In agreeance with Cancork Floor Inc., we see the left and lighter option of the two pulling some of the lighter tones from your doors. This color connection will help tie the elements together and create a thoughtfully designed space.

Thank you both for your comments! It's so nice to hear from someone with a solid opinion; my wife and I are terrible at this. BTW, I only tried 10 options that looked good online to find this one that matches; fortunately HD and Lowes have great return policies :) With what I've spent at these places recently, I don't feel too bad opening a few boxes. These were the only boxes that I needed to look at more than a plank or two. Cheers, Mark

I had a final box delivered and made the mistake of actually looking at it. It's so close to the color you both chose as better yesterday that I had to lay the whole thing out again, with the new one replacing the rejected one on the left (edit: I meant right). I'm only even considering it because It has a more realistic texture then the one I was going to use, but the color is slightly different. I'm sorry to ask this again, but what do you think?

Almost no difference - but perhaps the one on the left is still a better match to the "brown" tones in the doors.

that's my feeling as well. It's almost unquantifiable, but it's there. I just need to decide whether I want the slightly more real wood like floor or the slightly better color match

I agree with Cancork Floor with the fact there is almost no deference. The one on the left looks great with the tones of the door.

btw, thank you for taking a second look!

It's really odd that there's so little difference, and yet one really does look better. I feel the same :) thank you for the input

Another thing to consider is the pattern repeats since you are doing a larger area. If they are that close, go with the one that has more patterns, 10-13 vs. 3-5, will look much better when covering the entire space.

The one on the left has more, at least I assume because the right one has noticable repeats. I found this odd, because they did a superb job matching the physical grain to the visible grain. The left one has just elongated wood like texture, but no match between physical and visible grain.

Sorry, that's kinda rambling. My point was just that it's extra wood looking, but the repeats give it away.

I had a chance to inspect for repeats. Interestingly, they must have a different process for cutting the planks. While there are no exact repeats in the left planks, there are only 4 distinct plank patterns with the features at different locations on the plank. It's like they were cut from a longer plank but in random locations.

Since those features are going to repeat, it probably only counts as 4 planks patterns. Fortunately, anther nice thing about this pattern is that there aren't a lot of "wow" features that jump out and make repeating really obvious.