To test these sensors, I painted three sheets of drywall with six different paints each. There's also the $350 Nix Pro, which has better battery life and color that scans down to the decimal point, aimed clearly at professionals who use color matching in their careers. The latter two are useful if you want to print or post matching colors. The Nix Paints app is specifically for paint matching the Nix Digital app reports colors in RGB values as well as CMYK (for print) and Hexadecimal (for web).
#Lowes paint color match Bluetooth
At $100 (roughly AU$130 or £75 converted), the Nix Mini is a Bluetooth sensor with two apps. Nix colors sensors are the priciest on the list. Color Muse needs just 4 millimeters of surface to measure, and it transmits the results to the Color Muse app, where you can see color values and paint match suggestions. It's a Bluetooth-connected sensor that shines white light on the surface of your wall. Pico shines controlled amounts of red, green and blue light onto the scanning surface to determine the color value of your wall.Ĭolor Muse costs $59 (about £45 or AU$85 converted). Pico reports the RGB values and matching branded paint colors. It then shares those results via Bluetooth in your phone's Pico app. Costing $49 (AU$65, roughly £35 converted), this paint-matching device sequentially bursts red, green and blue light onto the surface you scan. Palette PicoĪustralian company Palette released Palette Pico in 2018. Before we get into results, here's a quick rundown of each of the units I tested. If there aren't any perfect match results, you can take the RGB values of the surface to paint stores like Sherwin-Williams, where they'll mix the color from a Sherwin-Williams base or tint a similar color to get it just right. Pico uses similar categories with "Great Match" and "Good Match." Colors in the excellent, great and three-star match categories are so close (or even the same just a different brand) that you'd probably never notice a difference. Nix uses the categories "Excellent Match," "Great Match" or "Good Match." Color Muse uses a three-star rating to indicate matches less than 1 Delta E, a two-star rating for 1-4 Delta E and one-star for anything outside that. What does all that have to do with the paint on your wall? The sensors and companion apps use Delta E to rank color matches. Medium difference, also obvious to an untrained eyeĬompanion apps like this one for Color Muse, display matching paint colors in a ranked order. Very small difference, only obvious to a trained eye A smaller number is better 2 Delta E is commonly thought of as the highest the difference can be before a sharp-eyed person will notice, or the "just noticeable difference." Here's a table of the most common ranges: The difference between a color as represented by its values in a color space and that color as displayed in the real world is referred to by color scientists as Delta E. Since color sensors have varying levels of accuracy and the color reading translates the color of the paint on the wall to the not-directly-correlated RGB color scale, that's two ways errors creep in.
#Lowes paint color match software
The software assigns the closest color it can find. Paint (like all real-world colors) is reflective, not additive, so its colors don't exactly map to RGB.
#Lowes paint color match plus
RGB is an additive system, however - like you learned as a toddler, red plus blue makes purple. For instance, pure yellow is composed of equal values of red and green, and adding increasing amounts of blue makes it increasingly lighter. RGB is a way of generating colors as defined by mixes of the three primaries 0,0,0 denotes black, and in an 8-bit system 255,255,255 denotes white. The $100 Nix Mini won me over, and it's the sensor I'd recommend if you're interested in paint matching. If you're looking for a way to match paint on old walls or paint new walls to match the color of an object (you can scan nearly anything with a smooth surface), these handheld devices are a big help. Nix Mini, Color Muse and Palette Pico scan a spot on your wall, connect via Bluetooth to a companion phone app and show matching paint colors from multiple paint brands.Įager to find out if these could solve my paint problems, I put these color-reading gadgets to the test. Turns out, there's a tiny piece of tech here to save the day.Ĭolor sensors that measure and match colors among real-world objects aren't new, but the three I tried are among the friendliest and least-expensive options. However, picking the right paint color or trying to match existing ones gave me major choice anxiety. I couldn't wait to get my hands on it and make it our own. My husband and I recently bought a house built just after World War II with rooms stuck in nearly every decade since.
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