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Multi-Primary Color Display Emerges as Next-Gen Color Reproduction Technology

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Re: Multi-Primary Color Display Emerges as Next-Gen Color Reproduction Technology

#11

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

Daneel_ wrote: post #5
noelwelsh wrote: post #2

Can anyone explain how this works? Humans have 3 (sometimes 4) cones, so I thought that going beyond 3 primaries wouldn't increase the perceivable gamut. Update: thanks for all the great explanations!

Cyan is severely under-represented by monitors, so the extra pixel is a dedicated cyan. It dramatically improves the ability to display blue/green colours. *edit: found the link I was after on this: https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/where-to-find-the-...

I was under the impression that yellow was a better candidate for this. But whatever. Can hardly wait for RGBCYM televisions that will make my wallet bleed.

Re: Multi-Primary Color Display Emerges as Next-Gen Color Reproduction Technology

#15

Post by esafak »

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

Can anyone explain how this works? Humans have 3 (sometimes 4) cones, so I thought that going beyond 3 primaries wouldn't increase the perceivable gamut. Update: thanks for all the great explanations!

Remember that light is synthesized by combining the primaries; the spectrum is defined by their convex hull. You can expand the hull and ergo gamut by adding primaries.

Re: Multi-Primary Color Display Emerges as Next-Gen Color Reproduction Technology

#16

Post by esafak »

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

Can anyone explain how this works? Humans have 3 (sometimes 4) cones, so I thought that going beyond 3 primaries wouldn't increase the perceivable gamut. Update: thanks for all the great explanations!

Remember that light is synthesized by combining the primaries; the spectrum is defined by their convex hull. You can expand the hull and ergo gamut by adding primaries.

The RGB setup we have strikes a balance between cost and visual quality. If the cost of adding primaries goes down you can add more to increase the quality. One issue is that the signals often assume RGB (channels), so the hardware manufacturer would have to adapt the RGB signal to their multi-primary hardware.

Re: Multi-Primary Color Display Emerges as Next-Gen Color Reproduction Technology

#17

Post by layer8 »

HelloUsername wrote: post #14

So where does this stand in 'backlit' or 'self emmission' panels? "TV Displays Explained at the Fundamental Level" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhFwPAfwdLo

If you’d read the article, you’d learned that these are advancements in backlit LCD technology. More generally, however, having more than three color primaries is orthogonal to the question of backlit vs. self-emissive.

Re: Multi-Primary Color Display Emerges as Next-Gen Color Reproduction Technology

#18

Post by Cthulhu_ »

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

Can anyone explain how this works? Humans have 3 (sometimes 4) cones, so I thought that going beyond 3 primaries wouldn't increase the perceivable gamut. Update: thanks for all the great explanations!

Humans can see more than the colors they can make with only combining RGB pixels; you can't make 'neon' colors with them, even though we can see them in real life, for example. Other commenters pointed to links showing the visible color gamut vs the RGB ones. Compare also with CMYK used in print, it can produce sightly different colors compared to display RGB.

Re: Multi-Primary Color Display Emerges as Next-Gen Color Reproduction Technology

#19

Post by layer8 »

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

Can anyone explain how this works? Humans have 3 (sometimes 4) cones, so I thought that going beyond 3 primaries wouldn't increase the perceivable gamut. Update: thanks for all the great explanations!

You are probably familiar with the horseshoe-shaped chromaticity diagram [0] of human-visible colors. A light source with three color primaries spans a triangle in that coordinate system. To cover the whole horseshoe, at least one of the vertices would need to be way outside the horseshoe. With four color primaries, you get a quadrilateral that makes it easier to cover a larger portion of the horseshoe.

The reason the visible colors form a horseshoe rather than a triangle is due to how the cones’ sensitivity ranges overlap [1]. They cannot be excited independently by the primaries of a display.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/CIE1931x...

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/Co...

Re: Multi-Primary Color Display Emerges as Next-Gen Color Reproduction Technology

#20

Post by summa_tech »

layer8 wrote: post #19
noelwelsh wrote: post #2

Can anyone explain how this works? Humans have 3 (sometimes 4) cones, so I thought that going beyond 3 primaries wouldn't increase the perceivable gamut. Update: thanks for all the great explanations!

You are probably familiar with the horseshoe-shaped chromaticity diagram [0] of human-visible colors. A light source with three color primaries spans a triangle in that coordinate system. To cover the whole horseshoe, at least one of the vertices would need to be way outside the horseshoe. With four color primaries, you get a quadrilateral that makes it easier to cover a larger portion of the horseshoe. The reason th…

Excellent explanation.

I'd like to add that no light source can lie outside the horseshoe of the CIE xyz diagram: pure wavelengths are points on the curved line, everything that mixes them moves towards the inside of the space. So you're stuck with triangles that fit within it.

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