Evaluations

Visual Evaluation	Instrumental Gloss	Instrumental Color
Color Change Fading Bleaching Yellowing Darkening Macbeth Spectralight Booth	Trigloss (60°, 20°, 85°)	Labscan II (0°/45° ) Sub-Tropical Testing Service specializes in Accelerated, Natural Outdoor material weathering. Natural Outdoor and Accelerated weathering laboratory's located in Florida and Arizona. Jacksonville, FL specializes in automotive Natural Outdoor material weathering in an acid rain environment. Florida is ideal for Natural Outdoor weathering.
	Washed
	Unwashed
	Polished
	Unpolished
Checking
Cracking	Gloss analysis machine	UltraScan (Spherical diffuse/8° )
Chalking
Dirt
Mildew
Blistering
Rusting

Natual Outdoor anutdoor and Accelerated weathering environments

Visual color assessment is an important form of evaluation since this is how our customers judge appearance. To obtain accurate and consistent measurements our inspector views the samples in a Macbeth Spectralight viewing booth under artificial daylight, requiring standards for comparison. Sub-Tropical has several "State of the Art" tools to conduct instrumental gloss and color measurements. Sub-Tropical uses a Byk-Gardner Micro trigloss reflectometer for determining instrumental gloss. Our main unit provides multi-angle measurements of 20, 60 and 85. This instrument is accurate to +/-1 gloss unit. It can handle single geometries, double geometries, and statistical evaluations. Our Hunterlab 0°/45° spectrophotometer (Labscan II) is a computer controlled instrument designed to measure color and color difference. It features 0° illumination and 45° from specular viewing. This sensor configuration takes into account surface texture and shine. It is designed to more closely approximate what the human eye perceives as color. Our Hunterlab Integrating Sphere spectrophotometer (Ultrascan) is also computer controlled. It features a diffuse/8°sensor configuration, minimizing the surface effects of texture and shine. This provides a color difference attributable only to sample color. The unit measures color in 1nm increments providing increased accuracy. The Integrating Sphere spectrophotometer can also measure transmitted color of clear specimens. All of our instruments are factory maintained and calibrated to National Standards. The units are standardized prior to each test to insure quality. Additionally we are members of Collaborative Testing Service, in which our equipment test results (gloss & color) are compared to other testing labs to insure accurate results.