An Industry First: LMT's Original Crown Experiment

LMT took six impressions of the same prep and anonymously sent them to six different laboratories along with prescriptions for non-precious PFM crowns; one was made in the Philippines. In this ground-breaking experiment in 1985—with LMT Publisher Judy Fishman as the patient—we wanted to know: could a dentist tell the difference between the $35 crown and the $75 crown?

Although not uniform in their assessments, the dentists could not discern which was the most expensive and which was the least; in fact, several of them rated medium-priced crowns better than the higher-priced ones.

The Crown Experiment—an LMT innovation repeated several more times in our history—demonstrated that when dentists choose a laboratory, perception is as much a factor as the quality of the crown itself, proving the value of laboratory positioning...