

Ask HN: Whiteboards - porcelain or melamine? - chrismealy

Is porcelain worth the difference in price?
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kochbeck
The usual benefit of porcelain is that it's on top of metal, and the metal
takes a magnet. So if you're going to be putting something on the board that
would benefit greatly from magnets, like, say, a timeline that you update
everyday by moving a series of magnetic pointers, then porcelain is for you.

OTOH, if you're just going to write and erase as is most typical, melamine is
nice because when somebody inevitably comes and writes in permanent marker on
the board, you don't feel bad throwing it away for a new one.

~~~
healsdata
We have a mixture of both in our office and I prefer the melamine ones because
they seem to have less problems with marker hanging around after being erased.
We also have some cheap melamine boards and some nicer ones; I'd recommend
spending the money to get nicer ones because the cheap ones also have problems
with ink lingering.

However, like the parent said, if you have a use case that requires magnets,
porcelain is the way to go.

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skeltoac
Have you considered glass? My favorite whiteboard was recycled from a 7-foot
tempered glass tabletop.

