A recent ASTM specification (ASTM E2214-02) was created to standardize the terminology and procedures used to evaluate color measuring instruments. This specification addresses the need for uniformity among the manufacturers of such instruments when quantifying the performance of their products. The scope of E2214 is necessarily large, covering the procedures required to compare instruments for a variety of metrics, all of which are important to their overall performance. In this work, we will focus on one aspect of the instrument evaluation: repeatability performance. We will present repeatability results,from a long-term study of twelve commercial spectrophotometers. Comparisons will be made between traditional color difference metrics and the more complex multidimensional methods specified in E2214. (c) 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.