When consumers shop for a product – be it a car, camera or computer – one of the first things they notice is colour.

And if the colour looks a little off – if adjacent components don’t match perfectly, for instance – no purchase is likely to be made. “Colour influences the perception of overall product quality more so than any other attribute,” says Shannon Gary, director of the industrial category for X-Rite Incorporated, which is in the business of helping manufacturers with real-time colour management 100 per cent in-line. Based in Grandville, Michigan (US), X-Rite makes colour-measurement instrumentation and software for various industrial markets, including plastics, automotive, paint and textiles.
In the plastics industry, X-Rite products are used to meet the colour-measurement needs of processors, moulders, extruders and resin manufacturers. In formulating, the ability to control colour permits compounders to hit target colours with a minimum of trial and error. Meanwhile, quality control personnel can verify the colour of raw materials, finished parts and assemblies to determine if they conform to specifications.
X-Rite’s newest industrial product is VeriColor Spectro, an easy-to-integrate non-contact spectrophotometer that provides in-line colour measurement for a variety of manufacturing processes, including plastic injection, extrusion and blow moulding.
Introduced at NPE 2006 in Chicago, VeriColor Spectro rounds out a product line that also includes hand-held and bench-top colour measurement devices, as well as a full suite of formulation and quality control software. 
Accurate Color & Compounding Inc, an American maker of custom colour concentrates for the plastics industry, uses X-Rite software, as well as a trio of spectrophotometers – a bench-top unit inside the lab and a pair of portable hand-helds.
“X-RiteColor Master Formulation software makes us much more efficient in the lab, allowing us to achieve colour matches and correct production problems much quicker than we could otherwise,” says Jason Yelm, the company’s vice president of manufacturing.
“Plus, the hand-held spectrophotometers are indispensable - one stays here and the other is usually out in the field, collecting data to diagnose problems at customer sites.”