Coating paperboard enhances printability and optical quality of the product as well as other important properties like packaging performance and shelf-life. To obtain high quality products a quality control of the manufacturing process requires identifying those manufacturing parameters that affect it. Roughness measurement and characterization of coating thickness are examples of these control parameters. Optical instruments measuring these quantities range from laboratory equipment to in-line and on-line sensors. However, the variety of instruments and sometimes misunderstanding of their limitations generate uncorrelated measurements, which are no longer valid to their comparison. The new ISO 25178 standard for surface texture provides guidelines to metrologists to address some this problem. Here, we report a case study for surface characterization of high quality printing polyethylene (PE) coated paperboard for high quality printing, where surface roughness is a key parameter. Two imaging methods to create topographic measurements will be compared, i.e. a confocal chromatic microscope and a scanning electron microscope (SEM). For the latter, stereo photogrammetry is used and 3D topographic profiles are obtained from Alicona MeX software. Leach and Haitjema [Leach, R., & Haitjema, H. (2010). Bandwidth characteristics and comparisons of surface texture measuring instruments. Measurement Science and Technology, 21(3), 032001] addressed the topic on how to design comparisons when using different instruments for areal texture measurement. We use their bandwidth matching concept, since it provides an extension to the ISO 25178 guidelines, ensuring that the instrumentation used to characterize the samples are within its measuring limits and further analysis of the results can be correlated. It is important to adopt a good metrology practice in order to translate these parameters into our future work. We expect to extend these findings into a real-time optical sensor, which later can be implemented in an industrial manufacturing environment for high optical quality paper and paperboard.