Color terminology

The Munsell Company in Baltimore was bought out by MacBeth a few
years ago. You can still purchase their color notation books through
MacBeth. I understand that they still have a skeleton crew that
still works in the old Baltimore place. In addition to their
conventional (fairly saturated) color chart and the soils charts,
they began selling charts for things that are almost white about
seven years ago. I got some of these "Nearly Neutral" charts when
they were in the experimental development stage. They were extremely
useful for assigning color designations to materials like paper. The
nice things about using the Munsell System is that it is fairly
accurate, relatively inexpensive, and doesn't require the expense of
having keeping or owning a colorimeter. The accuracy depends on the
skill of the person making the matches, but that is the case with
almost any color measurement system. Munsell has widespread
acceptance in industry.

M. Susan Barger, PhD
Department of Earth and Planetary Science
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 11:1
                  Distributed: Tuesday, June 17, 1997
                        Message Id: cdl-11-1-003
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