if you want square edge you can get it from Bruce, Mohawk and many other mfctrs. They may not have the samples but the lines all make square edge products. The reason for micro bevels are that no floor is perfectly flat and without sanding the floor you will have instances of overwood which if your picky you will notice with a square edge product. With micro bevels this helps avoid the situation as it camaflouges the height variations. Other reason is simply design. With a bevel each strip or plank is accented and it is a different look. Any difference in maintenance would be extremely negligible.

"...âÂÂ100% factâ no floor company finishes the sides of a beveled edge product.... " I can't resist here...I have to comment...you are in for a battle with the manufacturer, the distributor and the company that sold you the product. However, a stained and finished flooring product that when installed reveals unstained areas of each unit is unacceptable. I would find a few units with missing stain on edges, but not any more than about a half dozen units in the typical job. I would consider what you have there as a manufacturing defect or a flaw in the process that creates the product. A quick solution, were you to accept the product, would be to stain the offending blonde edges with an appropriate stain or coloring agent. However, I don't see why that would be your responsibility to do or to pay to have it done. However, $10 worth of coloring media and about an hour or two of labor to skillfully apply...and it'd be done and you could get back to installing and using the floor. Has the manufacturer suggested that yet? Staining the edges of a few units and correcting other minor defects with colored wood filler or coloring media is typical with any wood floor installation and is part of the job. However, your situation goes beyond the scope of correcting an occasional unit.

Hi everyone, thanks for your responses. The flooring dealer and the Mirage rep came to my house on Friday, took pictures, and filed a claim with Mirage. They both agreed that the reflection on the bevel seemed more exaggerated than what they consider "normal" and since "Sonora" is a new color in their maple lineup, they want to determine if there is a manufacturing issue with the stain or finish on the micro-bevel edge. Worse-case scenario is Mirage says its fine, and the dealer (the owner himself) said he would work with me to see if there is a way they can address it. I did have a sample board that was larger than usual - it was about 24X18. I have many pictures of the sample board in my exact room, with the planks running in the exact same direction as they are now, and time stamped at the same time of day. There is no evidence of such exaggerated lines as I have in the final installation. I did order the exact sku from this sample board (see pic below). For those who mentioned location of windows and light source, there is no good solution there. There are large windows both parallel and perpendicular to the direction of the planks - so regardless of what direction they were installed, this would have occurred. One window faces south-east and the other faces south-west, so throughout the day the sun travels from length of plank to width of plank. Now, time for me to claim ignorance... I really was clueless that there was even such a thing as a micro-bevel edge on a floor. If I saw it listed, I didn't make anything of it, and assumed it was related to installation. Not one store that I went to to did anyone mention to me that micro-beveled floors are different than what I had (and I showed them pictures), or that it was even a "thing", nor did anyone consult me regarding the lighting impact on the appearance of a new floor in my home. I must have been to 12 different flooring dealers. I also viewed hundreds of inspirational pictures online on the Mirage website and other manufacturers (Kahrs, Armstrong, Mohawk, Shaw, etc), and I never noticed any micro-bevel lines in any picture that I looked it. So while it may have been ignorance on my part, I don't know how I was supposed to guess that this would have been the outcome. And it would certainly seem that the manufacturers are doing their best to hide it in their room scene photos. Below is the stock photo for Mirage Maple Sonora. The 2nd picture below is of the sample boards I had with no evidence of a reflective bevel. The larger sample with the carpet piece below it is the exact floor I ordered (same sku#). The long plank at the back is a scrap of my old floor which was removed.

We went with a product that we have been very happy with. It is a light oak plank with a nearly imperceptible micro-bevel. It is very realistic looking, but it is still vinyl and looking closely you can tell it is not real wood. It met all of my standards, and we intend to put this in as flooring when we re-do our first floor (this is a second floor application we have in now.) I had thought I definitely wanted EIR and brought home numerous samples but ended up not going with this effect. What we discovered was that the EIR in most of the samples we had actually made the floor look more fake and plasticky. I think this happens because if there is a knot, you then have a very large splotch of smooth plastic. It is not so apparent when looking straight down, but when the floor catches the light at a certain angle, it is very apparent. We got Karndean's Van Gogh rigid core in French Oak. https://www.karndean.com/en/commercial-flooring/products/scb85-french-oak This is not EIR. Originally we thought we'd go with Karndean's Korlok line that is EIR. The Rigid Core has all of the same specs but is not EIR; we thought it looked less fake than the Korlok.