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.


As primarily an aesthetic product, colour and appearance is a crucial quality indicator for decorative coatings in order to repeatably meet customer requirements.


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, even tracking and calculating with secondary properties. 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.

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 our computer colour matching and digital colour data platform Colibri®.
Colibri® is a modular digital colour data platform that allows companies to develop and grow their systems as necessary, with specialised modules for all functions of the colour supply chain. Owners can build libraries and share data and functions securely with supply partners via cloud or on-premises infrastructure. Benefitting from the advanced colour matching algorithm, colour producers can greatly simplify matching and correction steps, easily switch in our materials or colourants as dictated by the market or supply chain.

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 accompaniment to the process, allowing operators mobility and flexibility whilst maintaining traceability and industry leading inter model agreement with other instruments in the supply chain. The latest portable instruments also incorporate a 60-degree gloss sensor allowing the operator to simultaneously test other appearance dimensions of the painted surface.

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

Instruments

CM-36dG Benchtop Spectrophotometer

The CM-36dG spectrophotometer is a high-precision and high-reliability benchtop instrument capable of measuring colour both in reflectance and/or transmittance, as well as 60-degree gloss. An ideal solution for measurement of paint and coating products. 

CM-26dG Portable Spectrophotometer

Top-class close tolerance portable colour measurement instrument with a built-in 60° glossmeter. The CM-26dG instrument provides the highest level of repeatability, mobility, and usability with excellent inter-instrument agreement.

Colibri® Platform

Quality control and colour formulation software, Colibri® is a colour management and matching solution scalable from one site to a global supply chain, whilst maintaining strict control and data ownership.

Rhopoint IQ-S

Trigloss 20/60/85° close-tolerance IQ version for maximum accuracy and resolution in all gloss applications. This new generation glossmeter also provides data for Rspec, DOI, and Haze.

Rhopoint TAMS

Portable machine vision system that can provide data for development teams by inspect surfaces throughout the coating process, from surface preparation, primer, coats, and finishing.

Light Booth

Light Cabinets in various configurations for visual assessment of colour samples using classic filament lamps & fluorescent tubes or LED/Hybrid technology illumination.

Applications

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.

Colour Communication for the Entire Supply Chain

The Colibri® software platform helps to specify, manage, formulate, produce, and communicate colour throughout all stages of the supply chain. With Colibri®, users can have fast, secure, and managed access to shared data from a central database, and benefit from improved colour communication and shorten time to market, while increasing product quality.

Related Solutions

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