I’m having trouble color matching between ABS and PC/ABS and wonder if anyone has had a similar experience or a tactic to visually align the same color across these two resins.
The PC/ABS part has the same texture callouts, same color specification (CIELAB), and still appears darker than the adjacent ABS parts. The parts we make are typically quite large, like 1m x .3m long, so even small differences become magnified.
I’m getting ΔE tolerances well under 1.0.
Asked the internet, the ai’s, the reddit, etc and came here hoping someone has first hand insight. Thanks.
Not the answer you are looking for but just an anecdotal lesson. I always remember my college graphic design class professor telling us whenever there appears to be a mistake to make it more obvious. Show that the gap, or elements that don’t look aligned (or colors that don’t match in this case) were intentional. In other words “elevate” it so it doesn’t look like a mistake.
Sorry for not directly addressing the issue, but even if you are able to match the colors now there is no guarantee the two materials will discolor the same over time.
I’m guessing you’ve already done this but this has most likely become a factory level issue. Your factory Engineers should be working with the raw material supplier to do batch color match, the caveat there is that when a new batch of raw material is required, you run almost the same chance of discoloration between the two.
I need some next level accountability from the factory that hasn’t been present, along with higher-level CMF expertise that they don’t have.
I was able to connect with a CMF principal at a very large China consumer electronics CM who seemed to confirm my suspicions. PC (and thus to some extent PC/ABS) has different reflectivity or other mystifying optical properties not shared with ABS. The measured colors will be the same but will appear darker.
To counteract this, a heavier texture or more dull texture like a MicroMatte could be used, rather than more common MoldTech specs. It’s still a bit of a guess and retexturing large parts isn’t anyone’s favorite task.
I second that approach. For something like this where you are so far downstream, no matter what you provide they are probably going to have to match it by eye anyway.
Following up for posterity. We tried this, with three progressively lighter (L-value) shots. The visual mismatch improved slightly, but it started to introduce other greenish hues in the lightest version. In the end we opted to change the surrounding colors and left the PC/ABS color alone because the trouble-shooting was leading to nowhere.
I really think its something that has to be solved with texture and mold treatment, not resin color. Unfortunately when we textured the mold the plan was for the parts to also be ABS, not PC/ABS.
I will continue to update this for the nerds out there like myself who might be interested.
Thanks for the follow up Sean! Great lessons learned for others.
I had a similar thing recently. Not a color match issue but a material change and the tolerances/thicknesses of the switch were different.
I was able to push back by explaining the design was optimized for a single material. We could switch a material but it was going to introduce considerable risk to the timeline chasing it to make it look right. Had we had the plan to make it out of two different materials I would have designed it differently and it was always going to look a little wrong… thankfully it worked!
Yeah totally. Its almost like… CMF is where you start! At least if its something that you want made at a high level of perceived quality. And you can chase solutions until the cows come home, and never reach ‘optimization’, its just when someone says the project needs to be done.
I’ve had this issue before. The solution was to purchased a NIX color sensor for all of our suppliers as well as a set of Pantone chips for our specified colors. We gave them a tolerance to stay between and if it exceeded those, we wouldn’t accept them. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of factors to consider with formulating colors and I think instead of trying to work with plastic suppliers and relay that info to the manufacturer, just let the manufacturer take responsibility for it once you’ve set up your CMF SOP’s.
Yeah and its surfacing deficiencies we have in both spec’ing and QA’ing colors and finishes. For instance I’d rarely be considering inherent resin gloss levels (aside from SPI finishes)… and it sounds like even mold injection temperature plays a role especially in PC and PC/ABS. But if we’re not spec’ing it, and the molder isn’t looking for it, and we aren’t measuring it, it won’t happen.
At least if its something that you want made at a high level of perceived quality. And you can chase solutions until the cows come home, and never reach ‘optimization’, its just when someone says the project needs to be done.