Ensuring colour uniformity throughout the supply chain
Ensuring colour uniformity throughout the supply chain requires robust safeguards and an insightful grasp of how to manage colour. If you have ever disagreed with a friend, family member or colleague about the colour of an object you’ll know just how subjective colour can be.
Now, more than ever, consumers expect consistency and quality from the products they purchase. Not surprisingly, colour is a key player in the quality perception game. Whether it’s a seasonal or fashion trends in retail, the perfect coat of paint on a living room wall, or the latest colour of a new sports team strip, colour matters.
Why colour plays such a significant role in the world we live in?
Colour can sway thinking, change actions, and cause reactions. It can irritate or soothe your eyes, raise your blood pressure, or suppress your appetite. We also associate colours with the pride movement. Think about the colours on a country’s flag, or even the colours we wear to support our favourite sports teams. Colour affects the way we think and feel in more ways than we know - it represents emotions, and it plays a pivotal role in our ability to recognise brands and familiar objects instantaneously. Without even realising it, colour can even affect our behaviour - if we see a green banana, we know it isn't ripe and choose not to eat it, if we see a red light, we know to be cautious or stop.
As a powerful form of communication, colour is irreplaceable.
Colour being an essential component of all our visual experiences means accurate colour management is so important, particularly in the plastics industry.
Why?
Colour variations and differing light sources can lead consumers to believe that a product if of a lower quality, the product has expired, or the product is low quality. But also, inaccurate colour management leads to vast amounts of increased waste which either has to be recycled, or sadly ends up in landfill.
What makes colour so hard to get right?
Colour can be surprisingly difficult to replicate and manage. This is partially because we all see and interpret colour differently, making visual colour evaluations unreliable. People will both see and describe colours differently, even when variable conditions such as lighting have been made uniform. In fact, everything from an individual’s age, medications and mood can impact their colour perception. Adding to this, variations in your environment - like light, altitude, and noise - can affect colour perception, as well as it being impacted by the physical characteristics of a product, such as its gloss level, opacity, and texture.
That's why objective colour management is only feasible with the right colour control tools in place to accurately measure, display and analyse colour as part of an overarching quality control process.
Why are colour management tools so important?
When uniformity is associated with quality perception, the colour continuity can be a make or break for consumer choices. As a result of this, it's vital that industries establish an acceptable level of colour variation tolerance and put those processes and procedures in place to maintain colours within these ranges. Thankfully, with the right tools and processes in place, today’s manufacturers can assure customers that their products will be colour accurate each and every time - without added costs, production delays or wasted resources.
How do we manage colour at PolyBlend?
Having the right technologies and tools in place is essential for an effective and modern quality control process. PolyBlend's colour management programme has been curated by colour specialists and includes a range of hardware and software technologies that, when used together, will help you accurately measure, display, analyse and communicate colour.
Colourimeters
Colourimeters are a simple, relatively inexpensive instrument that are often used for quality control purposes but cannot be used to calculate colour formulas. They provide an objective evaluation of colour characteristics, based upon one light and one observer condition which simulates how the human eye perceives colour. ???????????
Whilst a colourimeter is a standard instrument for colour management, a spectrophotometer offers a more complex insight into colour data……
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Spectrophotometers
At PolyBlend, the emphasis is on ensuring the best quality colour available for our customers, which is why we offer a more complex function for higher precision. Colour is a surprisingly difficult thing to get right, but a spectrophotometer provides spectral data that is beyond observation by the human eye.
?Spectrophotometers are best used for;
There are also multiple geometries of spectrophotometers, depending upon your industry’s specific needs. With Datacolor’s sophisticated matching technology and precise master formulation capabilities enable PolyBlend to quickly respond to market feedback and adapt to your specific colour match
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Light Sources and Colour Evaluation
?Given the?subjective nature of colour evaluation, it’s understandable that lighting sources pose a significant challenge towards achieving colour consistency. The hue of light used for visual colour evaluation is typically established at the beginning of the production process. Nonetheless, any lack of colour uniformity across the supply chain can result in a vastly different or even inconsistent end product.
The best way to ensure accuracy and repeatability when evaluating colour samples is to use a colour viewing booth (light box) that meets industry specifications. At PolyBlend we have used VeriVide equipment for over 25 years.
Standardising the light source, a colour is viewed under controls colour quality and accuracy, light intensity, evenness of illumination, viewing/illumination geometry, and surrounding conditions. Differences in any of these conditions may affect the colour appearance and result in inaccurate colour quality decisions or worse, a non-conforming colour of your customers products.
Quality control checks
The final stage of our colour management process at PolyBlend is the quality control checks. 'It's the eyes the buys' and so our final quality check is always made by eye, to ensure colour conformity and consistency as well to ensure the customers’ requirements have been met to both our and agreed standards.
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Whatever your colour needs,?PolyBlend?remains at the forefront of the latest colour technology to ensure our customers receive the quality they need. Our technicians are industry experts, offering years of experience and are trained to advanced-application level, so that you can be supported and guided through the process.
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