A New York City-based company that designs office products such as desk sets, pens and pencils is using RM200QC spectrocolorimeters from X-Rite (Grand Rapids, MI, USA) to ensure that the colors of its products manufactured in China remain true to the colors specified by its New York design team.
"We set ourselves apart from the competition partly through the use of vibrant, eye-catching colors defined by Pantone. So having colors match properly is critical for our business," says Roger Cole, the Vice President of Sourcing for 9Kings Shanghai Limited (Shanghai, China).
Cole said that Poppin’s manufacturing personnel in China use the hand-held RM200QC spectrocolorimeters as quality control devices to look for any color deviation between items on the production line and the Pantone standard colors that were originally defined by its design team.
In use, the RM200QC spectrocolorimeter measures color by illuminating the surface of a sample with both visible and UV light while simultaneously capturing 27 images with a camera.
After taking a measurement, the spectrocolorimeter compares the color of the object on the production line with the standard Pantone color specified by the design team and gives the result in the form of a simple pass/fail message or CIE L*a*b* color values and delta E color differences.
-- Dave Wilson, Senior Editor, Vision Systems Design
