With the improvement of consumers’ aesthetics and the fierce competition in the market, creating product differentiation and innovation demands are the most important tasks for every designer. Talking of cover glass, the “dead front effect” integrated with the screen has a sense of beauty and high-end feeling, which is sought after by everyone.  Dead front panel glass is widely used in smart wearable, financial equipment, medical equipment, industrial control instrument and other displays.

Today, Gelivable will share with you, how to realize the dead front panel glass?

Method 1: Printing

This is the most common method. The frame is printed in black, and the window area is printed in semi-transparent black.What should be paid attention to :

1. The selection of semi-transparent black ink should be close to the border color. And if the ink is too dark or too light ,then a color difference will be caused.
2. Control of transmittance: transmittance varies from 1% to 50% according to the brightness of the LED lamp and the use environment. At present, the two most commonly used are 15±5% and 20±5%.

However, the printing method is only suitable for small areas in the 30*30mm range. The reason is that semi-transparent ink printing is very thin. The appearance defects will be seen obviously when back-lit. Such as screen printing scratch marks, orange peel formed by uneven ink, impurities, etc. So large-area printing cannot be mass-produced.

Method 2: Electroplating

Through magnetron sputtering and optical principles, a layer of inorganic film is plated on the glass surface to adjust the transmittance and color of the coating in the window area to make the

the color of the window area consistent with that of the screen printing frame, and realizing dead front effect.However, due to equipment limitations, only small sizes can be made, and the cost is relatively high. That’s how the Apple Watch works.

Method 3: Gray Glass

After adding inorganic metallic oxide colorant, the original transparent glass material changed into a dark gray color with low-transmittance of 18% to 38%, which is called “gray glass”. It can help the full display screen realize the “dead front effect”.

The biggest advantage of using gray glass to achieve “dead front effect” is: the raw material size of gray glass is 1600*1030mm, so large cover glass sizes can be processed. At present, Gelivable can process up to 32 inches of dead front panel glass.

Method 4: Film Bonding

Film bonding is a method currently used for mass production by Gelivable. The glass surface is bonded with 3M heat insulation film, which can achieve the dead front effect.

This method can also meet the needs of large sizes. Currently, Gelivable can produce maximum 1.2 meters of glass.

Feel free to contact us if any interests to the dead front panel glass. We’d like to assist with your projects.

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