Names borrowed from the quarry
Montauk Black and California Gold appear on both pages, in stone on one and in porcelain on the other. Then the porcelain keeps going: Montauk White, Montauk Grey, Montauk Dark, Mariposa. Those are tones the slate range does not carry, and a white slate is barely a material at all.
That is worth understanding before comparing the two. Where a name appears on both pages there is a real stone to judge the print against, and it is on the slate tile page. Where it does not, the tile is a slate in manner rather than a copy of a particular rock.
What a slate print reaches
Color and pattern travel well. A slate's rust, gold and green can be reproduced closely, and so can the irregular edges of the natural layers, because those are two-dimensional facts.
Depth is the harder half. A cleft slate face is a broken plane with real relief in it, and it changes as light crosses the room. A printed surface with a texture pressed into it approaches that and does not arrive at it, which is why the best of these are the ones where the texture follows the print rather than repeating under it.
Matte, with almost nothing else
Nearly every tile here is matte and that is not a coincidence. A reflection is the single fastest way for an eye to notice that a stone is printed, and slate in particular is a matte material: a shiny slate look tile is imitating something that does not exist.
A small anti-slip group sits behind the matte, and those are the pieces made with a worked surface for wet and exterior use.
Nine millimeters and twenty
Two thicknesses split this range by where the tile goes. The 9 mm group is interior tile, and the 20 mm group, a little over twice that, is paver: thick enough to carry load through its own body on gravel, sand or pedestals.
Natural slate paving does reach 3/4 inch, which is near enough the same thickness. What it does not reach is the tolerance: a pedestal system holds a piece at four corners and needs an exact, calibrated thickness across the whole batch, which a split stone does not supply. The Frontier20 range covers that line.
Slate formats no quarry produces
12x24 is the commonest format here, then 12x12, with 24x48 and a 12x48 plank above them. A cleft slate at 24x48 would be heavy, fragile at the corners and expensive to gauge; in porcelain it is an ordinary product.
There is also a mixed format group, where one product supplies several sizes to be laid as a repeating pattern. That is how a slate terrace was traditionally laid, in random sizes, and the porcelain version sells the pattern as a set.
The series behind the range
Essence runs deepest, then Frontier20, Trek, Veneer, Traktion and Marlu. The series matters more than the color here, because a terrace usually needs a paver, a step edge and a base in the same face, and only a series carries all three.
Landmark Ceramics is the main supplier here, and the Landmark page covers that maker's approach across every look.
Porcelain or the stone itself
Porcelain suits a commercial floor, a high-traffic hallway and anywhere a 20 mm paver is wanted, since it is harder than slate and arrives at a fixed thickness. Slate wins on a fireplace surround, a feature wall and any surface where somebody will stand close to it, because the cleft face is the reason slate was wanted in the first place.
Those are two different strengths and not a ranking. The arrangement that turns up most often in a house is the porcelain on the floor that takes the traffic and the stone on the wall that gets looked at.
Pavers, mosaic and the finishing pieces
Pavers are a substantial part of this range and there is a real mosaic group behind them, plus accent tiles and bases. That spread is what a printed material allows: one face, produced in every format a job needs.
For the printed looks in other stones, stone look tile is the wider range, and outdoor porcelain is where the exterior thicknesses sit.
