Frosted Acrylic Sheet in Canada: The P95 Privacy Panel Guide (2026)

A frosted acrylic sheet is sold on one number and specified on three others. The number on the listing is light transmission, ours reads about 70 percent, and it tells you almost nothing about whether anyone will be able to see through the panel you are about to install. The three that decide the job are which face carries the frost, how far behind the panel the thing you are hiding actually sits, and what gauge stops a large panel bowing in its frame.

This guide is organised around the second of those, because it is the one nobody publishes and the one that gets fit-outs wrong. We stock P95 frosted acrylic in four gauges at our North York warehouse and cut it to size before it ships, so the numbers below are our own list prices rather than a range copied from somewhere else. Most of the people we quote it for are fit-out contractors and partition installers buying by the job, so the pricing at the end is worked per panel rather than per sheet.

What a frosted acrylic sheet is, and what P95 actually means

P95 is a pattern designation. It describes a surface, not a colour and not a density of milkiness, and the P stands for pattern rather than percent. The ACRYLITE Satinice range, sold under the PLEXIGLAS name in Europe and ACRYLITE in the Americas on trademarks owned by Röhm, groups P95 and DP9 as its velvet texture grades, one sided and two sided respectively. That is the whole of the designation: a fine matte texture on one face.

It matters because the alternative construction behaves completely differently. A bead diffused sheet carries light scattering particles distributed through the body of the material, so the diffusion is a property of the volume. A surface frosted sheet like P95 does its scattering in the top few microns of one face, and the other 2.8 or 9 millimetres underneath are ordinary clear cast acrylic. Everything below follows from that one distinction.

Frosted, Clear and Diffusing Sheet We Stock in North York

P95 Frosted Acrylic Sheets

70% light diffusion, privacy-grade frosted acrylic

From $92.79 CADView Product →

Cast Clear Acrylic Sheets

Optical-grade clarity, 1mm–25mm thickness

From $37.97 CADView Product →

White Acrylic Sheets

Bright white cast acrylic — opaque, semi-opal, and matte finishes

From $76.79 CADView Product →

Single-sided Frosted Polycarbonate Sheets

Frosted / white matte PC — privacy and diffusion in one panel

From $89.41 CADView Product →

Transmission is the number you are given, haze is the number that hides people

Two sheets can both be honestly described as transmitting 70 percent of the light that hits them and look nothing alike. Transmission counts how much light gets through. It says nothing about where that light goes once it is through, and scattering is the entire mechanism by which a panel obscures anything.

The measurement that captures the second half is haze: the fraction of transmitted light scattered by more than 2.5 degrees off the incoming direction. Both are measured together under ASTM D1003, which is the standard test method for haze and luminous transmittance of transparent plastics, on an instrument like the haze meters BYK builds for exactly this. A supplier quoting transmission alone has given you half the data sheet.

Where the difference shows up hardest is thickness. The Satinice technical information sheet prints transmission for a surface textured colourless grade and a bead diffused colourless grade across the same four thicknesses:

The surface textured grade is flat across the range. The bead diffused grade loses eighteen points over the same span, because doubling the thickness doubles the number of scattering particles a ray has to pass. Those are two different Satinice products rather than a measurement of the sheet we stock, and a deeper velvet frost will read lower than a light crystal texture, so treat the levels as illustrative and the shape as the lesson.

The practical conclusion is worth stating plainly, because it inverts what most buyers assume. On a frosted acrylic sheet, gauge is a structural decision, not an optical one. Going from 2.8mm to 9mm buys you stiffness and flatness. It does not meaningfully buy you privacy.

Privacy is a function of the gap, not the sheet

Here is the thing that actually decides whether a panel works.

A frosted face scatters each transmitted ray into a cone. A point on the panel therefore gathers light not from a single point behind it but from a disc, and that disc grows in direct proportion to how far back the subject sits. Push something against the glass and the disc collapses to nothing, so it stays sharp. Stand a metre away and the disc is wider than your head, so your head stops existing as a shape.

Read that row and the design rules fall out of it. Anything you want to stay legible has to touch the panel. Anything you want gone needs to be a few hundred millimetres back. The panel does not have a privacy rating, the installation does.

This is also why the same sheet can be a total success in a washroom and a total failure on a shower screen. In a washroom the person is a metre behind the screen. In a shower they are pressed against it.

Five distances in one office fit-out

Walk one floorplate from the ceiling down and you meet the same sheet at five different setbacks.

