer it stays dry the better as it will continue to cure allow
at least 48 hours for initial drying and avoid water rain or snow on the car we
don't recommend that you wash or expose the car to water for four to seven days afterwards like there's kind of a line
there but i also i'm trying not to buff over the line because i don't want to
carry material onto the part that i want to use as my control so hard to tell
okay i knew this would come in handy for something someday there so i'm just
putting that there so that it doesn't accidentally touch anything while it's drying
having waited the requisite day i am now ready to tinker with this
so let's see if it behaves any differently on the regular glass versus
the coated glass just want a few drops here
you know what more drops ah let's spread these drops out of it
should be fine okay so what i want to see is if they're
any more beaded on the coated part versus on the non-coated part
bear in mind of course guys that most smartphones have oleophobic coatings on
them already so i'm not really expecting a difference here very interesting so
while they seem to be behaving similarly
when it actually comes time to pour it off
it does pour off more easily
let's see if we make the same observation on the back
now the back is quite curved so
again very similar looking behavior this is the coated side
but it's time to tip it oh interesting
it actually came off less easily
now i'm going to use my greasy fingerprints to
grease up the phone
i don't notice any appreciable difference in readability
wait is this thing dead oh damn it
i can't say i notice any appreciable difference in image clarity with the
screen on but a lot of the time what separates the good from the bad when it
comes to screen coatings is how easy it is to wipe off grease so we'll try to
wipe that side take could clean part of the cloth try to wipe that side
wow that's really similar okay let's try uh let's try my microfiber i'll wipe a
little bit harder this time okay that came pretty clean
that also came pretty clean i wouldn't say that there's a huge difference here
all right let's try and create a bit more of a controlled test here then so
let's put
four fingerprints
four fingerprints okay then what i'm gonna do
is i'm basically gonna go wipe okay so a little bit remains
i'm gonna go wipe quite a lot of remains
wipe it's gone
interesting i'd say it's about three wipes to six to eight on the non-coded
side very cool all right let's pull something similar
on the back here then four
five oh boy six
seven doesn't seem to be helping that much here eight
nine ten nine
ten 11 12. i would say that is quite a similar
result let's bring out the picks now then shall we
start with the back i need a different kind of marker but i can read it well
enough that it's usable no scratch whatsoever from the five pick here i'm
expecting there's no way it's gonna hold up to this
yep paint scratches can you see them
can you see them now you can see them no i can't that's worse oh
uh maybe there should be three lines here
can you see them i don't see them that's hard to see okay well let's not
worry about it then and then pick seven scratches very easily
okay i mean i don't know what do we go for overkill at this point yeah
okay yeah well if seven scratches eight obviously will
now for the ceramic coated side four five six seven
here we go so the reason i'm retesting four
is that i want to make sure that the ceramic coating itself won't show surface scratches or imperfections
and so far it doesn't six
this is where the ceramic coating could separate itself
interesting time for number seven
and the behavior is basically identical
and seven
that seems better than seven on the other side we're gonna turn this up to
eight
yep that's definitely more noticeable but it still is better behaved when it's
being scratched not splintering apart like the other side did
time for ceramic coated
and that looks basically identical to the other one
and this is basically the same thing
oh god ow i just got stabbed with the pick it was the apic
well i'm disappointed i was basically expecting this stuff to turn my glass
into like a diamond scratched barrier
is what i would say if i wasn't aware
that this 9h hardness is actually using a
completely different scale from mohs
scale so it's actually using the same hardness scale that pencils use so this
is a 9h pencil which is somewhere in the range
of around a three on mohs scale now what i did notice
though is that even though the ceramic coating isn't particularly
hard when i was using a three or four or even five pick i didn't notice any weird
residue building up where the coating was scratching off leaving the exposed
glass underneath it so it seems to be just like a
spectacularly thin coating on the glass it's also
definitely different from the liquid armor that i tested dragging behind my
motorcycle all those years ago because that once you got under it you could
kind of scrape up and it created this kind of crusty layer over top but this
i can't i can't even get off even if i wanted to try to scratch it off with my
fingernail there are a couple more things i wanted to evaluate so i just wanted to make sure that touchscreen
responsiveness is still fine with the ceramic coating it doesn't surprise me
to note that yes in fact it is indiscernible and there is one more
thing i wanted to try ow
oh i just stabbed myself with a pin removal tool so i'm going to take a couple keys that are made of different
materials i'm just going to kind of like try to scuff and scratch the bottom of
the screen here materials both these keys seem soft enough this is not making any difference
at all so then with no improvement to scratch resistance the only selling
point for our phone is the ever so slight improvement to liquid beading and
repelling characteristics of in our case the front glass and the slight
improvement that we noted in cleanability although
yeah particularly that last one i guess there's something to be said for that
especially because it's not particularly expensive this is like
a many lifetime supply if all you're ever using it for
is a phone speaking of things you're using things
for if you use wi-fi most of the time on your smartphone why are you paying for a
fixed monthly data plan stop paying for what you don't use with ting you can
find out how much you'll save with their calculator at
Linus.ting.com we're going to have that linked below ting is a nationwide lte
carrier using both t-mobile and sprint networks and they will never block
throttle or interfere with your online access they've got no contracts so you
could just try ting out for a month with no strings attached and see if you like
it and they've got fantastic customer service because get this you will
actually talk to people instead of two robots i know it's shocking for those of
you who haven't watched many of our videos because i talk about ting all the time for
the rest of you there's just no excuse why haven't you signed up for tin yet you're not shocked at all so go check it
out get a sim card from their ting shop or at linusdotting.com and if you use
our link you'll get 25 off your first phone bill
so thanks for checking out this video if you guys enjoy these kinds of endurance
tests i'm going to give you a classic go watch our video where we stress tested
the fireproof hard drive enclosure
it's cool