What Is UV Control in Color Measurements?

Ultraviolet (UV) controls are an essential component of color measurement. By using UV technology, you can measure how your products look in variable brightnesses and degrees of sunlight. From bright summer days to dimmer indoor environments, UV controls allow you to ensure you see your product exactly how your customers perceive it. UV controls are the only way to gain accurate color measurements across all variables and possible environments.

What Is UV Control?

UV control helps analysts and manufacturers obtain a more accurate color reading of their product samples under any lighting condition. UV control lights can simulate daylight conditions using the “daylight illuminant,” otherwise known as CIE standard luminant D65. With a spectrophotometer, you can consistently simulate these daylight conditions in a lab and make the light source match that of a clear northern or western European day.

To reach D65 daylight conditions, labs use control options such as calibrated fluorescent standards, motorized UV filters and xenon light sources. This equipment drastically improves your color measurement accuracy when testing fluorescent whitening agent (FWA)-enhanced test samples. Spectrophotometers are used as a tool for simulating UV daylight conditions.

Why Use UV Control?

UV control allows you to see your products exactly as they appear to your customers. Without the power of UV control, your product may have a great discrepancy between what it looks like on the manufacturing floor and what it looks like in your customers’ hands. Color measurement UV controls are especially necessary for whitened and fluorescent product samples.

Bleached and fluorescent white products require strict UV control to ensure the quality of their traditional FWA dye. Traditional FWAs are tricky to work with due to how they interact with UV light, which causes variations in the whiteness index measurement and their perception by the human eye. This issue means a spectrophotometer may not accurately measure FWA whites the same way your customers see them. To correct this, UV control calibrates spectrophotometers to work with a specific UV standard and simulate daylight.

UV calibration is also essential for other fluorescent product samples and can simulate incandescent lighting. UV control can reproduce outdoor, incandescent and LED lighting with little to no UV content. Just recalibrate your spectrophotometer’s UV filters and take measurements of samples with and without UV interference to see the impact of your lighting on your FWA products.

Take Control of Your UV Calibration With HunterLab

HunterLab has been at the forefront of the spectrophotometry field since its inception in 1952. As drivers of the spectrophotometry industry, we’ve made countless strides in the field for the last half-century and are ready to help you elevate your analysis and manufacturing process with our state-of-the-art products.

We offer various spectrophotometers with built-in UV control options, including our Agera, UltraScan VIS and UltraScan PRO models. Our lamps let you adjust the spectral distribution to match the D65 illuminant as closely as possible.

Elevate your UV control and see your products at their full potential when you contact us today.