Colour measurement for paper and paper products

brightness, opacity, fluorescence, colour, whiteness and tint for all pulp, paper, and card products

Colour measurement for paper and paper products


Quantifying the whiteness and the effect of optical brighteners to meet the colour demands of customers

Pulp and paper products cover a huge gamut of packaging materials, office supplies, fine papers, cardstocks, and more, each with different requirements for appearance and physical properties. At the top end of the market, brands want custom colours for packaging with tight tolerances on colour and gloss to improve shelf appeal and improve the perceived value of their products. Producers serving the print industry must have control over whiteness and yellowness, and optical brightener. Even products that would not have historically been colour critical are seeing market trends bringing colour into their business as customers want customisation, branding, and consistency.

Konica Minolta offers customers a range of solutions for improving product quality and integrate accurate and traceable colour data into colour production processes, everything from recycling papers to specification of dyes and raw materials, process control, quality control, and colour communication with customers.

 

Colour measurement allows organisations to implement data driven processes that improve output and consistency, saving time and waste.


Applying colour measurement in collaboration with suppliers and customers for sharing colour data, setting tolerances, for specifying and approving product and ongoing reporting, can build supply chain relationships based on quality, consistency, and collaboration, reducing costly subjectivity, rejects, and disagreements.

Konica Minolta benchtop spectrophotometers and portable spectrophotometers offer simple and accurate solutions for measuring the colour of paper and paper products, allowing organisations to control and optimise production and improve product quality.

The CM-3630A is designed specifically for the pulp and paper industry for measuring brightness, opacity, fluorescence, colour, whiteness, and tint in full accordance with several international and national standards such as ISO, SCAN, DIN, TAPPI, CPPA, and AFNOR. Our team can help specify the best solution for your needs and demonstrate quick yet powerful templates for WI, YI, and more, that will expedite and simplify reporting and analysis.

The application team at Konica Minolta have a great deal of experience in delivering measurement solutions to customers in the paper industry value chain with an industry leading sales and support network across Europe and throughout the globe.

Benefits

  • Add and recalibrate potentially any recycled material
  • No need to newly calibrate colorants in the recycled material
  • Create a blend of recycled material and virgin material
  • Develop new recipes in a short time thanks to an excellent correction efficiency
  • Benefit from sets of colorant prepared by a pigment manufacturer as a starting point

Instruments

Instruments

CM-36dGV Portable Spectrophotometer

Vertically aligned benchtop spectrophotometer for measuring of solid, pellet, regrind materials, either opaque or transparent. An ideal solution for plastic companies wanting to generate accurate and traceable colour data. 

CM-26dG Portable Spectrophotometer

Portable sphere type spectrophotometer designed for user friendly colour measurement of flat or large samples. This device delivers measurement data including (SCI) and excluding (SCE) surface conditions in one measurement sequence, at ultra-high speed.
 

Colibri® Platform

Quality Control and Colour Matching Software, Colibri® offers special features for recycled plastics. Coloured recycled material can be used in recipe calculation either as pure polymer or in combination with virgin material without needing to generate calibration series each time.

SPECIM FX Hyperspectral cameras

The SPECIM FX series of in-line hyperspectral imaging cameras can be used for identification of plastics by colour and type as part of a sorting system. The FX-50 camera has even proven capable of sorting black PS, PE, PP, ABS, and PVC.

Applications

Applications

Colour Measurement of Recycled Plastics

Organisations can utilise Colibri® to integrate recycled materials into production. To do so, they should maximise the quality of the characterisation of those recyclates. The vertical benchtop spectrophotometer CM-36dGV can be used to generate excellent results when accurately characterising the colour of recycled materials either opaque or transparent. Edge loss errors are eliminated by illuminating an area that is larger than the measurement size. Colibri® can generate accurate matches using only characterisations of the material in a few mixes with black and white.

Mixed coloured regrind plastic products from a recycling process

Read more about Colibri® for Recycling

Learn more about the benefits of Colibri® for recycled plastics in this short handout. Colibri® is installed, trained, supported, and customised by an experienced and dedicated team who can discuss potential systems and the specifics of your particular requirements.

Colibri, The perfect match for recycled material

SPECIM Plastic recycling with Hyperspectral Imaging

The FX inline Hyperspectral imaging systems can be integrated into high throughput material sorting lines, categorising and sorting plastic recycling to help recyclers achieve the best quality product.

Read the Technical Notes
SPECIM FX series hyperspectral cameras: FX 10, FX 17, and FX 50

Related Solutions

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