Colour fastness is one of the most important parameters in evaluating the quality of textiles and leather.
It is the property of a dyed material to keep its colour and not to transfer its colourants to other material, e.g. while washing.
The grading can be done visually or instrumentally.
The visual method is prevailing, but inspectors need thorough training and eyes are prone to tiredness and subjective evaluation.
There also exist digital imaging devices / spectrophotometers, which aim to compensate the drawbacks of the visual grading.
The instruments are objective, but they are costly and need to be calibrated and maintained.
Therefore, Kuraray developed an App for assessing colour fastness, which is based on a process, for which a patent application was filed.
It compensates the shortcomings of the previously mentioned methods:
It is objective, quick, cheap, user-friendly and requires almost no training.
Moreover, there is an easy and automated documentation of the results into CSV format.
The measurement functionality can be enabled through in-app-purchase.
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https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/