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.