iPhone Camera Meets Benjamin Moore Fan Deck
Benjamin Moore has wedded its color authority to the technology of iPhones.
On June 1 the company debuted “ben Color Capture,” an iPhone application
that, with the tap of a key, lets users snap a picture of any color and instantly
match it to one of the more than 3,300 hues in Benjamin Moore’s color system.
BY CHARLES THURSTON
COATING’S WORLD CORRESPONDENT
It is not surprising that Benjamin Moore, the paint compa- ny that unveiled the first retail color mixing technology back in 1983 has come up with one of the latest hot applications for the Apple iPhone. Called “ben Color Capture,”
which echoes Benjamin Moores’s “ben” line of low-VOC interior paints, the app became available on June 1 for free on
Apple’s web site. Since then some 50,000 downloads of the app
have moved into consumers hands, said Carl Minchew,
Benjamin Moores’s director of color technology.
With approximately 79 million iPhone users, such an
application may become a key driver for more e-commerce
channel retail paint sales. Indeed, AT&T reported sales of
2.4 million new iPhone customers during second-quarter
2009, its best quarter to date since the phone went on sale
two years ago. Half of all iPhone users are under 30, and
15% of them are students.
“The ben Color Capture app utilizes the capabilities of
the iPhone to provide a fun and useful tool for exploring
and storing color information,” said Minchew. “Since cam-era-based RGB systems are not optimized for color accuracy, the intent of the app is to help the user identify colors of
interest which they can fine tune using a variety of accurate color tools such as color chips and wet samples.”
The application is relatively easy to use. After download-ing it from the Apple website, you simply open the “
capture” icon to either take a photo or call up a photo stored—
perhaps previously imported—on the phone.
To test the application, I turned to a local iPhone user
and color designer, Annie Conn, who had decided to paint a
wall the same color as the electric blue eyes of her
Australian shepherd mix, Sinatra. Once Annie shot a single photo of the dog’s eyes, she zoomed into the eye area,
touched the screen over the eye, and up popped a palette of
half a dozen close shades from Benjamin Moore’s 3,400-
strong color wheel, among which Province Blue was the
best match, which was also identified by its Benjamin
Moore mix formula number.
“This app is great for anyone who wants a quick reference to color from anything they can get a picture of,” said
Conn. “The zoom-in capabilities of the iPhone help you capture the target color.”
Other ways to view the target color are through the app’s
strip and harmony functions. Touching the strip icon opens
a palette of the various colors selected in the photo area,
arranged in a row from light to dark. Touching the harmony icon opens a row of color shades and tints from the tar-
