Why can’t cameras and screens reproduce colors that are the same as real life? And why are they so different between devices?

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Why can’t cameras and screens reproduce colors that are the same as real life? And why are they so different between devices?

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6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Screens can only produce so many colors, and cameras can only capture so many. Most screens and cameras have 3 channels (Red, Green and Blue, or RGB) and on most screens they can be any 8-bit value (between 0 and 256), which when you do the math adds up to 16.8 million colors.

It’s different between devices because some are built to be more color accurate (and more expensive as a result) and in doing so will can have a higher bit-depth, usually 10 or 12 bits.

And there are things called color spaces, which is essentially the map of colors you have, even with the standard 3 channel 8 bit set up, those bits can correspond to different colors, depending on how you need the scene to look. Night/dark scenes especially use a lot more blue colors, so you can take the standard Adobe sRGB color space and shift it to blue to get better color than normal.

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