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Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You

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Re: Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You

#31
I once abseiled into a crevasse while in Antarctica. The colours I saw in there were utterly breathtaking and I never knew why. Now I do, and this also tells mewhy the photos don't even remotely do it justice (aside from not being as big and three dimensional!)

Thanks for such a beautiful article about not looking at a screen: I'm off outside... :)

Re: Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You

#32
Such a cool article chock-full of cool facts!

> Nearly every species of scorpion intensely fluoresces under UV light. […] Scorpions have photoreceptors in their tails, separate from their eyes. […] It is hypothesized that a scorpion uses this fluorescence to tell whether any bit of its body is left exposed from its hiding place. Its tail “looks” down at its body, and if it sees its own fluorescence, it knows it is exposed to light, and in danger.

And a special call-out to the “Andean Cock-on-a-Rock” :), see a photo in the article.

Re: Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You

#34
Great article. Small nitpick though: while I understand that P3 deserves specific mention because it’s so ubiquitous now, it’s not like Apple invented the idea of wide-gamut displays. Adobe RGB, commonly used by wide-gamut computer monitors, in particular is noteworthy in the context of this article because it extends further into the blue-cyan-green than P3,

Re: Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You

#36
The phosphor screen of a B&O MX8000 TV (a Philips tube) was unlike any I’ve ever seen in terms of cyan intensity. That was in 2020 while the tv is from the 1980’s. Playing Donkey Kong on it was totally different than any other screen. It was like a Morpho butterfly, but in the article it is pointed out that phosphor screens have limited color range.

Triangles between screens may differ with tuning, but I suppose they all are limited in range. I’ve yet to experiment if this experience was a “brand experience” because I liked the TV or that the colors are indeed more intense than even some HDR/DV flat screen from the past few years.

This article was so well written that it gives a lot of energy to make this comparison for real. Absolutely masterful writing and all of the plenty examples make me want to look for colors I’ve missed out on while watching so many screens.

What the article does very well is vibrantly describe what you are missing and then post an image of it, such as a beach. Looking at that image, it falls absolutely flat compared to memories and the imagination of those places. This makes it tangible how limited screens really are.

Edit: added last paragraph

Re: Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You

#37

While it is true that some saturated blue-green colors will never be reproducible with only 3 primary colors, the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram used in TFA overemphasizes their importance, because human vision cannot distinguish many colors in that area of the diagram. In reality, the greatest defect of the sRGB color space, which is still too frequently the default color space, is that it is not able to reproduce ma…

> the relation between those areas would be opposite in a uniform color space.

If I understand correctly fig. 3 in [1] should be perceptually uniform. The bluegreens missing from sRGB, but present in BT.2020 comprise a sizeable chunk comparable to redyellows.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345252499_Evaluatin...

Re: Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You

#38
Very well written, super interesting topic. I never understood all these natural reasons why real life colors feel so much more vivid. I guess when I look outside of the rgb triangle in the graphic, the cyans/blues/greens shown (since I'm seeing this on a screen) are sort of shadow colors? Approximations without the full vibrancy?

Re: Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You

#39
post #10

That was incredibly well-explained. Kudos. I do have a question that the article doesn't seem to attempt to answer, though. The article says (paraphrased in my new understanding) that any spectra which makes the cones in your eyes react the same way will result in seeing the same colour. Do we know of any examples of this? (Colour-blindness seems like an obvious example; I'm curious though if there are any examples o…

This is called metamerism. It can be a practical issue if two pigments have the same color under one light source, but a different one under another. You want your artificial teeth to have the same color as your real teeth in sunlight, led light, and a classic lightbulb for example.

Well, now that you mention it, I'd just like to remind you that people are a lot weirder than you might think! Having incisors to be a different colour (say, a brilliant red) under artificial lights could definitely be a thing people desired..
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