Wood has inherent aesthetic features which can give the final product competi­tive advantage over other materials. It is therefore important for the forest products industries to take advantage of those features of wood that have great influence on customers' choice of product. It is the final consumer's willingness to buy a product that is the motive power for the whole production process. Today, the forest products industry is not using any scientific method in order to utilize the aesthetic features of wood. Therefore methods to measure people's preferences for different wood features and also methods to measure these features in an objective way are needed.We have in an earlier study shown that it is possible to measure people's attitudes toward wood by a questionnaire technique. The results show that people prefer different blends of wood features. There are two qualitative differences that are of importance for people's impression and valuation of wood: The overall blending of wood features and divergent features that mismatch in a surface. It was found that divergent features are more important than the overall mixture of features. But if there are no defects that mismatch, the overall mixture will then be the key to a person's appreciation of a wood surface. In a new study, we have started to measure the different wood features in an objective way and developed statistical models of the relationship between the objective parameters and people's subjective preferences for different wood surfaces made of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris). In this first attempt we have made very simple manual measurements of parameters such as knot size, knot type, knot shape and distribution of knots over the surface.The statistical analyses show that it is difficult to find any significant relation­ships between people's subjective preferences and the simple objective para­meters we have measured. It is evident that more sophisticated measure­ment tech­nique is needed. We must be able to measure parameters such as colour, grain pattern etc. Therefore we will use colour camera technique in future studies.