Extinction of Colorboxes

By understanding the client’s needs and noticing the diversity of the market, companies are still focused on providing both solutions. Such a two-pronged approach is not obvious at all, because especially on the markets of Western Europe, for some time the companies provide only spectrophotometers to customers.

It turns out that not all customers perceive this as an advantage, so it is worth having a choice. There is still a huge crowd of people who appreciate the traditional solution, want to physically touch a flashcard, check the proposed shade, not to mention the much lower price of the colorbox in relation to the spectrophotometer.

Generally, there are two types of colorboxes on the car paints market, which are determined by color positioning: according to the vehicle's brand and according to the chromatic system (ColorTool by Profix).

Of course, you can also divide the color documentation according to the production method: polygraphy (old technology, poorly reproducing the original varnishes), spray method (the most expensive but most faithfully reflects the used varnishes and application method) and coating (combines the advantages of both above - a relatively low cost while maintaining characteristics of varnishes ).

Coating is the most popular form of production that involves the application of paint to paper with use of a roller. This technology is characterized by a very good ratio of the cost of production to the quality of the obtained flashcard. Color cards produced in this way are characterized by the most stable color quality in the whole production range.

Coming back to the arrangement of flashcards, the system by brand has undoubtedly a lot of advantages and the greatest of them is transparency and ease of use by an unpaired user.

However, for a more advanced user, a better solution is documentation in a chromatic system. The system in a chromatic system, at closer acquaintance, turns out to be a very versatile solution. The customer has very easy access to a selected group of colors and thus finding the right color takes several seconds. This is especially important when you do not know the color code or the car is repainted. In such cases, we are not interested in what manufacturer or which OEM code it is, the color matching is done by finding the nearest color among existing flashcards.

In the process of searching for a color, it is very helpful to arrange the cards in the cabinet, all groups of colors are visible with one look at the arranged sets.

An additional very interesting aspect of such a solution is the fact that when searching for a color, using the recipe program, the program suggests a color card pinned to the standard or variant, however when we fail to match the dedicated card, we always have the option to use the cards on the right or on the left from the proposed. In fact the whole colorbox is one big series of variants.

This is the greatest strength of this solution - the ability to choose any color card in the fastest possible way.

An additional advantage of this solution is the fact that one card, by means of a reference, can be pinned to several different codes, different manufacturers, because the same color can be found on cars of several different manufacturers.

In summary – by constant development of the software and corresponding chromatic system, searching for recipes by OEM code and / or manufacturer (with a hint from pinned color card) or selecting card that matches the car followed by choosing the right recipe never was that easy.

Of course, despite the many advantages of color documentation, we are not able to stop technological progress of spectrophotometers.

This means only one thing - in some time customers all over the world, while choosing colors for cars, will only use spectrophotometers, which will be connected through a cloud with a phone, tablet or in another way about which at this moment we have no idea. That is the future.