Pantone Plastics Library... Do you use one?

I am trying to see if this is worth the investment. Thanks!

We looked into this product for my work. But decided against it. We make a lot of things in Asia and we found most of our factories did not have the book. So if they don’t have the book then there is no point in us having it. Also it is really expensive. It looks great and would help us a lot if both parties had one.

Every place I’ve worked just used the Solid Coated books, a bit cheaper and quite accurate if you’re not doing translucency.

Pantone Solid Coated Books may help for colour selection, but what about colour matching for quality control. Through in multiple vendors and materials, what becomes best practise?

We bought it at work a few years back, it’s not worth the money in my opinion. We don’t even use it anymore, we ended up using the solid coated book. The color range is very limited and you are going to end up wishing the book had more shades of a particular color. Also, keeping track of all the chips if you have several projects can be an headache, we lost countless chips from suppliers who didnt send them back or just lost them.

The transparent book might be interesting just to see the variation of color depending on the plastic’s thickness.

Same as the comments above, we primarily use proprietary Xrite color chips or Pantone Solid Coated chips for communicating with vendors.

Once we get to a point where they have a rough idea, we will use the Lab* color values to dial in the chips and provide limit samples on the actual plastic parts.

It’s always a challenge, some vendors have Pantone books that are 10 years old and have been sitting in the sun, some people just print out a file on their printer from your artwork and use that, so ultimately you have to try and figure out what works the best with your vendors.

We do a lot in transparent plastic film colors. A quick way I found to generate a bunch of transparent colors is to use the built in Pantone book on AI. I print them out on transparency film with our in house print. I have sent chips we like to our vendors and this helped them get closer to the desired colors quickly.

Rarely is there a need.

Our QA doesn’t mix lots. Also, if I am required to use separate vendors or different materials, I know getting them to match isn’t worth the effort. So instead of having slightly different colors looking like a mistake, I’ll make the colors largely different so it appears to be on purpose instead of a mistake.

We use our set quite a bit, especially when a customer has existing art or a print Pantone they are trying to match a plastic color to.

We will sometimes send them to suppliers to match and customers to see what the color will actually be like. You can set up an account and order replacements online for a few dollars each when you send one out that won’t be returned or lose them. Works a heck of a lot better than asking a supplier to match the customer’s shoe color from a photo :slight_smile:

I guess I might amend my comment by saying rarely have I seen teams that had both solid coated swatches and the actual plastic chips. It would be great, but unless you’re a huge cop oration (the only place I ever saw them was at a huge medical company I interned at), you likely could spend the extra few grand elsewhere.

Does Pantone solid coated can be used for all standard production method? I mean pellet color, spray paint color, silkscreen color.
How about anodizing color?