Colour and Gloss Measurement of Decorative Paint & Coatings

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.