Methods: Twenty patients requiring restoration of an anterior single dental implant with unrestored adjacent teeth had two porcelain fused to metal crowns fabricated. Shade matching under standardised conditions was undertaken either visually or using the SpectroShade™ Micro. Four technicians were randomly assigned to make the restorations. Both the patient and the clinician were unaware as to which crown was associated with which shade taking technique. At the fit appointment, the patients and clinicians completed a questionnaire with questions formulated to be answered on a Likert scale. Prior to fitting, the Spectroshade™ Micro was again used to measure the spectral power distribution of both fabricated crowns and the reference tooth of each patient.
Results: Data was analysed using a two-tailed Wilcoxon signed ranks test and the Spearmans rank correlation coefficient. There was no significant difference, from the patient's and clinicians perspective, in the shade preference of the crowns fabricated using either the conventional visual or SpectroShade™ Micro spectrophotometric shade data at the 5% level. There was no correlation between the Delta E values of the crowns and the perception of colour match and overall match of the crowns with the reference tooth, both from the perspective of the patients and the clinicians.
Conclusions: The SpectroShade™ Micro appears to be equally as good as the expert eye of the technician in recording shade data predictably but it also produces data in a format that can be used to fabricate a crown which will have an acceptable colour match to the reference tooth clinically. The SpectroShade™ Micro spectrophotometer has a definite role in the shade taking process.