The development of a portable spectrophotometer for noncontact color measurement

A portable spectrophotometer for noncontact color measurement was developed to display spectral distribution and tristimulus values of a color simultaneously. It comprises electronic control circuits, control firmware, and an optical mechanism with a photo detector array. Essentially, a light beam is reflected or transmitted by a measured object into a device that disperses the light beam into its spectrum on a photo detector array. Then, the photo detector module generates a series of signals as functions of light intensity and produces their corresponding digital values reflecting light intensity. These digital data are processed by the electronic control circuits and control firmware to directly provide the spectral distribution and standard color values. The measured results of the developed system were also compared with those obtained by a similar instrument on the market.