I found some very inexpensive 3″×6″ ceramic tiles at Home Depot. These. They have a nice glossy black finish and they only cost 26 cents each. I decided to try to engrave them. I was hoping to be able to blast cleanly through the black glaze and reveal the bright white ceramic underneath. It didn’t exactly work out that way.

Here are pictures of my results. The upper left tile is blank. The one below it has been vector engraved at two different power levels. The three on the right have been raster engraved at varying speeds and powers.

The raster engraving never did reveal any clean tile. The bluish tint I believe came from the blue paper towel I used to wipe away the ceramic dust after engraving.

Below is a close-up view of the lower power vector effort. It’s pretty clean, but the line is wide and not very deep. The lighting for this photograph makes it look brighter than it really is. 

Here’s an angled close-up of the higher power vector attempt.

The material bubbled up and created a mess above the plane of the glaze. Here I’ve made some attempt to scrape it away, but the result is still not clean at all.

You can buy tiles that are designed to be laser engraved. These cheap tiles from the hardware store are no substitute.