I've got one of those color detecters too, the cobolt.
I have had extremely limited success trying to identify wire colors with any 
sort of solid or neutral background...i've tried black background, white 
background, grey, brown, a bunch of different backgrounds.
I think part of the issue with the cobolt is that the mouth of the device, 
where you place the item to be color identified, is very large...and it is 
difficult to get really tight focus on the lense.
Also, allot of wires these days will have a strip of color on a solid 
colored insulator background that indicates the apparent "color" of the 
wire.  So, unless the lense is positioned directly over that strip, it'll 
just say black, or gray or what ever color the wire or background happens to 
be.
I had another color identifier years ago that was probably ten times more 
accurate and useful for this kind of thing than the cobolt...I don't 
remember the maker, but it was also about a quarter the size compared to the 
cobolt...
the lense could be tightly focused on a small item, and it also told you 
saturation, hugh and so on if you wanted.
Of course, it was around $500 I think which is also much much more than the 
cobolt unit.
I haven't tried the color identifier function on my nokia phone for getting 
wire colors yet...the camera lense can be tightly focused so perhaps that 
might work better.
73
Colin, V A6BKX
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tom Brennan" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, May 13, 2011 11:48 AM
Subject: Re: The TW2 came.


> I've got a Cobolt colour detector.  What I do with it to look at wires is 
> to lay
> the wire on top of my power supply.  The supply is in a gray metal case so 
> it
> provides a pretty nutral background and I can often tell wire colors that 
> way.
>
> Tom
>
>
> Tom Brennan  KD5VIJ, CCC-A/SLP
> web page http://titan.sfasu.edu/~g_brennantg/sonicpage.html