Colour and Gloss Measurement of Decorative Paint & Coatings
Colour Quality Control, Precise Colour Matching and Communication Tools for Decorative Coatings
Colour and Gloss Measurement for Decorative Paint & Coatings
Colour measurement and colour matching solutions for home decor, wall paintings, flooring, furniture, and other materials
Decorative paints & coatings are applied on the interior and exterior walls of all kinds of residential, commercial, industrial, and institutional buildings, selected often entirely for their visual appearance as an expression of personality, character, or brand. Decorative paints & coatings are also utilised in decorative interiors such as wall paintings, wood flooring, sculptures, and furniture.
However, often these products have a long list of required properties such as light fastness, viscosity, coverage, ease of use, etc., that complicates consistent delivery to customers.
Konica Minolta measuring instruments offer a solution for improving coating quality for all decorative paint applications, from raw materials to finished products. Colour measurement allows organisations to implement data driven process control and quality control procedures that improves output consistency, saves time, waste, and environmental impact.
Whether for internal controls, colour communication with your supply chain, colour matching, or remaking from a database of colours, our software solutions are supported by an experienced team who can help you to accurately specify, produce, and communicate colour.
Digital colour and appearance data can be used to expedite the supply process, greatly improving a paint producer's ability to react to the market by reducing the risks and costs associated with producing, distributing, and maintaining physical standards.
As primarily an aesthetic product, colour and appearance is a crucial quality indicator for decorative coatings in order to repeatably meet customer requirements.
Colour measurement, applied when visiting with customers, agreeing specifications with suppliers, in paint and coating development laboratories, benchmarking industry competitors, or reporting for internal quality control programs, can build supply chain relationships based on quality, consistency, and reducing subjectivity from specification and approval.
Konica Minolta has a dedicated team of experts responsible for implementing, training, optimising, and customising systems for colour formulation and digital colour data communication. Our experts can help your teams to establish digital colour standards and colour difference tolerances that you can share with your supply chain partners. You can leverage the experience of our application teams to quickly establish repeatable, best-practice processes for colour and appearance measurement and control.
Our benchtop spectrophotometers are manufactured to the highest standards, to provide you with accuracy and traceability alongside innovative features like a built-in ISO compliant gloss sensor or built-in display and operator wizard. Benchtop instruments also offer the greatest application flexibility for either liquid paint or components, or solid paint samples. A portable spectrophotometer such as the CM-26dG is the perfect partner for the process, allowing operators mobility and flexibility whilst maintaining traceability and industry leading inter-model agreement with other instruments in the supply chain. The CM-26dG also includes an integrated 60-degree gloss sensor, allowing the operator to simultaneously test other appearance characteristics of the coating.
Through our partnership with Rhopoint Instruments, we offer a number of advanced gloss and appearance measurement solutions, including the innovative IQ glossmeters which measure DOI and Haze. Development teams can utilise the Rhopoint TAMS, a portable machine vision system, to inspect surfaces throughout the coating process, from surface preparation, primer, coats, and finishing.
Benefits
- Accurately and cost effectively meet customer specification
- Achieve first-quality products quickly, with less cost and waste
- Increase production capacity by optimising processes
- Strengthen brand identity
- Reduce subjectivity on specification and approval
- Reduce business risks by reducing reliance on physical standards and specific expertise
Instruments
Applications
Measurement of Exterior Paint Materials
Benchtop spectrophotometers are the best choice for exterior paint and coating applications. Facades and other building materials have roughly structured surfaces. Thereefore, to obtain repeatable data that corresponds with the human observer, a larger measurement aperture must be used. The sample holder arm of the CM-36d can be removed to allow the operator to measure samples of any size using a measurement aperture of up to 30mm.
Measurement of Interior Paint
For interior paint and coating applications, useful colour data can be measured with either benchtop or portable instruments. The portable CM-26 series, available with or without an integrated 60-degree gloss sensor. As close tolerance instruments they enabling the operator to measure repeatable and traceable colour data consistent between other CM-26 series instruments (Inter Instrument Agreement) and other spectrophotometers (Inter Model Agreement).
This allows the operator to measure a colour at a customer, match that colour in production anywhere in the world, and perform QC measurements of the result whilst keeping the instrumental influence on production tolerance as low as possible.
Visual Assessment of Paint with a Light Booth
The objective of colour measurement is to manufacture products that are visually appealing and cohesive to the human observer. Therefore, visual assessment will always be a part of the colour production process. Instruments allow organisations to report and communicate traceable colour data, accurately and without subjectivity, but the product still needs to be approved by a customer's eye. Rely on one of our light cabinets and evaluate colours under controlled lighting conditions.
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