Colour and Appearance Measurement of Plastics products
QC and formulation of films, foils, sheets, pellets, or plastic parts
Colour and Appearance Measurement of Plastics Products
Master the colour of your plastics products to meet quality standards
The appearance of plastic products is a key quality parameter with an undeniable influence on the customer's purchase decision. The appearance of many plastic products typically involves not only colour and opacity, but also gloss and surface texture. Whether the plastic product is opaque or translucent, flat, curved, thin, or thick, offering appealing colours, delivering products in the correct colour, and delivering consistency are expected from the modern plastic producer.
Konica Minolta is a solution provider for the plastic industry, offering colour measurement instruments, colour data and matching software, innovative gloss meters, and controlled lighting cabinets for visual assessment.
Our experts can help you to implement measurement and control processes that will benefit your business.
- Improve product quality
- Reduce costs and waste
- Improve communication with supply chain partners, building relationships based on collaboration and improvement
Offering a wide range of colours or custom colours within specification is a proven way to build supply chain relationships and grow your business.
Digital colour and appearance data can be used to expedite the supply process, greatly improving companies' ability to react to the market by reducing the risks and costs associated with producing, distributing, and maintaining physical standards, subjective specification, and approval processes with customers.
Colour measurement, applied when visiting with customers, agreeing specifications with suppliers, in plastic product innovation 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 specification and digital colour 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. By improving colour communication, owners can dramatically save time, reduce waste and rejects.
Konica Minolta benchtop spectrophotometers provide operators with the ability to measure all manner of samples both in reflectance in transmittance, whether these are films, foils, sheets, pellets, or plastic parts. Whilst customers, who require portability, are well served by close tolerance instruments like the CM-26dG or for textured plastic producers (like the automotive industry) the CM-25cG.
Our partnership with Rhopoint instruments and Just Normlicht GmbH (light cabinet) offers our customers access to innovative solutions for gloss measurement and a range of controlled lighting assessment solutions.
Benefits
- Drive innovation through unrivalled colour management
- Achieve tight tolerances according to respective standards
- Deliver colour on time and on demand
- Meet customer's needs and specifications
- Speed up colour approval processes
- Strengthen brand identity
Instruments
CM-36dG Benchtop Spectrophotometer
A high-precision benchtop instrument capable of measuring colour either in reflectance or transmittance, ideally suited to a wide range of plastic products. Konica Minolta has integrated an ISO 2813 compliant 60° gloss sensor, to provide simultaneous measurement of colour and gloss.
CM-5 Benchtop Spectrophotometer
A standalone benchtop with integrated colour display and operator wizard, the ideal solution for lab colour measurements of solid, granular, powdered, or liquid samples. The top facing measurement port and large transmittance chamber facilitate efficient and repeatable processes.
Applications
Measurement with the CM-26dG
With its lightweight ergonomic design, optional Bluetooth™ and high-resolution TFT colour display, the CM-26d series is perfectly suited for applications in the field. It offers great flexibility of use with two easily interchangeable measurement apertures with Ø 8 mm (MAV) and Ø 3 mm (SAV). The two lens position settings guarantee perfect data correlation with both apertures, enabling measurement of all sample sizes and shapes.
Measurement of Plastic Molded Parts
QC colour measurement of plastic products is easy using a portable spectrophotometer like the CM-26dG or CM-17d, dependent on the needs of the operator and samples our experts can help you find the optimum solution.
The CM-17d has a vertical configuration and small footprint which is typically easier to allign with samples that have smaller or curved surfaces typical of some moulded plastic parts.
The CM-26dG can be used to simultaneously measure not only colour data but also surface gloss. An ideal solution for quickly and traceably quantifying the visual appearance of products. This would be a significant time saving for some extrusion plastics such as those used in glazing.
Having the ability to traceably and accurately specify, formulate, measure and QC products helps supply chains to improve quality and efficiency.
Measurement of Textured Products
With the portable spectrophotometer CM-25cG the colour of textured plastics can be accurately and repeatably measured. Using circumfrential illumination this device outperforms angular geometries that are be suceptible to small shadows caused by the texture, causing measurement inacuracies.
The CM-25cG simultaneously measures both colour and gloss values, greatly improving efficiency when performing specification or QC measurement tasks.
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