The Mystery Color that started the quest!

Before moving on to a post regarding my tests of the three colorimeters I have purchased, I thought I might provide some background about how this interest in colorimeters got started.

It all began with this project, a set of stackable DVD cases in 8 different colors.  Each if these cases holds one DVD of a movie of interest to the person for which they were created.  It is their goal to use a spinner having the same set of eight colors to randomly select a movie for family viewing.

DVD Case Stack

 

Unfortunately, I did not know the FULL scope of the project when the DVD cases were printed.  And, of course, each of these colors is vitally important to the person for whom they were created.  The colors form a set and both cases and spinner sections must match exactly.

The problem I faced is that one of the colors (in the black box), which was printed quite a while ago, was a complete mystery to me.  Try as I might, I had yet to find the filament that was used.  It is not a Bambu Labs color and in the past, recreating colors was just not all that important to me.

But, once I became aware that color CAN be and IS vitally important to others, I decided to try to find the color using a colorimeter... finally leading to the purchase of three colorimeters using 3 different lighting systems.  The goal was to find a starting point from which to search the FilamentColors.XYZ filament color library.

Here is the color information as captured by the LS173 colorimeter and entered onto the search form of FilamentColors.xyz web site..

FilamentColors.xyz Search

While the library is not all inclusive, it did return some likely candidates.

Filament Match Candidates

 

Of these, the only brand I had purchased in the past was Anycubic. And, I had, in fact, purchased a green.  

Notice that the search return also gives us a 'Delta" of the differences between the search values and the values as tested by FilamentColors.  

VISUAL PERCEPTION 

I have come to realize that the values vary according the the instruments used for testing.   

That is because each system is trying to determine the colors in terms of the way humans perceive colors.  And, that process is skewed by the lighting and lens systems used.  None of my colorimeters return the same values.  And, this will be the topic of my next blog entry.

Even so, there is real value in a combining our own testing with a colorimeter along with using those values to search the FilamentColors library.