At the quadrennial meeting of the CIE held in New Delhi, India in 1995, Division 2 of the CIE on the Optical Properties of Materials established a new technical committee charged with preparing a CIE recommendation and eventually, a CIE standard that clearly defines the geometric requirements for instruments designed to measure the color of materials. The committee was given the designation TC 2-39 and the Danny Rich was appointed as the chairman.This paper reviews the progress and findings of CIE TC 2-39 during the last five years which have led to the development of draft recommendations on the geometric specifications for color-measuring instrumentation, including the geometric description of the recommended geometries and tolerances around those geometries. The recommendations are based on reports taken from the literature and on original measurement data provide by the committee members. The data clearly show that the existing geometric specifications for instrumental colorimetry are too loosely defined and toleranced for reliable absolute color measurements needed to characterize non-impact printing inks or to reproduce consistent device profiles.