Transcending the Beer–Lambert Limit with Full-Dimensional Digital Colorimetry

Automated workflows are rapidly accelerating discovery across the chemical sciences, yet the throughput of such platforms remains bottlenecked by the high cost and slow operation of traditional analytical hardware. 1 While digital colorimetry offers a ubiquitous, low-cost alternative for reaction monitoring, current techniques rely on the linear approximations of the Beer–Lambert law. 2, 3 This constraint causes data degeneracy, severely limiting analytical accuracy. Here we present quantitative Colorimetric Analysis of Molecules (qCAM), a methodology that bypasses the Beer–Lambert law by retaining the full dimensionality of digital colorimetric data. When applied to the quantification of metals in solution, qCAM matches the accuracy of inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), the current gold-standard tool, while reducing equipment costs 100-fold and accelerating analysis time from hours to minutes. We demonstrate the versatility of qCAM as compatible with both high-throughput workflows and automated flow-synthesis platforms for chemical, environmental, and medical monitoring, producing results within 0.20 ppm of current analytical methods.