Choosing the Best Device to Create Digital Color Standards

Whether you’re producing textiles, automotive parts, or plastic pieces, color needs to remain consistent or the final product will be rejected. Unfortunately, there are many ways for color errors to creep in during manufacturing.

Creating and using accurate digital color standards is one way to combat these errors. Digital color standards can be used in software to specify and communicate color, formulate colorants and raw materials, and control color quality. They give brand owners peace of mind that the color they communicate is the color that will be produced, and manufacturers the confidence to work faster and more efficiently.

To create digital color standards, you need an accurate, repeatable master spectrophotometer. But with so many instruments on the market, how can you choose? Today we’re highlighting some of the features of our new Ci7860 so you can judge for yourself whether it’s the right instrument for you to create digital color standards.

A Champion Instrument to Create Digital Color Standards

1 – The tightest inter-instrument agreement available

The Ci7860 is the ideal master device. With a 0.06 average DE* inter-instrument agreement, it creates the industry’s most accurate digital color standards. In fact, the Ci7860 can achieve a 25% tighter specification than any other device on the market.

Inter-instrument agreement is a very important consideration when selecting color measurement devices for your workflow. Unfortunately, it’s such a technical topic that it leads to a lot of confusion. Check out our Inter-Instrument Agreement blog to learn why it’s important.

2 – Control over advanced optical brightening agents

From laundry soap to paper to socks, OBAs are used in many applications to give a “whiter than white” appearance. But they also pose a challenge for manufacturers because they yield measurements that may or may not correlate with visual assessment.

Read our Controlling OBAs In Manufacturing blog to learn more.

Using a spectrophotometer with a controlled amount of UV energy can provide accurate measurements; an important consideration if you work with OBAs. The Ci7860 uses calibrated UV filters to help measure and control advanced optical brighteners used in paper, textiles, plastics and paint and coatings.

3 – The ability to quantify haze

Haze tells you how much light transmits through, and how much light is scattered, when it passes through a sample. It can be good or bad. For example, if a clear envelope window has haze, post office character recognition machines won’t be able identify the address characters. On the other hand, haze can help disperse the light in a vehicle’s brake light bulb so you see scattered red light instead of just the filament.

Whether you want to include or exclude haze, the Ci7860 meets ASTM D1003 – Procedure B standard methods for specification and quality control.

4 – Precise measurement area with video preview

A problem many manufacturers run into is sample size. If 40% of your samples are too small to measure with your device, how can you ensure accuracy? The Ci7860 offers up to five aperture sizes (25mm, 17mm, 10mm, 6mm, plus an optional 3.5mm). These can be used for reflection and transmission measurements across opaque, transparent and translucent materials.

The Ci7860 also offers video preview of even the smallest object onto any PC monitor (not a tiny device screen), so you can see exactly what you’re about to measure.