So, you bought your fancy high-end ultra wide monitor with an IPS panel, 10 bit
color, adaptive refresh, and an attachment for keeping your drinks cool.
Maybe you've even used some calibration tools to get things looking just right.
But then, when you have a friend over for Counterstrike, he starts complaining
that the colors seem a little off. How could that be? Well, considering that
people vary wildly in everything from
musical ability to whether or not we find spray cheese appealing, it might
not be surprising to learn that people perceive colors differently as well. And
I'm not talking about really obvious things like color blindness or needing
glasses because everything's blurry without them. What I'm referring to
instead is variations between people's cone cells, the things in your eyes that
allow you to see color. You have three normal types of cones, each sensitive to
a different range of wavelengths. One kind for colors in the red to yellow
range, one for greens, and one for blues and violets. This arrangement of cones
actually inspired the RGB color model that you see in monitors, TVs, and
basically every gaming keyboard for the past couple of years. Since red, green,
and blue match up well to the three kinds of cones we have, RGB ends up
being a great base for reproducing lots of different colors. But because some
people have small variations in cone
composition, our sensitivity to these different colors of light will also vary
greatly from person to person. So to get an idea of how a regular person sees
color, a test was conducted back in 1931
on a handful of people and the results were averaged and have been used as a
baseline for much of color science ever
since, including the way that we think about display design. So, modern flat
panel displays will give off different amounts of energy in the red, green, and
blue parts of the visual spectrum, but they don't exactly match the proportions
that were found in the 1931 experiment.
To complicate things further, monitors can differ wildly from each other in how
vividly they show each of these colors, which you can see clearly on spectral
power graphs, which show very different amounts of energy per color between
displays. And even though modern screens
have better picture quality and lower power consumption than old bulky CRTs,
those old monitors were actually better at producing uniform colors. Flat panel
displays have narrower band color, meaning that they give off purer reds,
greens, and blues, which show up as pointier bumps on a graph like this. But
because of the variations in people's cone cells that I mentioned earlier,
this makes it easier to pick up on small variations between monitors and also
easier for two different people to be looking at the same monitor yet see
different colors. a phenomenon called metameic failure. So when you put this
together with other factors such as different color spaces and backlight
types, which you can learn about in these videos, it's really no wonder that
different people notice such drastic discrepancies in current generation
displays. One solution which is already being used in higherend laser projectors
is to use two different shades of red,
green, and blue as your primaries, giving you six base colors instead of
three. This helps spread out the color energy and make things look more
uniform. But differences between our eyes will continue to make this a tough
problem to tackle for some time. Until then though, we can continue to enjoy
our arguments about whether malberry magenta and passion pink are actually
the same color. Thanks once again, by the way, to our friend Tyler from
Spectraal for helping us out with this video. He is like a color wizard of some
sort. Speaking of wizardry, are you a
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you hear about us section. Go check it out. It's linked down below. Thanks for
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