Touching the panel: cabinet fronts, bonded graphics, shower screens

At zero separation there is no obscuring at all. Frosting here is a finish decision, and a good one: the matte face hides fingerprints, kills reflections and takes ink and paint well, which is why every sign shop that prints direct to substrate keeps a matte grade on the rack for reverse printed cabinet inserts and applied graphics. Use 2.8mm in a captured frame. Do not sell it to anyone as privacy, because at this distance it does not deliver any.

20 to 50mm behind: light boxes and backlit panels

This is the LED setback, and it is the one case where the diffusing job is more important than the privacy job. Frosted acrylic scatters point sources into an even wash so the individual diodes stop reading as dots. If hot spots still show, the fix is almost always more setback rather than a heavier sheet, since gauge does very little here. Our guide to acrylic sheets and lighting works through LED pitch and diffuser selection in more depth.

Even output with no visible dots is a setback problem before it is a material problem. The LEDs sit well back from the panel face rather than against it.

100 to 300mm behind: desk screens, counter returns, reception fronts

The most common commercial use, and the most misunderstood. At 150mm the model puts the spread at 80mm, so a laptop lid still reads as a laptop and a monitor as a monitor, while anything written on either has already gone. Push back to 300mm and the spread is wider than a head, so the person becomes a shape. That is usually exactly what a client wants from a desk screen: lose the face, keep the light. Specify 4.3mm for a screen up to about 1200mm wide with a clamp along the bottom edge.

The distance rule visible in one photograph: the laptop close to the panel holds its edges, the people further back do not.

600mm and beyond: meeting rooms, washrooms, full height infill

Past about half a metre the panel is doing everything it is capable of and more distance changes little. This is where frosted acrylic genuinely substitutes for etched glass at a fraction of the weight. Move to 5.5mm for unframed or single edge fixed panels, and to 9mm where a screen stands free or spans more than about 1800mm without intermediate support. Flatness, not opacity, is what you are buying.

What the frosting costs, gauge by gauge

Clear cast acrylic and P95 come off the same 4 by 8 ft format in the same four gauges, which makes the frosting premium easy to isolate.

The premium does not hold steady, it collapses. Frosting adds 27.2 percent at 2.8mm, 21.2 percent at 4.3mm, 14.9 percent at 5.5mm, and only 4.8 percent at 9mm. Put another way, the frost costs $19.82 on a thin sheet and $10.82 on a thick one, so the heavier the gauge, the less you pay for the finish.

At 9mm it stops costing anything meaningful at all. P95 at that gauge is $237.79 CAD, which is the same $237.79 as our opaque white cast acrylic in the same size, so a thick frosted panel is priced identically to a thick solid one.

Weights are computed from the 1.19 g/cm3 density on a true 48 by 96 inch sheet, the same basis used in our acrylic sheet sizes and thickness guide. All four gauges are in stock.

Frosted acrylic sheet against frosted polycarbonate

We stock a frosted polycarbonate as well, and the choice between them is not the one most people expect. It is not a straight impact versus price trade, because the price relationship flips with gauge.

At the thin end frosted polycarbonate is actually the cheaper sheet, by $3.38. At around a quarter inch it costs $93.62 more, which is 55.8 percent, and that is a lot to pay for impact resistance a boardroom screen will never be asked for. Spend it where a panel is genuinely at risk of being hit, in a school corridor, a gym or a machine guard, and take the acrylic everywhere else. Our acrylic versus polycarbonate comparison covers the wider material trade in detail.

One practical point that decides more jobs than the price does: the frosted polycarbonate is stocked as full sheets and quoted separately for any cutting, while P95 goes straight through our cut to size configurator. If the schedule is thirty panels at four sizes, that difference is the whole project.

Cutting, edges and handling

P95 machines like any other cast acrylic, with one habit that is specific to it.

One gloss face, one matte face, and an edge that polishes optically clear. The two surfaces are visibly different where they meet.

Keep the masking on the matte face until the panel is installed. A frosted surface shows a scratch far more readily than a gloss one, and there is no polishing it out afterwards without leaving a shiny patch. Mark your cut lines and your face orientation on the film.

Decide which face goes where before you cut. For a privacy panel the matte face goes toward the side you want obscured. For a diffuser it goes toward the LEDs. Getting it backwards is not a disaster, but it costs you performance you paid for.

Run a test cut on an offcut. The frosted face can take a laser edge slightly differently from the smooth one, which is worth knowing before it happens on a finished panel rather than after. Any fabricator who already cuts clear cast will find nothing else new here.

