Pantone Capsure RM200PT

Realy easy to use and finds the closest Pantone color on pretty much everyting I have measured. Battery life seems good so far.

I have been painstakingly trying to match my Kona Cotton solids fabrics with the Pantone The Plus Series Color Bridge Coated & Uncoated - by hand. The grey skies and gloomy, rainy days make that job even more challenging. I have searched all over to try and find RGB or CMYK or Pantone matches for the Kona Cotton solids, but haven't found any information. I decided to get the Pantone CAPSURE Color Matcher tool to use with the Color Bridge, and I love it! I tried this the first time a few days ago - I brought my Kona Cotton solids to a room with both natural and ambient light during the daytime (highest daylight hours), and set the CAPSURE light setting to match the room. The first several matches, I matched up what CAPSURE matched to what I had previously matched. Some were the exact match I had previously, some were not, but close. Some matches are more difficult to the fabric color and available Pantone colors. Because I want to use these matches digitally as well, I need to make sure there is a different Pantone match for each of the fabric colors. If I get a match for the same Pantone color for multiple fabric colors, I then go back to the book and find the best matches for each. My project is more detailed and time consuming than most - and even for me it works great! It is an investment, but one that is totally worth it for me. I will be using this for years to come, on a variety of projects!

This product has been an incredibly disappointing experience. 1) the claim "Easily integrates captured colors into your design programs - Adobe Creative Suite and QuarkXPress" is false. X-Rite Pantone tells me this was a "typo". There is no way to get the data out of the device 2) the device doesn't give you the color value for the color you are scanning, it gives you the color value for the closest color. I need to instruct my vendor on our Delta E and where to move from current samples. I can do neither since I cannot get a reading of the color in front of me. 3) the support for the product has been horrible so far. it took me a week to get the "this was a typo, I hope this didn't cause any inconvenience" chat back. Inconvenience? I spent nearly $800 on a device that wasn't as advertised and now doesn't do the most basic of functions - give me the color value of the color in front of me. I have an $800 paperweight, barely used. Unacceptable.

I performed an experiment with this at work. I captured 178 from a fandeck in our ink room both on the Capsure and our company's spectrometer. Both devices were calibrated and at the same illumination. I did this 5 times and the results were alarming. The Capsure captured perfectly consistent Lab values while the one at work did not. The variations in the work spectrometer were even up to whole numbers rather than just percentages. This thing is ridiculously easy to use and packed full of helpful tools. Did I mention it's ridiculously accurate?

If you are looking for a device that simply matches PMS colors from your samples this is probably perfect. The documentation says it gives RGB, CMYK, and LAB values. Well, it sort-of does. But not really. What it does is match to the closest PMS color, then it gives you the LAB values of the PMS color itself. It doesn't display actual LAB values of the sample. For example, I created a swatch, scanned it, it gave me a PMS color, lab values, CMYK, etc. I altered the swatch slightly, reprinted, re-scanned. It was just slightly different than the original scan but different enough that you could see the variation by eye. CAPSure chose the same PMS color (which I expected since the samples were quite close) but it also gave the exact same LAB values for both samples. That clued me in. I called x-rite to find out for sure and they explained that THIS version of the CAPSure is just a PMS color match device. It compares sample to its PMS catalog, then tells you the closest PMS match. It seemed to work just fine in that capacity. But what it does not do is give you numerical values for the colors you scan. It is not, in that sense, a spectrophotometer.

My Capsure is about 50% accurate with the Solid Uncoated fan book, and completely inaccurate with dyed knit goods. I talked to Pantone tech support. They said that it should be 99% accurate with the fan books. It gets some colors right, sometimes. The pastels it gets wrong almost all the time. Right now we're working with 4525 and 453, a dark gold and a greenish beige, and it usually gets these wrong. When I recalibrate it the accuracy improves for a while. With bulky knit fabrics the problem is light coming through the knitting. I improved the accuracy by putting the fabric against black paper, and then I linied a small box with black paper, and pressed the Capsure firmly into the knitting. Generally this resulted in a darker number than the yarn actually is, e.g., 166 instead of 165. But often three readings would result in three different numbers. The Pantone rep said they have another model, the RM200QC, that is intended for quality control. It costs nearly $2000 and she said that it wouldn't help me.