Professional specifications, installation guide & design solutions
Starphire ultra-clear glass offers exceptional clarity with minimal green tint. Premium option for high-end residential and commercial projects.. Modern, efficient design with excellent weather protection. Perfect for residential and commercial applications, these glass are specified for the application rather than chosen from a catalogue. Professional installation ensures optimal performance and longevity.
Glass is supplied from the primary manufacturers and processed to your specification:
Tell us the coating, thickness and make-up you need, or describe the problem and we will specify it. Collection from Staten Island is available by appointment.
Proper installation is critical for optimal performance. Our licensed contractors provide:
Installation includes sealing and flashing the perimeter of the opening, because a window is only as watertight as the junction between it and the building. Where an opening needs more than that — a failed sill, damaged masonry, a detail that was wrong to begin with — see waterproofing.
Starphire Ultra-Clear is Vitro Architectural Glass's low-iron product, made by the company formerly known as PPG. It is not a coating, a film or a treatment. The difference is in the batch.
Ordinary clear float glass is not actually clear. Iron oxide occurs naturally in the silica sand used to make it, and iron oxide absorbs light at the red end of the spectrum, leaving a green cast. Most of the time you do not notice, because you are looking through a thin pane straight on.
Two situations make it obvious. The first is thickness — the green intensifies as the pane gets thicker, because light passes through more material. A 3/4″ clear glass shelf or shower panel reads distinctly green. The second is the edge. At an exposed edge, light travels horizontally along the whole length of the lite rather than through its thickness, so the green concentrates into the familiar bottle-green line you see on any glass tabletop.
Low-iron and clear glass come off the same float line, using the same process and the same equipment. The difference is the purity of the raw materials going in. Starphire uses silica with the iron content stripped down — under ten percent of what conventional glass contains — together with proprietary processing Vitro has refined over three decades.
The result, by their own measure, is glass that is 87 percent less green than ordinary clear.
This is the signature, and it is the quickest way to identify the material. Conventional glass gets greener as it gets thicker. Starphire goes the other way: the edge takes on a distinctive azure blue while the surface stays neutral. On a frameless shower panel, a glass shelf or a partition, that edge is visible from every angle and it is a large part of what people are paying for.
If you want to check what you have been quoted, look at the edge of a sample. Green means standard clear. Blue means low-iron.
Starphire transmits 7 percent more visible light than ordinary clear glass at 1/2″ thickness, and 16 percent more in a 1-3/8″ laminated construction. The gap widens with thickness, which is precisely why low-iron matters most on heavy glass and matters least on a thin vision pane.
It is available from 1/8″ (3.2mm) to 3/4″ (19mm), and Vitro produce a jewel-like edge at lengths up to 130″ even at 19mm.
Worth stating plainly, because low-iron glass is sometimes sold as though it were stronger: it is not. Starphire has the same surface hardness, the same resistance to abrasion and scratching, and the same tensile performance as standard clear glass of the same thickness. You are buying optical quality, not structural performance. It tempers, laminates and behaves identically in every other respect.
The mistake we see most often: specifying low-iron for only one lite of an insulating unit. If the other lite is standard clear, the green is still in the assembly and the ultra-clear look does not arrive. Vitro say this themselves. If the appearance is the reason you are paying for it, both lites need to be Starphire.
Where the cost is justified: thick glass, exposed edges, anywhere colour fidelity matters, and anywhere the glass is a visible design element rather than something you look through without noticing. Shower enclosures, partitions, shelving, balustrades, display and gallery glazing, entrance doors.
Where it is not: ordinary vision glazing at 1/4″ in a frame, where the edge is hidden and nobody will ever see the difference. We will say so rather than sell you the upgrade.
Wet areas: for shower and bath enclosures, Starphire is available with the Clarvista coating, which protects the surface against the dulling that heat and humidity cause over time. On a frameless enclosure that is worth having, because the whole point of the specification is that it stays looking like new glass.
