Why can’t cameras and screens reproduce colors that are the same as real life? And why are they so different between devices?
In: Technology
It would be possible to do much better in matching real-life colours and in having devices consistent. This would involve accurately calibrating both the cameras and displays which would be expensive and hardly anyone cares enough to pay more. So we get cheap and good-enough colour accuracy. Worse, people often prefer vivid colours to natural ones, so there’s an incentive to be unrealistic.
There are some colours that our existing RGB displays can’t show. Even the best OLED TVs using the latest colour standards can only show about 60% of possible colours, though the missing ones are mostly vivid colours that don’t occur too often in real life. So the missing 40% is not as bad as it sounds.
To understand the problem, check out [this diagram](https://www.displaymate.com/Display_Color_Gamuts_2_files/image006.jpg). It represents all human-visible colours using the white shape. Since we use three-colour (RGB) displays, they can only show colours in a three-cornered (triangular) shape, and the corners have to be in the white shape. The further you push the red and blue corners to the limit of the white shape, the dimmer they get.
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