Pantone Plastics

[Silence04]

Does anyone have the pantone plastics chip books?
Is it worth the money for the set ($3,500)?

I know there are no universal color standards for plastics like there are for inks, but i was interested in knowing if a plastic chip book would shave any time off the color matching process at the plastic color houses?

any info on these would be great!

[PrintDriver]

What type of plastics are you using and what are you using them for?

I only use sheet acrylics/plex/petg/etc and prefer numbers off the company's chain set rather than a PMS color. Especially if backlit. But my applications for plex may be different than yours.

If you are buying large quantities of colored plastics from a supplier, you'd be better off asking them about these Pantone books and color specification. I'm skeptical of their use but I'm in a rather limited application.

[Silence04]

PET and HDPE for product packaging...

I talked with pantone and apparently there are no Formulations for plastic companies to achieve specific Pantone Plastic Chip colors. Every Plastic Chip still has to be matched by guesstimating a mixture of colored pellets.

However they said it's much easier to match a plastic chip to plastic, than a ink/paper chip to plastic... so that is suppose to eliminate a lot of time color matching.

[PrintDriver]

So Pantone says. What do your plastics vendors say? :D

Do they have a chart of achievable colors or do they really try to nail exactly what you ask for?