Exterior work: Solarban low-e coatings are available on a Starphire substrate, giving solar control with high visible light transmittance. Note that Solarban Starphire must be heat-treated.
This is where a clear answer matters, because low-iron glass is occasionally sold as though clarity and solar performance were the same thing. They are not.
Iron oxide is what absorbs energy in ordinary clear glass. Take most of the iron out and the glass absorbs less — which is exactly why it transmits more visible light. But visible light is only part of what arrives from the sun. Reducing the absorber means more of the whole solar spectrum comes through, not just the part you can see.
So a monolithic sheet of Starphire, on its own, is not a solar control product. It is an optical product. In direct sun an uncoated low-iron pane will deliver at least as much heat into the space as clear glass, and it will not reduce glare, because reducing glare means reducing light and that is the opposite of what it is for.
The important qualifier, and Vitro state this themselves: solar heat gain is governed primarily by the low-e coating and the overall unit make-up, not by the iron content of the substrate. The substrate decides how the glass looks. The coating decides how it performs. Those are two separate specification decisions and they should be made separately.
The same logic applies to UV, and here the consequence is not comfort but damage. UV is what fades pigment, bleaches timber, degrades textiles and yellows paper. Glass with less iron in it does not block more UV — if anything, less absorption means more gets through.
That is a genuine issue anywhere the glass is protecting something valuable, and it is solved by the build-up rather than by the substrate. A laminated construction is the effective answer, because the PVB interlayer blocks the overwhelming majority of UV. Low-e coatings also reject a substantial share.
The practical upshot for display and conservation work: specify low-iron for the clarity, and laminate it for the protection. One does not substitute for the other.
This is the combination that resolves the whole problem, and it is why Vitro offer their Solarban coatings on a Starphire substrate rather than treating the two as alternatives.
A solar-control low-e coating rejects the near-infrared that carries most of the sun's heat while passing visible light. Put that coating on a low-iron substrate and the visible light it passes is unusually high and unusually neutral, because there is no green in the glass to fight through. You get solar control without the dimming, and daylight without the colour cast.
Two practical notes. Solarban Starphire must be heat-treated — that is a manufacturer requirement, not an option. And the point made earlier applies with force here: if only one lite of the insulating unit is low-iron, the green from the other lite is still in the assembly and you will not see the benefit you paid for.
Amazon's glass-domed headquarters in Seattle, The Spheres, uses Solarban 60 Starphire — a fair indication of where this combination gets specified.
Starphire is described in the trade press as the design industry's de facto low-iron standard, and that reputation is the reason it appears on drawings by name rather than as "low-iron glass". Three things drive it.
Colour rendering. Low-iron glass produces less spectral distortion, which is why it is chosen for museums, retail and any setting that depends on faithful colour. A red looks like the red it is, not a red seen through a faint green filter.
A neutral canvas. Where glass carries digital printing, ceramic frit, acid etching or applied colour, the substrate has to be neutral or every printed colour shifts. Starphire is specified as the base for decorative work for exactly this reason.
Consistency. Ordinary clear glass varies in colour between batches and between manufacturers. On a large glazed elevation or a long run of partitions, that variation is visible.
Display cases, vitrines and gallery vision glazing are the classic application, and architects routinely specify low-iron for these even when the rest of a building uses standard clear. The reason is simple: a green cast over a painting is a misrepresentation of the work.
The conservation requirement sits alongside it. Case glazing wants low-iron for accuracy and lamination for UV rejection, and on a daylit gallery it wants a solar-control coating as well. All three together, not one instead of another.
Anything sold on its appearance benefits, and food is the clearest case of all. A green cast makes pastry look stale, bread look grey and icing look dirty. In a display case the glass is usually thick and the customer is standing close to an exposed polished edge, which is precisely the situation where the difference is most obvious.
The same applies to jewellery, cosmetics, textiles and gallery-style retail — anywhere the product is the reason someone came in.
Low-iron glass is a premium material and it turns up where the glass is meant to be noticed. These describe the kind of work each area brings rather than any specific client project.
