Live data from Hacker News

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

en.ubiresearchnet.com

41–50 of 57 posts

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

#41
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How about just a "true RGB" that will make your wallet bleed (at $31k): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAOgZ6cjrio

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

#42

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.

The YouTube logo in HDR looks very neon to me

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

#43
> reduce harmful blue light

enough studies and randomized control trials have been conducted, it is conclusively shown that blue light emitted from household devices does not interact meaningfully with sleep. metareview CRD420251034611 "non-significant reduction in sleep onset latency" means blue light has been conclusively observed to not delay sleep - it doesn't mean that blue light has not yet been observed to delay sleep, we instead know conclusively that it does not. even better, a registered trial one: https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT01855126 - RCT where shining a bunch of blue light on old people's eyeballs didn't help them stay awake longer (going to bed too early is actually a more common clinical issue than staying up too late). well if it can't keep people awake, it doesn't keep them awake.

it's a great interview question though. "does blue light from screens cause sleep delay?" it doesn't. why do so many people think it does? why suffer with a piss colored screen?

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

#44
post #19

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…

Wouldn't we in theory be able to make LEDs that are outside human perception but combine to be able to cover the whole human vision gamut then?

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

#45

> reduce harmful blue light enough studies and randomized control trials have been conducted, it is conclusively shown that blue light emitted from household devices does not interact meaningfully with sleep. metareview CRD420251034611 "non-significant reduction in sleep onset latency" means blue light has been conclusively observed to not delay sleep - it doesn't mean that blue light has not yet been observed to del…

My erstwhile psychiatrist was completely obsessed with blue light. That, and caffeine, she told me to cut them out. She insisted that staring at a screen late at night, and just prior to sleeping, was my undoing.

And to a certain extent, she was right, but it was not "the blue light" per se that was damaging my psyche. Rather, it was the stuff within the light that was getting me agitated and angry. It was the disputes on Wikipedia, the social media arguments, the ragebait I found everywhere, the F.U.D. leading to my paranoia and rebellion and loss of trust.

It's like people who say "5G is harmful to our brains" -- well, yes, because whatever is being transmitted over that 5G is harmful, like porn or social media -- not the mere frequencies themselves!

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

#46
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew I was a highlighter but reading that showed me how much my brain relies on spam click highlighting to keep my eyes on track. I should probably read more books.

Fascinating! I wondered why some people did that

I do it one type of pointer or another for tracking my reading position continuously. I even highlighted some words in your comment while I read it. In a book, I typically put my finger (or the corner of my bookmark) under the 3 words or so I'm currently reading, or I'll put my thumb next to the line I'm currently reading. I don't usually think about it, but being on that web page and being prevented from highlighting made me back away quickly. If I'm not highlighting, then I'll also scroll so the top of the page marks where I am. (Whenever a page has a menu that changes relative position/size or pops up to cover the content when you change scrolling directions, that's an annoyance.) I think I use something to keep track of the current line like that more often than highlighting. Now that I think about it, if my mouse pointer were more noticeable, I assume I might simply point to where I am. Then again, the highlighted words are independent of the pointer, so it lets you have both.

Why? Maybe my eyes move away from the page while I think about what I'm reading. Otherwise you'd have to keep a visual lock on your reading position continuously right? Or you'd have to scan the text to figure out where you left off.

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

#47
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you have monochromatic red and green light sources, like in a laser projector, you can reproduce very well the red-yellow corner, as mentioned by others.

However, in CRT displays, the color of the light emitted by the red phosphor was rather impure, far from a saturated red.

This limitation has been inherited by the sRGB color space, and because of this, the main defect of sRGB is that it cannot reproduce a lot of colors in the yellow-orange-red-purple corner.

This is very noticeable, because there are a lot of natural objects with such colors, e.g. flowers, fruits, birds, insects, clothes, whose colors appear washed out in sRGB, but they look much better on displays with greater gamut, like P3-D65 (Display P3) which is available in better monitors.

While the colors in the cyan corner cannot be reproduced well even with a laser projector, that is usually less objectionable than the poor reproduction of yellow to red colors by sRGB monitors, because interesting cyan objects are more rarely encountered (though they exist, e.g. certain gems, lichens, algae, insects, lizards and fish, certain clothes, frequently the littoral sea).

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

#48
This is really being driven by tandem OLED with blue phosphorescent (not fluorescent which is the current commercial design) layers, most likely from Universal Display Corp. The blue phosphorescent OLEDs have (note red/green are already) longer lifetime and and efficiency, but they aren't the deep blue you need for 3 primary displays.

Samsung and LG which both demoed ultra-wide color gamut/volume displays at SID 2026, but also CSOT/TCL. This allows even greater than BT.2020 coverage (APEX pixel is 131%!) or trade off for lifetime with higher brightness/efficiency.

The original 4 color LCDs (like RGBY/RGBW) was driven by a long ago need for brightness and resolution with fewer subpixels (see Samsung's Pentile RGBG arrangement). This both solves a different problem and the technology is being driven by a different development (and marketing).

https://en.ubiresearchnet.com/sid-2026-bt2020-oled-display-t...

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

#49
post #19

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…

Also note this is a side-effect of the fact that mammals lost true 3-color vision then primates re-evolved it by mutating the yellow cone into green/red cones. If you look at the sensitivity of red/green cones they almost overlap, as opposed to blue cones which have a more reasonable placement on the spectrum line. If you look at say birds with 3-color vision their distribution of cones is more like our blue/green spacing in the spectrum.

I believe the leading theory is that red light is given off by a variety of fruits when ripe so arboreal ancestors with that mutation could much more easily locate food. To most mammals red ripe apples and green unripe ones are all just shades of yellow so the mutation would have been like a superpower: the equivalent of eagle-eyed vision.

Post reply on HN