Color Measurement Challenges That Manufacturers Faces In Metal Industries

Printing on Metal product and mirror-like products is an increasingly popular task as the manufacturers, designers, and brand owners always struggle to look for new things to add strength and interest to the products. Producing elegant and attractive metallic images using translucent inks on the metal sheets is a big color measurement challenge for the manufacturers. There is a numerous testing equipment that can be used to measure the color uniformity of the painted metal products.

Types of Color Measurement Instrument

The best color measurement instrument which is highly preferred by the manufacturer nowadays in all production verticals is spectrophotometer. There are two types of spectrophotometers which are used in printing and packaging industries today i.e.

• Spherical spectrophotometers that provide the illumination radiance of diffuse/8^o ,
• Traditional spectrophotometers that provide the illumination radiance of 0^o/45^o.

Apart from these spectrophotometers another type of spectrophotometers is multi-angle spectrophotometer. These instruments are widely used in paint and plating and paper, and packaging industrial production applications to measure the color consistency of the metallic inks or paints. But the basic instruments that manufacturers usually uses in the testing laboratories to measure the colors are the spectrophotometer machine with 45^o illumination.

As per the measurement geometry terminology, the very first thing which is considered is the angle of illumination, the second thing which is considered in the viewing angle of the instrument from the specimen will be viewed for best possible results. This concludes that in 45^o illumination instruments, the illumination will shine at an angle of 45 degree from the surface of the specimen whereas the detector of the instrument receives the reflected light at an angle of 0^o angle right from the perpendicular surface of the object.

On the other hand the Spherical color measurement spectrophotometers that provide the illumination radiance of diffuse/8^o provides the illumination to the specimen from all the directions and the detector receives the reflected light from an angle of 8^o from the surface of the object. This geometrical terminology is known as sphere geometry because these instruments are lined with an extremely reflective substance that are used to provide light and to diffuse light from the surface of the specimen.

The color measurement instrument which is widely used to measure the color consistency of the samples is TP 810 Spectrophotometer machine which is considered in all production vertical to measure the texture and the gloss. The instrument provides the illumination of 0^o/45^o. It is the best testing equipment that offers highly precise and repeatable results.