Ash appearance has been a persistent issue in the tobacco industry for many years. Most notably in the Asian market ash appearance can be an important cigarette benchmark. In the past there has not been an objective method to determine the ash appearance of a cigarette. The combination of tobacco and cigarette paper influences mainly the ash appearance. However, several other factors have a significant impact on the result of the measurement. These are climate condition, type of light source or the background. The developed method minimizes the influence of all these factors leading to a semi automated procedure to quantify the ash appearance of a cigarette.The method consists of an apparatus to burn down cigarettes under constant conditions including a digital camera to take pictures of the ash. Finally the digital pictures are processed with an imaging software to receive a value expressed as percentage dark area in the ash. The apparatus called "ash appearance box" allows the analysis of 3 cigarettes at once. Results are given for 26 different cigarette brands. 9 cigarettes of each brand have been analysed. The ash appearance value of the different brands was in the range of 1-10% dark area in the ash. The overall coefficient of variation found was 42,4%. The lowest variation of one cigarette brand was 23,1%, the highest 63,4%. The high variation of the results is obviously caused by differences in the tobacco composition, for instance the amount of heterogeneous tobacco components like stems. It is acceptable to exclude the highest and lowest value of each cigarette sample to normalize the data. In this case the average coefficient of variation found was 31,7%. The error of the method itself is less than 10% (5% digital camera, 5% position of cigarette in the box).