Duplicate Content or NOT?

I'm building an ecommerce site and I've got a white hat question that is probably fairly basic to most of you. I have tons of products and the only differential between some of them is the color. Each product has it's own product page and own url. I kept it that way instead of creating one product with color options so that it looks like i have more products.

So if i have 4 product pages with all the same content except the color - is that duplicate content? I can change some of the content but for the features of each product it really is what it is.

What percentage of the content would need to be changed on a per page basis so that google does not penalize me for dup content?

Also regarding title metatags. Is it ok to have them very similar but only changing the color? IE: "Nice Big Product Blue" "Nice Big Product Red"

Thank you for your help.

I believe dupe content is a myth. It hasn't been proven to affect your se rankings in any way.

Dup Content is very real if you steal it from other sites...lol.. but in this case, you're not worried about it. See your site is selling similar items which are expected to be similar in content. I wouldnt worry about this too much in the way of a penalty from G but I would think that your customers might care a bit if the content is exactly the same.

I would advise color swatches and multiple photos. You can always add products later to "fill up your site". Might make it more professional.

Also, lets say that google did penalize you for it... worse case they would take the red and yellow ones out of the search results (not the index the results) and just leave the red one in there... when searched for the main keywords without the colors. This is kind of common anyhow and more of a way to clean up results then to penalize webmasters.

Thanks for your help. This makes a lot of sense to me.