How to Accurately Evaluate and Control the Color of Windows and Doors
Color control is incredibly important for window and door manufacturers. Not only must all parts match throughout the home or building and retain color integrity over time, manufacturers must be able to produce an exact color match years down the road for replacement parts.Challenge
Home and commercial buildings are designed to last. However, creating timeless and durable color on doors and windows holds many challenges:
- The color of incoming materials varies and can impact final color.
- Visual evaluation using physical standards under inconsistent lighting can lead to poor color decisions.
- Textured and glossy surfaces require extremely tight color tolerances to ensure all parts match when assembled and installed.
- Color must be reproducible across multiple supplier and production sites.
Solution
To control the color of windows and doors, building material manufacturers need a complete quality control solution that includes a custom physical sample that represents both color and appearance effects, a light booth with standardized lighting for visual evaluation, a spectrophotometer to capture accurate spectral data, and quality control software to compare and track quality and trends.
Results
A quality control solution can help window and door manufacturers reduce rejections.
- Rejecting off-color materials instead of adding the wrong color to stock.
- Capturing spectral data to eliminate the subjectivity of visual evaluation.
- Comparing color against accurate standards ensures compliance.
- Setting clear expectations and ensuring device performance across sites.
How It Works
Many window and door manufacturers utilize physical color standards to communicate expectations and evaluate quality against a production sample. To successfully represent both color and appearance, each physical color standard depicts both color and special effects like gloss and texture. Samples and standards are then compared in a light booth to ensure color does not shift under different types of light, such as showroom, outdoor, and home.
Although visual evaluation is important, adding a sphere spectrophotometer can quantify color acceptability without the subjectivity of visual evaluation. A benchtop model creates digital standards and ensures incoming color is within tolerance, while a portable handheld is ideal to evaluate color on the receiving dock or offsite at a customer or accelerated weathering test location.
Quality control software ties everything together by communicating accurate color data with suppliers and providing pass/fail tolerance information for each material color measurement. Quality assurance software takes it a step further to offer insight into color trends and monitors, optimizes and ascertains the performance of the entire spectrophotometer fleet to ensure all sites are reproducing color the same way.
Featured Products
Replicate color, texture, and gloss to establish realistic color targets for suppliers and visually evaluate color during final assembly.
A benchtop spectrophotometer to measure incoming materials to verify compliance and reject shipments that are out of specification.
A portable spectrophotometer to capture spot measurements on the dock or in the lab, evaluate color stability during weathering tests in the field, and specify accurate color offsite for replacement products.
Quality control software to compare and evaluate spectral data to track trends, ensure color consistency at every site, and evaluate suppliers across the supply chain.
A light booth to visually evaluate color matches under multiple standard lighting conditions.
Quality assurance software to verify all onsite and offsite instruments are measuring within tolerance and performing within specification.
Achieve Color Success
A complete color control solution from X-Rite can help window and door manufacturers ensure the color of all parts match throughout the home or building and produce an exact color match years down the road.
