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
Computer monitors use the R,G,B system to generate colors. They do not generate spectrally pure light, but provide a mixture that stimulates your eyes the same way a more complicated spectrum of light would. Since there are maybe 100,000 meaningfully distinct wavelengths in the visual range, and 3 primary colors, a *lot* of information gets lost. If you google “sRGB” and head over to Wikipedia, you will see a nice representation of the so-called “color space” of the human eye.
The thing is, an R,G,B system can only represent colors inside a triangle on the plane “color space”. That is because you can’t have negative brightness of any of the three primary colors. The triangle formed by three primary colors is called the “gamut” of an R,G,B system, and your monitor can normally only reproduce colors inside that gamut.
If you look on Wikipedia for “chimerical colors” you will see some interesting demonstrations of how you can exploit a peculiarity of your visual system to see colors outside the monitor’s gamut.
Latest Answers