A frameless enclosure in a high-end Upper East Side apartment is the clearest case for low-iron. The panels are thick — typically 3/8″ or 1/2″ — and every edge is exposed and polished. In standard clear at that thickness the green is unmistakable against white marble or pale stone, and it makes the tiling look slightly off-colour. Starphire removes that entirely, and the blue edge reads as a deliberate detail rather than a defect. With Clarvista it stays that way.
Tribeca office and loft conversions want glass partitions that disappear. That is harder than it sounds, because a partition presents its full height as an exposed vertical edge, often alongside a second panel, so you are looking at two green lines through the middle of a sightline.
Low-iron solves it, and it matters more here than in an exterior window because you see interior glass from close range and from the side. It is also the right substrate where the partition carries digital printing, acid etching or applied graphics, since colours print true rather than shifting green.
The converted commercial buildings through Boerum Hill and towards Downtown Brooklyn take a lot of partition and meeting-room glazing. The specification question here is usually where to spend: full low-iron throughout, or standard clear for the general partitions with Starphire reserved for the front-of-house and conference glazing where clients see it.
That is a legitimate approach and we will price it both ways. What does not work is mixing the two in the same run of glass, where the difference between adjacent panels is obvious.
The waterfront Brooklyn houses through Manhattan Beach and Sea Gate tend towards large bathrooms with substantial frameless enclosures, often with fixed panels and heavy hardware. At those panel sizes the thickness is at the upper end, which is exactly where the difference between clear and low-iron is most visible.
One practical note for these locations: the hardware specification matters as much as the glass. Salt air reaches inland further than people expect, and stainless rather than plated hinges and clamps is the sensible choice.
The Fifth Avenue stretch running up past 82nd Street carries the densest concentration of museums in the city, and the surrounding blocks hold private galleries and dealers. Case glazing, vitrines and interior partitions here are specified for colour accuracy first. Standard clear at display-case thickness puts a visible green over the work, which for a dealer is a commercial problem as well as an aesthetic one.
The pairing that usually goes in is low-iron laminated — clarity from the substrate, UV rejection from the interlayer.
The gallery blocks through the West 20s between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues are mostly converted industrial buildings with large street-facing openings, which means daylight is part of the exhibition condition rather than something to be excluded.
That makes it the case for the full combination: a Starphire substrate for colour fidelity, a solar-control low-e coating to manage heat and reduce the near-infrared load, and lamination for UV. A ground-floor gallery with an unshaded south or west elevation is a genuinely demanding glazing problem, and getting it right protects the work on the walls.
The food retail streets — Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, Brighton Beach Avenue, Eighteenth Avenue in Bensonhurst, Court Street in Carroll Gardens — run on display. A pastry case is a shop window at close range, and the customer's eye is roughly a foot from a thick polished edge.
This is the application where the difference is most immediately obvious to a non-specialist. Put a low-iron panel beside a clear one over the same tray and the comparison makes itself. For a business whose product has to look fresh, that is not a detail.
Broadway and Spring Street through SoHo, the Madison Avenue boutique blocks, and the jewellery frontage on West 47th Street all trade on product appearance through glass. Jewellery is the hardest test of the lot, because the whole proposition is colour and brilliance and a green cast reads as a lower grade of stone.
On jewellery frontage the specification usually has to do two jobs at once — low-iron for appearance and laminated construction for intrusion resistance. Those are compatible; Starphire laminates normally.
The same reasoning applies to gallery and display glazing, retail frontage where product colour matters, balustrades with exposed edges, and residential glass shelving and splashbacks. We supply and fabricate Starphire across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, and throughout Northern New Jersey, the Jersey Shore, Philadelphia and the Lehigh Valley, with collection from our Staten Island shop by appointment. Direct delivery to site is available on orders over $2,500 in value.
Send us the sizes and tell us what the glass is doing. If low-iron is worth it for your application we will say so, and if it is not we will tell you that too.
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