Colour communication has always been one of the most difficult problems in manufacturing and design. A designer specifies a colour. A brand manager approves it. A print supplier reproduces it. A packaging converter matches it. A plastics manufacturer moulds it. At every step, the risk of deviation grows — and without a shared language for describing colour precisely, errors compound. X-Rite and Pantone together solve this problem from both ends: Pantone provides the common language, and X-Rite provides the instruments to measure and verify it.
Pantone's colour matching system — familiar to anyone in design, print, or manufacturing — assigns a unique number to each colour in its library. These numbers appear on brand guidelines, material specifications, purchase orders, and quality control documents worldwide. When a brand specifies "Pantone 485 C" for its red packaging, that number carries an exact meaning that can be communicated to suppliers in any country without ambiguity. This universality made Pantone indispensable to global manufacturing long before digital colour management existed.
X-Rite's role is to measure whether those Pantone specifications are actually being achieved in production. A spectrophotometer measures the reflectance of a printed or coated surface and expresses the result as numerical colour values — most commonly in the CIE L\*a\*b\* (LAB) colour space. These values can be compared against the target Pantone reference data stored in the instrument, and a Delta E (ΔE) value tells the operator exactly how far the measured sample deviates from the target. Since the Pantone acquisition in 2007, X-Rite instruments have contained the full Pantone colour library as built-in reference data, making this comparison seamless. For Australian businesses, both X-Rite instruments and Pantone products are available through Seaga Group.
From Design to Production: How the System Works
In practice, the X-Rite and Pantone system works across the entire production chain. A graphic designer selects a Pantone colour from a fan deck or digital library and specifies it by number on their artwork files. The brand owner or procurement team uses that Pantone number to communicate the colour requirement to their print or manufacturing suppliers. The supplier's press operator or production manager uses an X-Rite spectrophotometer — such as the eXact 2 for printing — to measure the produced colour and verify that it falls within the agreed Delta E tolerance against the Pantone standard.
If the measurement shows the colour is out of tolerance, the production team can adjust — changing ink mixing ratios, press calibration, substrate compensation, or coating weights — until the measurement confirms compliance. This closed-loop system, from specification through measurement to approval, eliminates the subjectivity that has historically caused colour rejections and rework. Every decision is based on data, not opinion.
The system extends beyond printing into other materials. When a brand needs its signature colour to appear on a printed carton, an injection-moulded component, a powder-coated surface, and a fabric label simultaneously, each material type requires different ink or pigment formulations to achieve the same visual result. X-Rite instruments measure all of these surfaces using the same colour science, allowing quality managers to verify cross-material colour consistency against a single Pantone reference standard. The Ci64 handheld spectrophotometer is commonly used for this kind of multi-material quality control in plastics and coatings environments.
PantoneLIVE: Digital Standards in the Cloud
The integration of X-Rite and Pantone went further with the development of PantoneLIVE — a cloud-based platform that stores digital colour standards specific to different production processes and substrates. Rather than a single printed Pantone swatch that must be physically shared across a supply chain, PantoneLIVE holds mathematically precise colour targets optimised for flexographic printing on film, offset printing on coated board, inkjet printing on uncoated stock, and dozens of other production combinations.
This means that a brand can define their colour once in PantoneLIVE, and every supplier anywhere in the world can access the substrate-specific target for their particular process. An X-Rite spectrophotometer with PantoneLIVE access pulls the correct standard for the substrate being measured, removing a major source of variability in the approval process. This is particularly valuable in packaging supply chains where a brand's colour must appear identically on different packaging formats produced by multiple converters across different countries.
The Judge LED light booth from X-Rite is often used alongside spectrophotometers in this workflow — providing standardised D50 lighting conditions for visual inspection that complement the instrument data. Having both a light booth and a spectrophotometer gives quality control teams both objective measurement and standardised visual evaluation, a combination that covers both regulatory approval requirements and the human judgement that brand owners still expect.
Conclusion
X-Rite and Pantone together provide the most complete colour management system available. Pantone defines colour in a universal, globally understood language. X-Rite measures and verifies that language in production. Together, they create a closed loop from design intent to manufactured reality — eliminating ambiguity, reducing rework, and giving brand owners the confidence that their colour is right, no matter who produces it or where. For Australian businesses in printing, packaging, plastics, and manufacturing, this integrated system represents the industry standard for professional colour management.