Benjamin Moore Regal. No contest.
Regal seems so difficult to get a nice even result with unless you are a fairly experienced painter, and the price point is just absurd when there are plenty of cheaper brands that offer all the same promises regarding durability.
Edit to add: I will say it's a very nice thick and creamy consistency which helps get a thick coat on initially which means less coats/time spent, but since it can be a bit finicky you might have to do extra coats anyway just to get everything to look even 😕
Regal and Aura both. I was a Sherwin Williams fanboy on my own projects until I started working with a guy who tries to only use Ben Moore stuff and now I'm sold. So worth the cost
My new construction home was covered with super low quality Sherman Williams paint. Less than two years later I go to get a can to fix a patch. They discontinued my paint. Great. I had to repaint the whole room. I don’t think I’ll ever let that go.
The color? They should have been able to match any tint. I would imagine the other qualities like finish would have been close enough.
A patch is hard enough to hide without using a paint with a different finish. Yeah, it probably would have been fine. I’d probably be the only person to ever notice. It’s more the principal of them selling bulk paint at the end of its product life cycle with no legacy support. The guy at the counter offered to try and match it then floated just painting the entire room if I wasn’t ok with that. It just rubbed me the wrong way.
With new construction, the problem seems to be the painting sub spraying on the thinnest coat of paint they can get away with.
As a DIY homeowner that paints maybe a room a year on average, my current favorite paint is HGTV Home Showcase by Sherwin Williams, available from Lowes for about $50 a tin. It has a red label. It's a small step up from the cheapest, but it's still far from the most expensive; but it seems to me that the gain in quality that you get from paying a bit more than the cheapest is much more than you would expect, so it's got a great quality-to-price ratio. With the cheapest paint, you have to work to get it on the walls smoothly, but this goes on nicely.
My favorite is Sherwin Williams Super paint, though lately I've been using Ben from Ben Moore and Clark & Kensington as well because that's what they sell where I work and paint is paint and discounts are discounts. And they both work perfectly fine and go on nicely.
Benjamin Moore paint is very nice, but it's also very expensive. Sherwin Williams is nice and somewhat expensive, although they often have sales. I have found that Behr paint is not very nice and isn't all that cheap either. It covers well, but it doesn't go on as smoothly as other brands.
Maybe this is timely. We're having all our bathrooms gutted and redone. Just today our contractor asked what colors we wanted them painted, so I asked which company's color samples we did get. He said if I'm going to a place like home Depot, Behr or Dunn Edwards.
I don't think it matters which color samples you get. Everyone has to be able to reproduce everyone else's colors. The only differences might be that if you use a different company's color samples, then it takes them a little bit more work to do the color match, rather than simply giving them their company's name for a color; and you may get a guarantee on the color if you use their own colors.
I work in property management. We’ve switched to Kelly-Moore’s DuraPoxy recently and have been very happy with how it holds up to washing and abuse so far. It also looks better than cheaper paint.
A good premium enamel from SW or BM would do equally well.
For the exterior of my house I use Sherman Williams Duration. It has held up really well over the last 12 years and I am still able to buy matching paint as I have only been painting walls as needed and I have time. I am only about half done :(
Ooo we just bought some duration for our house. It's going to be slow going. As we found out the previous owners didn't prime at all so despite us priming it's not going well. Time to scrape it off including their paint
Just gonna shout out Clare for any elder or younger Millennials in the crowd. Their colors are chef's kiss
I go between them and Benjamin Moore, just because so the pros over ever hired to work on my house use Ben Moore, and I figure there must be a reason.
