In an age with RGB monitors and displays, I don't know why such a project could be useful.
It's called 'hacker' news. Not all the things have to be useful. It's interesting, at least to me. :)
Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor
41–50 of 61 posts
Re: Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor
#42Very 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…
huh, my memories have full color and some detail, I wonder if thats why I have problems remembering things
I get full color, smells, taste and sensations.
I am annoyed when I get woken up from a good meal. :)
(On the flip side, I can technically breath underwater in my dreams, but I feel the water going into my lungs so it isn't pleasant!)
Re: Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor
#43I had no idea B&W LCD monitors even existed, looks like they are primarily marketed for medical imaging purposes, curious what advantage they have over displaying grey-scale images on a good color monitor. I'm guessing by the sub-pixels it is made from mostly the same panel as a color model.
Re: Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor
#44This 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.
This is also how automatic digital photo enhancement worked for a while.
Re: Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor
#45I think the limiting factor of the color intensity is the dye/ink used to make the mask. Probably each pixel is only blocking like 50% of the light in its stop band.
Re: Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor
#46Can someone explains how this works? I have frustratingly been googling for 30 minutes now trying to learn how autochrome works. Being tech oriented it's so frustrating when people sum it up in 1 sentence "its made of potato starch and magically it makes color!" How does it work? Do they hand paint the screen? How does it actually add red or blue to an arbitrary shade of gray which lacks any chroma? Does it work with…
Autochrome is pretty much just subpixels. You capture and view a greyscale image through the same dots-of-color filter plate, and thus you see color, just like an image sensor uses a Bayer filter to deconstruct color into greyscale (with three times as many pixels), and then your screen has three subpixel per pixel which you perceive as a solid color because they're sorta far away and kinda small.
Analog displays have no pixels but dots.
Re: Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor
#47Oh, 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...
Wikipedia has it animated, too EDIT: warning! strobing! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benham%27s_top#/media/File%3...
Does anyone have an explanation of what I should be seeing here? I've been staring at it for a while (both full-screen and in the article), and I haven't noticed anything other than black and white.
Re: Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor
#48Oh, 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...
Wikipedia has it animated, too EDIT: warning! strobing! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benham%27s_top#/media/File%3...
When I look at that animation, I see brown bands. My girlfriend sees dark blue. Why?
Re: Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor
#49I used to make screen captures of my Apple ][ monitor using Glow-In-The-Dark Silly Putty.
It took a minute or so to capture the image, but then it was like Kai Power Goo in non-Newtonian hardware!
https://www.macworld.com/article/3005783/an-ode-to-kais-powe...
Re: Show HN: Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor
#50I had no idea B&W LCD monitors even existed, looks like they are primarily marketed for medical imaging purposes, curious what advantage they have over displaying grey-scale images on a good color monitor. I'm guessing by the sub-pixels it is made from mostly the same panel as a color model.
I perused Ezio's website, and found three B&W monitors they currently sell, their "GX" series. Looking at the specs, the thing that stands out to me is that they're really bright: 1,200 cd/m^2 for the GX240 and GX340, and a whopping 2,500 cd/m^2 for the GX560 ! I bet these monitors are brighter than equivalently-backlit color displays from not having a Bayer filter in front.
Speculations on why medical monitors might be that bright: they can probably be better read in brightly-lit medical settings, shine through overlays and negatives placed over them, and be more easily read by some patients with poor vision.
They also offer palettized grayscale: up to 1,024 tones from a palette of 16,369. I'm not sure how useful that is in practice, but is is a unique feature.
https://www.eizo.com/products/radiforce/gx240/