Signs of a Poor Quality Car Window Tint

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Having your car windows tinted makes a lot of sense in most cases.  Doing so should drastically improve the heat balance inside your vehicle, whilst offering an improved degree of privacy and security for anything left inside.  But like everything in life, you tend to get what you pay for with window tinting; and there is little worse than a bad window tint on your car.  There are some clear signs that the tint has been done to a low standard or with poor quality materials, so hopefully knowing this will help you spot a bad tint job on any cars your consider purchasing, as well as protecting your own vehicle.

Colour

Most tints should be in a consistent shade of whatever colour the owner wanted, but one colour that you should avoid is purple.  This is almost never an option for a tint and instead is a sign that the original black tint has degraded over time.  This means that the film is of a very low quality and the tint, the very thing that is supposed to filter out UV rays and moderate the sun’s heat, has surcome to UV damage and probably needs replacing.

Smoothness

Almost all window tints are applied as a film over the existing glass and as such, there is quite a bit of artistry in getting them on correctly.  Tints should have smooth, clearly defined edges that seamlessly blend back into the original glass as well as having a perfectly smooth surface area all over.  If the tint has jagged or torn edges then you know it has been rushed on by someone that took no care in the task.  Similarly, if you find bubbles or lumps in the tint, then this is a sign that the film was put on by someone inexperienced at the process and they have managed to trap air bubbles under the film, leaving a poor result.

Check around the defroster bars

The defroster bars in your rear window are not inside the glass, they are on the surface and as such stand ever so slightly higher than the glass around them.  The same is true of windows that feature the dot matrix pattern, which serves a purely aesthetic purpose.  These features will prove difficult to apply a tint over as the film will stick to them in an uneven fashion, causing lumps and bubbles.  Expert installers, such as those at Xtreme Car Audio, have the knowledge and experience to be able to fit the tint whilst tackling this problem correctly.  Essentially, if it looks like part of the window that was always there, the tint is installed properly.

 

There are of course other signs that a window tint has been installed badly or is of low quality, but these are the biggest warning signs you should watch out for, and hopefully by being aware of this, you will be able to spot a shoddy job before it becomes your problem to deal with.