With so many variations in shades for every color, it’s not that easy to find the exact shade of green, blue, or yellow you’re trying to find. That makes the job difficult for interior designers, graphic artists, and anyone else who deals with color on a daily basis. The Nix Mini Color Sensor wants to change that.
Shaped like a large diamond, the device can be used to take a scan of any color you can find in the real world, which it can then automatically identify from the RGB, CMYK, LAB, and HTML color models. It can even single out a matching color from over 10,000 brands of paint, making it an immensely useful tool even for regular homeowners looking for the right shade of paint for the house.
The Nix Mini Color Sensor is a smaller version of the outfit’s Pro Sensor, measuring just 1.5 x 1 inches (diameter x height), putting it around the same size as a ping pong ball, so it should fit in most pockets without any problem. A hole on the body even allows it to hang on a keychain, so you can have access to your color sensor anywhere you go. It weighs just half an ounce, too, so it adds absolutely no heft to your pocket.
We’re not sure what kind of sensors it actually houses, but we’re guessing it’s just a color-sensitive camera, with the companion app (iOS and Android) doing the actual work of identifying the shade using a color-comparison AI. High-CRI white LEDs shine a bright light on the surface every time you run a scan, ensuring it takes a perfect capture of the shade to make it easy for the software to identify. According to the outfit, each unit is factory-calibrated for color accuracy, so you can expect accurate color identification every single time. It can scan, pretty much, any type of surface, by the way, from walls and vinyl to leather and fabric (maybe on your LCD screen, too), so you should be able to use it to identify any color that grabs your attention.
The Nix Mini Color Sensor comes with no integrated buttons, giving the diamond-shaped enclosure a clean and uninterrupted appearance. Instead, control is done completely through the app, so there’s no chance of taking accidental scans while it sits in your pocket. After a scan, the exact color automatically appears on the app, after which you can type in a description and save the information to the database. From there, you can choose to find it’s designation in the different color models, as well as choose a matching brand and shade of paint.
It comes with an integrated battery that’s rated at 5,000 scans on a single charge, so even if you use it twice a day, this thing will rarely require charging. Chances are, you’ll have the battery drain more on standby instead of heavy use, as what usually happens with most of our current gadgets.
Want one? The Nix Mini Color Sensor is priced at $79.