The edge polishes clear. A flame polished or buffed edge on P95 comes out optically clear against the matte face, which reads as a deliberate detail on an exposed edge and is one of the reasons the material looks better than film applied frosting in an unframed panel.

One thing to raise with the design team, not with us. Acrylic is a combustible thermoplastic. The manufacturer says so plainly in the Satinice fire precautions, and it is why partitions, ceiling elements and anything in a corridor or exit route can attract a flame spread requirement that a decorative panel in an open office never will. We supply the sheet and we can tell you what it is, but we are not code consultants: for a rated location, have the requirement checked against the National Building Code of Canada and the provincial code that adopts it before the panel is written into the drawings. It is a much cheaper conversation at design stage than at inspection.

We cut all four gauges here. Rectangles, radiused corners, cutouts and fixing holes go through the cut to size service with live per piece pricing, and shaped or engraved panels through laser cutting and engraving. For panels that will be handled on site, ask for a small radius on the exposed corners rather than a square one.

Ordering frosted acrylic sheets in Canada

The thing that surprises most first time buyers is that panel size drives cost far harder than gauge does, because a panel either nests into the sheet or it does not.

Every row is computed from the real sheet price against a true 48" x 96" sheet, with pieces nested flat and the kerf held in the gap between them. The material figure is the sheet share only, before cutting.

Look at the last two rows. A 900 by 2100mm infill panel consumes an entire sheet and throws away more than a third of it, while a 1200 by 400mm desk screen leaves barely 3 percent on the floor. For example, a contractor who trims a full height module from 2100mm to 2000mm still gets one panel per sheet and saves nothing, while dropping a vision panel from 1800mm to 1200mm takes it from two per sheet to four and halves the material in it. Moving a panel module by 100mm at design stage is frequently worth more than any discount you could negotiate on the sheet.

To quote a run properly we need four things, and a schedule that carries them comes back priced the same day:

• Panel sizes in millimetres, finished, with a note on which dimension is the width
• The gauge, or the setback and fixing method so we can work the gauge out
• Corner radius, cutouts and hole positions, or a DXF if the fabricator has one
• The quantity per size, since the volume tiers land on identical parts

Three more things worth settling before an order goes in.

Volume pricing. Cut piece pricing steps down at 50, 500 and 1000 pieces of the same part, at 10, 15 and 20 percent respectively. Those tiers are on identical parts, not on mixed sizes, which is another reason to standardise panel modules across a fit-out. For how the trade pricing works across a larger order, our Toronto wholesale buyer's guide sets out the tiers, minimums and freight terms in full.

Stock and format. All four gauges are held on 4 x 8 ft sheets at North York. There is no 3 x 6 or 4 x 6 format in P95, so a small panel is cut from a full sheet rather than a smaller one.

Getting it there. Online checkout serves Ontario addresses within 200km of the warehouse, and pickup is free from the North York door. Anywhere else in Canada goes by freight and we quote the panels and the freight together, which for oversized sheets is the only honest way to price it. If you are comparing suppliers, our guide to finding plexiglass near you in Canada covers what to ask before ordering.

Other Panels for Interiors and Lighting

Diffused White Polycarbonate Sheets

Even LED diffusion — white PC for backlit signs and light panels

From $89.41 CADView Product →

Mirror Acrylic Sheets

Gold, silver, and multi-colour mirror acrylic — Taiwan and JB stock

From $147.29 CADView Product →

Honeycomb Composite Panels

Ultra-lightweight structural panels — HEXABEN Clear, large format

From $2700.00 CADView Product →

Extruded Acrylic Sheets (PMMA)

Clear, grey, and sparkling extruded PMMA — value-grade for fabrication

From $49.71 CADView Product →

Where to buy frosted acrylic sheet in Canada

From a supplier who stocks all four gauges, cuts them before they ship, and will tell you honestly when the panel you have drawn will not be as private as you are expecting. We keep P95 frosted acrylic at our North York warehouse and cut it to your panel schedule here.

If the specification is still open, the complete guide to buying acrylic sheets in Canada is the right place to start, the acrylic sheets category collects everything we have written on grades and applications, and top uses for plexiglass sheets covers the wider application set. When you are ready to price a run, send the schedule through our quote request or contact our team and we will work through the gauges and setbacks with you.

TORONTO WAREHOUSE Unit 29, 601 Magnetic Drive, North York, ON, M3J 3J2

Phone: +1 (416) 857-7555 Office: +1 (416) 726-2428 Quotes: Request a quote or contact us