A friend like Ben

If Sherwin-Williams' entry into the color-specifier-for-iPhone market left me rather cold yesterday, I was warmed right back up by Benjamin Moore's more usable variation on that theme, ben . Ben's unveiling was delayed by a week or so, but it was worth the wait.

Clearly, Benjamin Moore spent a lot more money on the development and roll-out of ben and I think it was money well-spent. Ben is a very well thought out app and one I'm sure I will use in my day to day life.

Ben suffers from the same camera limitations that Sherwin-Williams' ColorSnap does and ben also failed my take-a-photo-of-a-color-chip test. If you missed my review of ColorSnap yesterday, I took a photo of a Sherwin-Williams color chip and tried to have ColorSnap identify the color correctly. ColorSnap couldn't do it. Well neither can ben , and I think that's a camera shortcoming more than an app shortcoming. I'll be interested to see how these apps fare in a similar test with the better camera coming in the new iPhones. We'll see.

Anyhow, ben takes a little longer to load than ColorSnap does, but it's still pretty fast.

Once it's loaded, it lands on a begin display that permits you to pick out between taking a photograph or retrieving a picture out of your smartphone's data.

I selected a photo of a brightly-colored floor tile.

Once the photo's selected and imported (a process that takes a few seconds at most), you could zoom or crop the imported photograph any manner you'd like.

Here's the zoomed in photo of the tile sample.

So now that my photo's zoomed, cropped and lively; all I want to do is contact everywhere on the photograph and ben fits what ever shade I'm touching to one of the 3,000 colours in Benjamin Moore's palette.

When I touch the blue in the lower left quadrant of this photo, ben matches it to Benjamin Moore's 2067-20, Starry Night Blue. Ben 's also showing a virtual fan deck along the bottom of the page. If I click on any one of those color blocks, I get a full-screen view of the color with the virtual fan deck still below the main color..

When I tap Starry Night Blue for the second one time, I get a true full-display screen view without a visual distractions.

If I faucet the display screen two times, I pass back to the photo in which I started. Now, I can touch everywhere on my image and get a direct colour fit. Here's the blue-grey shade below the black bar within the higher right quadrant.

Here's the purple within the lower right quadrant.

The yellow from the top left quadrant.

And right here's the black from the decrease proper quadrant.

What's most outstanding to me is the velocity with which this app does this color matching. It's quite cool and it's pretty spot on when it's searching at an archived picture.

Ben also has an interactive color wheel as a completely separate function as well a store locator that uses the iPhone's onboard GPS. The whole package is pretty slick and packs a real technological punch into a free app. I'm very fond of Sherwin-Williams and I specify colors from their palette more than any other. With that said though, I declare Benjamin Moore's ben the winner of the iPhone app paint specifier battle.

Hats off to each businesses for their include of recent generation and I cannot wait to look what is next. Finally, I'll pose the query again: what's a Blackberry?

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