It’s all about balancing product quality and manufacturing cost efficiency in today's market. Often, traditional product coating methods are too expensive, inefficient, or not environmentally friendly. Physical vapor deposition (PVD), or “vacuum coating,” presents an alternative way to improve product characteristics or appearance at a fraction of the cost-per-part of some other methods without environmental impact. As such, there is an ever-growing list of physical vapor deposition (PVD) coating applications. The coatings themselves commonly fall into different categories: