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Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor

anfractuosity.com

11–20 of 61 posts

Re: Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor

#11
post #3

This was actually a "thing" back in the 1950s. Apparently the results were awful: http://www.earlytelevision.org/color_filter.html

They appear to just be green on the bottom, yellow in the middle, and blue on the top.

Such that it might be plausible for outdoor scenery, but useless otherwise.

Re: Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor

#12
Very neat, the outcome probably isn't what you were hoping for, but it has a beautiful and ethereal quality to it. It's like an art piece.

From the photos and video, only a small section of the screen has colour. Does that change as you move around, or is the coloured section static?

Off topic, but the visual effect seen here is a lot like how my memories and dreams feel; only the thing I'm currently focussing on has any colour or detail, whilst everything else is muted and fuzzy.

Re: Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor

#14

Tektronix did it with a totally wild set of LCD color filter shutters over the whole face of the CRT, and then sequential color fields. It meant you got the whole spatial resolution of the display, but one third the temporal resolution. Similar to color-wheels in DLP projectors, really. The system was called NuColor, if you want more detail. The Bayer filter method in TFA is sensitive to perfect alignment between the…

JVC built a working model with that approach. There's a neat breakdown of the tech on this YT channel:

https://youtu.be/z-q8ehzHeQQ

Re: Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor

#15

Tektronix did it with a totally wild set of LCD color filter shutters over the whole face of the CRT, and then sequential color fields. It meant you got the whole spatial resolution of the display, but one third the temporal resolution. Similar to color-wheels in DLP projectors, really. The system was called NuColor, if you want more detail. The Bayer filter method in TFA is sensitive to perfect alignment between the…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor

#16
post #12

Very neat, the outcome probably isn't what you were hoping for, but it has a beautiful and ethereal quality to it. It's like an art piece. From the photos and video, only a small section of the screen has colour. Does that change as you move around, or is the coloured section static? Off topic, but the visual effect seen here is a lot like how my memories and dreams feel; only the thing I'm currently focussing on has…

Yeah I would like to improve the effect. I think the main colour region seems to stay the same.

I'm wondering if I can get acetate that's ever so slightly adhesive, so it sticks better to the monitor, which I'm wondering might help the colours show better all over.

Re: Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor

#17

Tektronix did it with a totally wild set of LCD color filter shutters over the whole face of the CRT, and then sequential color fields. It meant you got the whole spatial resolution of the display, but one third the temporal resolution. Similar to color-wheels in DLP projectors, really. The system was called NuColor, if you want more detail. The Bayer filter method in TFA is sensitive to perfect alignment between the…

An LCD panel backlit by a CRT or a DLP projector was/is a way to make a high-dynamic-range display.

http://anyhere.com/gward/papers/Siggraph04.pdf

Re: Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor

#18
When I had a Commodore PET computer I tried making colour by flashing areas at different rates. You can get a very limited colour by changing the length of flashes but not only did I get it to work (poorly) I also got terrible eye strain looking at those flashing squares.

Re: Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor

#19
Oh, I hoped to see something based on Fechner colours (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fechner_color). It gave me quite some creeps when a misconfigured XFree86 server managed to draw a bright red line right across the black and white LCD screen of my first laptop...

Re: Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor

#20
post #14

Tektronix did it with a totally wild set of LCD color filter shutters over the whole face of the CRT, and then sequential color fields. It meant you got the whole spatial resolution of the display, but one third the temporal resolution. Similar to color-wheels in DLP projectors, really. The system was called NuColor, if you want more detail. The Bayer filter method in TFA is sensitive to perfect alignment between the…

JVC built a working model with that approach. There's a neat breakdown of the tech on this YT channel: https://youtu.be/z-q8ehzHeQQ

Man, that was the golden age of analog video right there. In the 90s it became just barely possible to do a lot of processing of analog video using a shitload of expensive electronics, and people did. Those were the days of "line doubling" deinterlacers that were as big as shoeboxes and as expensive as cars.
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