I thought of a great invention for web designers!!

[Ratty]

It would be a small, key-chain sized device. You put the sensor over a color and it displays the RGB values on a little LCD screen.

Okay, I'm no good with colors. Often when I'm designing a web page I get colors from real world objects (I can't simply pull them out of my head like some people can). The other day I saw some really cool artsy postcards and I loved the color combinations and I wanted to incorporate them into a web design. So I spent a tedious bit of time trying to pick the same color on my PC's color picker and it was very hard to get it right and I never did get it exactly right. So I ended up scanning the thing then getting the color values from the resulting image. Way too much trouble. Why couldn't I just whip out my little key chain, press the sensor over each color and write down the RGB values from the little LCD screen?

Web designers, would something like this be useful? Would you buy it? How do I go about turning my idea into money?

[arcos]

1. It is a really good idea...

although I'm a web designer, a lot of other people would find it useful. Graphic artists, digital photographers, etc...

[Drifter]

2. I believe this is called ...

a densitometer (sp?).

They exist. Not sure if they are cheep enough for your everyday average consumer.

These devices are used by photo developers to measure the accuracy of their photo developing process.

Cheers
Drifter

[DS1]

3. I think Sony makes one

I believe there are consumer versions available, but don't have time to look it up right now.

[Ratty]

4. Damn. Third question ...

should have been, "Has anybody already invented this?"