Instrumentation for colour measurement:

As colour is perception, it cannot be directly measured; however we can measure and subsequently calculate certain factors which are responsible for producing this sensation of color. The quantification of the color properties of textile materials is of great economic value in industry and instruments are employed to some degree in almost every textile operation involved in textile coloration.

Color instrumentation has experienced a tremendous advancement in technology during the past few decades. The first devices for measuring color were absorptiometers which were used to determine by visual inspection whether two solutions were of equal color. This is very similar to holding two glass cylinders of dye solution up to a light and judging whether they are of equal strength and shade, except that the absorptiometer provided a method of adjusting the thickness or path width so that this change in width could be read from a scale. In measuring reflected light from opaque materials such as textiles, the first instruments were reflectometers developed around 1915-1920.