I’ve heard that monitors and TVs can’t display every possibile color that humans can see. What’s stopping them from just having red, green, and blue pixels, and then just making those go as bright (and as dark) as possible? What’s the limitation?
In: Technology
there’s a few things here to your question.
a) even if it was “just” a matter of making pixels “bright” (or more saturated), it’s easier said then done. tvs and monitors are made to specific standards and to understand certain formats; they literally wouldn’t understand a signal that somehow made them more “bright” (assuming you mean color saturation). it’s a chicken-and-egg problem that necessarily limits progress.
b) the colors you see on a monitor are “simulated” by red, green, and blue light coming from pixels. the pixels are not “actually” producing the colors, your eyes are essentially being “tricked” by having the red, green, and blue cones in your eyes excited. this is important to remember, because the more light you add from pixels, the closer you actually get to white (which is when all your cones are excited equally). it becomes pretty hard to produce colors at certain parts of the color gamut, because on a display it starts becoming white.
c) even if the tech practically existed, it likely isn’t cost-effective to mass-produce, especially for colors we hardly ever see. uptake on HDR/UHD vs SDR is a lot slower than HD vs SD and even slower than color vs black and white. very few people would pay huge amounts of money for a screen that replicates colors that are hardly ever used in media (precisely because they aren’t represented very easily on screens), which would make it even more expensive to produce.
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