RESUMEN
Several ways of curing are being tried to improve material's properties and reduce marginal gap. However, all are considering about the pattern of light intensity. It was noted from the preliminary study the change of light wavelength from filter changing may give an impact on material's property and microleakage. The object of this study was to verify the effect of filters with various wavelength width on the microhardness and microleakage of composite resin; hybrid type of DenFil and submicron hybrid type of Esthet X. Composite resins were cured using 3 kinds of filter; narrow-banded(465-475 nm), mid-banded(430-470 nm), wide-banded(400-500 nm). After the estimation of microhardness, degree of dye penetration and the maximum gap from SEM evaluation were done between 4 groups that showed no difference in microhardness value of the lower surface. The results were as follows: 1. Adequate microhardness could not be gained with a narrow-banded filter irrespective of curing time. At the upper surface, DenFil should be polymerized with middle or wide-banded filter for 20 seconds at least, while Esthet X be cured with middle or wide-banded filter for 30 seconds at least to get similar hardness value to control group. 2. There was little dye penetration in enamel margin, but all dentin margins showed much more dye penetration irrespective of curing conditions. Although there was no statistical difference, groups cured with mid-banded filter for 40 seconds and with wide-width filter for 20 seconds showed relatively less dye penetration. 3. It was revealed from the SEM examination that group cured with wide-banded filter had the smallest gap without statistical significance. Spearman's rho test showed that the correlation between the results of dye penetration and SEM examination was very low. From these results, it could be concluded that curing with wide-width filter would be better than the other techniques, even though the curing technique using mid-width filter seems to have its own unique advantage.