What you see is what you get

Tighter color standards help ensure each molded part looks as vibrant as the next. PolyOne Plastic Compounds and Colors Group Edited by Jean M. Hoffman Snowshoe racer Tom Sobel edges out rival Frank Shorter, the1972 Olympic marathon winner, in a race outside Boulder, Colo. Sobel's snowshoes from Redfeather Design Inc., Denver, have injection-molded plastic bindings and heel strikes. Colorants for these components were formulated to withstand frigid weather without loss to strength or flexural and tensile modulus of the plastic. Traditional computer simulations represent plastic differently than those seen in the real world. Bottle manufacturers carefully control the amount and strength of each colorant as well as its opacity level so bottles don't end up with different color casts Light reflections off a part's surface changes the bottle's color. The pearlescent effect intensifies the play of light so as to attract a consumer's attention. The difference between the slightly lighter (green curve) batch and the slightly darker (red curve) are imperceptible to the human eye, though clearly evident to the spectrometer. The fact that the curve shapes are essentially similar is significant, and indicates that the two batches will appear as the same color. Plastic fenders that match the lawn tractor's painted body don't need paint themselves which helps lower manufacturing cost. Portable spectrophotometers and laptops equipped with color matching software now lets designers color match parts in 24 hr. One of the hottest topics in product design today is color. Thermoplastics make it possible to integrate color into new designs in imaginative ways. However, before a designer