Why are Colorimeters never enough?
As we know it, two powerful and very different instruments occupy the color measurement space: the Colorimeter and the Spectrophotometer .
Popular with consumers for their affordability and ease of use, Colorimeters are ideal for finding closer color matches from existing digital fan deck databases. Due to the substantial cost savings of traditional Spectrophotometer s, they are favored in less demanding professional applications. The price of a new generation of Colorimeters ranges from a few hundred yuan to several thousand yuan, reliable and precise matching accuracy, while typical Spectrophotometer s provide more professional functions, but still remain in the range of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.
Professional color matching with a Spectrophotometer is required because Colorimeters have several disadvantages compared to Spectrophotometer s.
1. Although the average color accuracy of a Colorimeter is reasonable, the maximum color error in the 2-3 dE range can be quite high. This is acceptable for general consumer color measurement, however, for professional use, there is little chance of inaccurate color matching in the case of paint retouching, formulation and quality control.
2. The Colorimeter can only measure the color of one light source. This limits color matching to only one lighting condition and can lead to metamerism errors. There are color adaptation techniques to convert color measurements to other light sources, but these methods are too inaccurate for professional color matching <1dE.
3. Colorimeters are not suitable for quality control applications. Although the average inter-instrument agreement is relatively good, over some regions of the color space the maximum inter-instrument agreement can be 1-2 dE. This may result in quality errors.
Once spectrometer prices drop significantly and match current Colorimeter prices, there will be no need for Colorimeters.
