24 Sustainability Incorporated
“We Set Standards and
Open up New Markets for
Our Customers”
One in a Million
Night Blue, Pompeii Gray, or Frozen
Bronze – these may sound like the current
trend colors in the fall/winter collection,
but they are not. They are the latest and
most fashionable metallic car colors.
The days are over when customers could
order any color as long as it was black.
Today, customers can choose from thousands
of shades. Shimmering glitter
tones are at the top of consumers’ wish
lists right now. But the challenge begins
when the car has to be repainted
after
getting a scratch.
The human eye can differentiate about
ten million colors. However, perception
is a very subjective matter, influenced by
the surrounding colors, the degree of
brightness, and the eye itself. Above all,
our perception of metallic colors changes,
depending
on the angle they are viewed
from.
For such cases, AkzoNobel, one of the
world’s leading paint manufacturers, has
relied on the spectrophotometers of
BYK-Gardner for more than ten years. For
determining metallic colors, in particular,
the two companies developed a special
multi-angle spectrophotometer for car
repair shops around ten years ago. It records
the paint finish with a fixed light
source and analyzes the color using detectors
from different measuring angles. In
this way, data are obtained for perfect color
matching. In 2011, the time had come
to develop a new generation of devices.
Dr. Stephanie Arzt, Key Account Management, BYK-Gardner