High-precision low-cost colorimeters and spectrophotometers based on liquid crystalline optics

Abstract

As the phenomenon "color" is involved in almost each production where is a great demand for inexpensive and precise colorimeters. Today there are in principle two kinds of colorimeters: three-channel colorimeters (which are cheap but not accurate) and array spectrometers (which offer a high accuracy at a high price). Liquid crystals have the potential to allow accurate color measurements at a low price. We show three different schemes of colorimeters and actual measurements. The accuracy of our colorimeters is better than 0.005 for each color coordinate.