Colour measuring equipment

From the late 1950s it became possible to use a digital computer for colour matching. These were expensive. In the late 1960s it would have cost £100,000 but only £10,000 for a COMIC. Such computers only began to be used in the UK for colour matching in the early 1960s when it became possible to connect a terminal in a colour matching laboratory to a large distant computer by telephone line.

Only about two hundred COMICs were sold in the USA, Western Europe, South Africa and Japan in the period 1958-68.