If you’ve ever tried to colour-match by eye, you’ll know that it’s no easy thing. In fact, it’s a complete nightmare. Depending on the lighting and how long you’ve already been staring at swatches, colours are horrifically subjective. This isn’t just a problem that can occur when painting a room – if you’re designing art or crafts, choosing furniture or making any other choices that involve colour, the ColorReader could be just what you need.

The ColorReader takes the uncertainty out of color matching, and using it is extremely easy. You need to connect to the device via its accompanying app, but from there, it’s simple: place the lens of the reader face-down on the colour you want to measure and click the Read button at the bottom of your app screen. The three closest matches to your reading will then appear, along with the colour name, number, fandeck name and Delta E from the reading itself. You can then click on any of the suggested colours to see a breakdown of their L,a,b, RGB, or GMYK values, as well as their Hex number, all of which allow you to apply the exact tone of your reading to whatever you need, from physical paint to digital.

The reader finds these colour matches from the fandecks of many majorpaint  suppliers, including Ace®, Behr®, Benjamin Moore®, Cloverdale®, Color Is®, Dryvit®, Farrow & Ball®, Kelly-Moore®, ML Campbell®,  PPG®, Sherwin Williams®, True Value®, and Valspar®. Be aware - whilst some are sold overseas, these are all North American brands, with only NCS 1950® and RAL® from Europe. If you want to narrow your search to certain brands only, it’s easy to do this in-app.

The ColorReader keeps a record of all of your previous readings, so you can review the details again as you need. The Co-ordinate Colours function will even take your colour readings and suggest complimentary colour schemes to go with them!

This handy tool is compact, light-weight and works quickly. If you don’t want to rely on an app, the ColorReaderPRO can display all of the same information on its own screen, but either way, this device is extremely transportable, convenient and easy to use.

http://colorreader.datacolor.com
$99

Pros:
Huge range of paint brands
Accurate readings
Gives you the top three choices
All of the colour ID data you could need
Coordiante Colour mode
Saves your readings

Cons:
Mostly North American paint brands
Price

4.5/5